Hightower Lowdown

Unlike most great scientists, Ashley Mulroy doesn't have a PhD. Ashley is still a high-school student in Wheeling, West Virginia, but what she lacks in academic degrees, she more than makes up for in intellectual curiosity, which led her to make a discovery that will have a profound effect on my health and yours.

Ashley has documented that America's water supply has become contaminated with antibiotics. These are the drugs, like penicillin and tetracycline, that we count on to fight bacterial infection. If these bacteria-killing drugs are widely dispersed in places like our drinking water, the bacteria they target eventually adapt to the drugs, creating species of "superbugs" that are immune to antibiotics.

When she was 15, Ashley launched a 10-week science project taking water samples along several miles of the Ohio River near her hometown. Sure enough, she found antibiotics in the water, with the highest concentrations near dairy and livestock farms—which use the antibiotics to help fatten their animals.

Ashley went further, testing tap water right in Wheeling, and found antibiotics coming out of the taps, too, including her own school's drinking fountains.

Incredibly, 40% of the antibiotics used in America go not to treat human diseases, but simply to fatten livestock and fatten the profits of industrialized agribusiness. It's time to ban this senseless use of antibiotics.