There’s something seriously rotten in the state of the Food and Drug Administration.

Instead of concentrating on stopping food-borne illness by upping inspections at the largest culprits, it’s encouraging growers big and small to turn their fields into animal-free quarantine zones. Instead of antagonizing supermarket and restaurant chains by ID’ing where contaminated products were sold, the agency prefers to spend its time issuing press releases warning of the dangers of raw milk. Instead of tracking whether genetically modified and -manipulated food has long-term consequences for human health, the FDA is poised to allow meat and dairy products from cloned animals to enter the food system unlabeled.

But today’s news is simply even more breathtaking in the sheer effrontery of its disregard for public health and its focus on preserving business as usual at any cost.

Rick Weiss of the Washington Post reports that the FDA is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle housed in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine’s last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.

Multiple health groups and even most of the FDA’s own expert advisers think the decision will be dangerous for people. The FDA, whose regulators must be getting carpal tunnel syndrome from all that repetitive rubber stamping, prefers to ignore them and follow its own industry-friendly “guidance document” that says the only considerations governing approval have to do with efforts to fight food-borne illness. That there is already an arms race occurring between antibiotics and bacteria is not relevant, apparently. The FDA takes no responsibility for the fact that the widespread usage of drugs in animals has already given rise to a scary class of “superbugs” — for example, that E. coli 0157:H57 you keep hearing so much about — that humans then get sick from thanks to contaminated meat and water supplies. Soon we will have run out of antibiotics to treat these superbugs, and along the way we won’t be able to combat diseases like meningitis, either.

Only one drug from the class of antibiotics that includes cefquinome has been approved in the United States, one called cefepime (brand name Maxipime) that is currently the only effective treatment for serious infections in cancer patients and other life-threatening infections. Giving cefquinome to cattle would almost assuredly undermine cefepime’s power. I was surprised to learn this has already happened in Europe, which has been using fourth-generation antibiotics in cattle — I thought Europe was more cautious than that. A study published in December found high levels of E. coli resistance to fourth-generation cephalosporins in E.U. pigs and cattle.

The really outrageous part of this entire argument is that the newly approved drug would be used to treat bovine respiratory disease, which “would be a relatively minor issue but for the stressful conditions under which U.S. cattle are raised, including high-density living spaces and routine shipment on crowded trains for hundreds or thousands of miles,” the FDA’s advisory panel learned.

Yet rather than attack the root causes of this sickness, which might cost Big Meat some money, the agency is willing to risk the lives of every man, woman, and child in America.

What can we do about this? I’m not sure yet. But I intend to start by writing to Senators Edward Kennedy (D–Massachusetts) and Olympia Snowe (R–Maine), and Representative Louise Slaughter (D–New York), who have already introduced legislation proposing to phase out some antibiotics being used for nonmedicinal purposes in farm animals. There’s also Senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), who’s introduced the Cloned Food Labeling Act. (All the preceding name-links go to contact pages.)

I also don’t think it could hurt to get in touch with Stephen Sundlof, the FDA’s chief of veterinary medicine, who wants to overrule the more cautious members of the advisory panel and ignore all but the FDA’s own lax guidelines. Why not let him know what you think of his cavalier stance? His email address is stephen.sundlof@fda.hhs.gov and his phone number is (240) 276-9000.

I suspect — I hope — that watchdog groups like the Union for Concerned Scientists will be mobilizing a mass response, and perhaps submit a written petition to the FDA to reconsider.

Because this time, voting with our forks will be too little, too late.