In a win for public health, pollinators, and the environment, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this month in favor of farmworkers and public-interest groups that called for reversing the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) approval of a human antibiotic for use as a pesticide on citrus crops.

In the ruling, the court determined the EPA's 2021 decision to allow spraying of streptomycin on citrus crops to be unlawful under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The court also held that the issue's seriousness required that the EPA vacate its approval of the ‘pesticide'.

The decision directs the EPA to bolster its analysis of the potential risks to pollinators and assess whether streptomycin is actually effective for this purpose.

Streptomycin is used to treat serious human illnesses ranging from tuberculosis to urinary tract infections. The overuse of medically-important antibiotics has contributed to increased antibiotic resistance in bacteria, a pressing public health crisis causing more than 35,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"We don't need to blast medically important antibiotics into the environment," said Allison Johnson, Senior Attorney at the NRDC. "We do not have to choose between a stable food supply AND pollinators–we need both."

"Organic producers show that we do not have to sacrifice one for the other by building healthy farm ecosystems without wanton antibiotic usage."

Also involved in the lawsuit was the Farmworker Association of Florida, which sought to protect agriculture workers who toil in the fields and deserve to be free from such avoidable threats to their health—especially when the spraying of antibiotics "has not been proven effective in treating citrus diseases," according to the advocates for both the environment and workers' heath.

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