Read the second paragraph,understand that this work has been continually confirmed and that simplechanges in feed protocols equal any benefit from the actual use of antibioticsat all. The danger from the practice cannot be any starker.
The attempt to blame a singlesource in the EU for the sudden appearance of a new E coli infection isobviously misplaced. Its existence ispossible only because of the practice of using antibiotics. Ending the practice as we must do sooner orlater and better sooner is our only real option.
Must we wait for a real nastyproblem to get out there like the SARS event which may also have been anagriculture derived problem?
There are plenty of concerns withfactory farming to start with. Endingthe risk of disease generation is surely a good decision.
E-I-E-I-Oh no: Decades of antibiotics in farm animals lead to deadlysuperbugs 3
2 JUN 2011 2:34 PM
Stuart Levy once kept a flock of chickens on a farm in the rollingcountryside west of Boston Tufts University School U.S.
Results started showing up almost instantly. Within two days, thetreated animals began excreting feces containing E. coli bacteriathat were resistant to tetracycline, the antibiotic in their feed. (E. Coli,most of which are harmless, normally live in the guts of chickens and otherwarm-blooded animals, including humans.) After three months, the chickenswere also excreting bacteria resistant to such potent antibiotics asampicillin, streptomycin, carbenacillin, and sulfonamides. Even though Levy hadadded only tetracycline to the feed, his chickens had somehow developed whatscientists now call "multi-drug resistance" to a host of antibioticsthat play important roles in treating infections in people. Morefrightening, although none of the members of the farm family tending theflock were taking antibiotics, they, too, soon began excreting drug-resistantstrains of E. coli.
When Levy's study was published in The NewEngland Journal of Medicine in 1976, it was met with skepticism."The other side -- industry -- could not believe that this would havehappened. The mood at the time was that what happens in animals does not happenin people," said Levy, who serves as president of the Alliance for thePrudent Use of Antibiotics, in a telephone interview from his office at Tufts."But we had the data. It was obvious to us even then that usingantibiotics this way was an error and should be stopped."
During the intervening 35 years, study after study has confirmed Levy'sfindings and shown that the problem of antibiotic-resistant"superbugs" is even worse than anyone could have imagined. Each year,70,000 Americans in U.S. United States
From his perspective of more than three decades as a resistant-microbewatcher, Levy sounded almost weary when he said, "Proponents of growthpromotion keep asking for more data, and we scientists provide them. But thenthe findings have never led to removal of the practice."
Getting serious
Last month, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Sciencein the Public Interest, Food Animal Concerns Trust, Public Citizen, and the Union of Concerned Scientists joined forces to filea lawsuit against the FDA. The groups want the agency to withdraw itsapproval for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracycline in animalfeed. They say that it's something regulatorsshould havedone decades ago.
The FDA first approved the use of low-dose antibiotics in the 1950s.Concerns about the drugs began appearing within a decade, and by the timeLevy's paper was published, the FDA was aware the practice posed a serious riskto human health. The agency proposed to withdraw its approval in 1977, sayingthat new evidence showed that penicillin- and tetracycline-containing productshad not been "shown safe for widespread, sub-therapeutic use."
The proposal drew howls of outrage from two of the most powerfullobbying groups in Washington, agribusinesses and drug manufacturers. Both theHouse and Senate ordered the FDA to "hold in abeyance any and allimplementation of the proposal" until further studies had been conducted."It was the power of the lobby and the money behind that lobby," Levyrecalled.
As requested by Congress, the FDA commissioned three studies during the1980s, all of which supported initial concerns about the risks of feeding farmanimals antibiotics on a daily basis. The FDA received petitions urging it toact from coalitions of scientific and environmental groups in 1999 and 2005.Such respected bodies as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention, the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Departmentof Agriculture, and the World Health Organization all identified low-doseantibiotics as the reason antibiotic-resistant bacteria were proliferating inhumans and animals. And the FDA -- which is charged with protecting the healthof Americans -- failed to act, only going so far as to issue a "DraftGuidance" [PDF] report and a draft "Action Plan" proposingvoluntary guidelines. These suggestions have done nothing to stem the deluge ofunnecessary antibiotics through the spigot of agribusiness.
"We've been fighting the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics inlivestock for more than 30 years," Margaret Mellon, director of the foodand environment program at the Union ofConcerned Scientists, said in a press release announcing the lawsuit."And over those decades the problem has steadily worsened. We hope thislawsuit will finally compel the FDA to act with an urgency commensurate withthe magnitude of the problem." (Siobhan Delancey, a spokeswoman for theFDA, declined to comment on the suit.)
The trouble with antibiotics
Bacteria are evolutionary dynamos. Untold trillions of them can live inone confined animal feeding operation, or CAFO -- the technical term for afactory farm. They breed rapidly and mutate readily. Exposure to even minisculelevels of drugs equips bacteria with the genetic resilience to fend off higherlevels of the same drugs.
From the dawn of modern antibiotics, researchers have been aware thatthe seeds of the wonder drugs' destruction had already been sown. In his 1945 Nobel acceptance speech for his discoveriesrelated to penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming said, "There is a danger thatthe ignorant man may easily under-dose himself and by exposing his microbes tonon-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant." Fleming'sprediction was prescient -- except the problem wasn't an "ignorantman" but politicians and business executives whose priorities layelsewhere.
During the decades that the FDA dithered, a mountain of scientificresearch accumulated showing that antibiotic-resistant bacteria can not onlyevolve in the guts of farm animals, but can spread from animals to the humanswho tend them, and then be passed on to people who have never been anywherenear a chicken house or hog barn.
