Sure.
Disease in a flock—we're talking about population medicine, not individual animal medicine here—is like a scale, from white to black with every shade of grey. In these flocks we don't have healthy and unhealthy, we have every spectrum in between.
If we wait until birds are clinically ill, those birds are spreading pathogens into the barn and we get a cycling and an amplification. It's like an avalanche effect. By using antimicrobials prudently and early, on a flock basis we can prevent that disease from rising.
I'd like to go back to Ms. Hansen's point about the European Union experience. You're right that they were very successful in raising livestock without growth promotional antibiotics. I concur with that point. What they have not been successful in doing is raising livestock without antibiotics.
They have removed those growth promotional antibiotics, and they've had to go to the higher-powered therapeutic drugs that are important in humans. I guess that goes back to Mr. Smith's point, with which I completely concur. I don't think we should be willy-nilly using these very important antibiotics either. That's why it's very important to maintain our available repertoire of antibiotics for the judicious use by veterinarians.