In 2004, Dutch doctors discovered a strain ofmethicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)in a 6-month-old baby. Often fatal, MRSA is the original "superbug"because it can survive treatment by the most powerful antibiotics in modernmedicine's arsenal. At first, the doctors were puzzled. MRSA was primarilyknown as a hospital-acquired infection. But the child, who carried the germsbut never became sick, as is often the case with the asymptomatic carriers ofbacteria, had never been in a hospital. Her parents were pig farmers, andsubsequent investigations showed that the MRSA had been passed from the pigs tothe parents and on to the baby. (Most bacteria are non-infectious, althoughthey may carry resistance genes. The problem is that they can pass theirresistance traits to infectious bacteria.)
Three years later, J. Scott Weese, a professor at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph near Toronto Atlantic Ocean . Further research by Weese revealed thatthe swapping of resistant bacteria between animals and humans can be a two-waystreet. Not only were the farmers affected by MRSA that had originated in pigs,but the pigs carried MRSA that until then had only been found in humans.
For a year or so, American agribusiness continued to claim that MRSAwas a problem that couldn't happen here -- a myth they were able to perpetratebecause no government agency was routinely testing hogs for MRSA. But duringthe summer of 2008, Tara Smith, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa andthe deputy director of the university's Center for Emerging InfectiousDiseases, found that seven out of 10 pigs she and her students tested on farmsin Illinois and Iowa carried MRSA.
A graduate student working with Smith recently uncovered a strainof S. aureus associated with hogs and the people who tend them in aday-care worker who had never been near a hog farm. Fortunately, thatparticular strain was not antibiotic resistant. But the discovery showed thathumans do not have to work with infected animals to pick up the bacteria theycarry. "Whether the pig bacterium was passed on via another human or viacontaminated food products, we can't tell right now," Smith said in anemail.
Making the case
In fact, there are any number of ways antibiotic-resistant bacteria canspread from farm to fork. A recently published study in thejournal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that 47 percent of thebeef, chicken, pork, and turkey sampled from grocery stores in five U.S. Johns Hopkins Center
Pharmaceutical companies dispute the assertion that treating animalswith low-dose antibiotics is dangerous to humans. "A lot of people want totalk about antibiotic resistance as if it is a big amorphous issue," saidRon Phillips of the Animal Health Institute, in an interview. "It is, infact, a series of discrete issues where you have to look at specific bug/drugcombinations and figure out what are the potential pathways forantibiotic-resistant material to transfer from animals to humans. Studies havebeen done, and have come to the conclusion that there is a vanishingly smalllevel of risk."
Smith of the University of Iowa
One area where solid scientific evidence is lacking, astonishingly, ison whether changing the industry-wide practice of giving low doses ofantibiotics to livestock would actually make that much of a difference. Theexperience of farmers in the European Union, where dosing animals withsub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics was banned in 1998, suggests otherwise.Denmark is the world's largest pork exporting country, and most of its hogs areraised in large confined operations much like those used by the U.S.
It's easy to understand why drug companies react so forcefully to anyattempts to cut back on sub-therapeutic antibiotic use -- FDA figures show that60 percent of the antimicrobial drugs they sell are fed to farm animals topromote growth, an enormous chunk of their business -- but given the success offarmers in Europe who've stopped using antibiotics to promote growth, why isthe farm lobby so vehemently against change? Would it spell the end of the hugeCAFOs upon which American agribusiness has come to depend? Steven Roach, thepublic health program director for the Food Animal ConcernsTrust (FACT), one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the FDA,has a straightforward answer to that question: No, CAFOs would not go away.European pig farms are as large as those in the U.S., according to Roach. Someof the E.U.'s chicken operations are even larger than those in this country.(And if American farmers feel uncomfortable with examples from foreigncountries, he suggests that they look at Tyson, one of the United States'largest poultry producers, which had no problems raising chickens withoutantibiotics in ways that the suit aims to stop.)
"There are two parts of production where there are small economicbenefits to using low-dose antibiotics," Roach said in an interview."Particularly on young pigs. The challenge for the beef cattle industry isthat when you feed a high-corn diet, cattle have some heath problems, and oneway they manage that is using the antibiotics in the feed. But even so, someproducers are raising them without antibiotics in feedlots now." Roachsaid that European farmers have gotten around these problem areas by weaningpiglets later. Barns are kept cleaner for all animals. And altering dietsallows CAFOs to raise cattle without antibiotics. Of course, says Roach,some farmers simply won't want to change. He believes they are afraid that ifthey allow outside forces to impose even small changes, then other changes arebound to come.
After 35 years on the frontlines in the battle to keep antibioticseffective, though, Levy believes there's cause for optimism. "The mood isnow 180 degrees better than it was for getting rid of this practice," hesaid. "There are more and more scientists and lay people who are urgentlyasking for an end to this use of antibiotics."
It helps that one of those "science people" is also arepresentative. LouiseSlaughter, a Democrat who represents upstate New York, was a microbiologistbefore going into politics. In 2009, she introduced a bill called the Preservationof Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which calls for the FDA towithdraw its approval of the practice within two years unless there isreasonable certainty that the low-dose antibiotics cause no harm to humanhealth. "We are witnessing a looming public health crisis that is movingfrom farms to grocery stores to dinner tables around the country," shesaid in an email. "As the only microbiologist in Congress, I feel it's myduty to bring public attention to this."
Although Slaughter's bill has yet to pass, it had 127 cosponsors in thelast congressional session, more than double its support in the previousCongress. It looks as though even more legislators will sign on this time, andmany are hopeful that the combined forces of looming legislation and an activelawsuit will finally lead the FDA to act. "If we don't addressit," Slaughter continued, "we risk setting ourselves back to the timebefore antibiotics, when even common infections could kill a person. That's notany kind of world I want my children and their children to inherit."
A former contributing editor to Gourmet magazine, BarryEstabrook is the author of Tomatoland:How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit andblogs at politicsoftheplate.com.
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