What is
occurring is a biological transition that can easily tip into a crisis killing
a lot of people. That is the real and
present danger to the use of antibiotics.
It may never happen but it must be recognized and checked. In our present day it has become easy to forget
the biological pandemic that occurred in the Americas beginning in 1492 and not
truly abating for three hundred years.
That was a
series of unchecked plagues that wiped out over ninety five percent of the
population in stages. They were
completely instrumental in the depopulation the Americas and allowing the
replacement expansion of Europeans.
Europeans have
been subjected to the slander that this was wilful when it was nothing of the
kind. By the time Europeans arrived, the
lands had already been depopulated leaving fields passing back into the wild
and easily restored. The natural
response of the remnants was to flee and form survival hunting bands that could
avoid significant contact. That is
certainly what occurred in the Amazon.
What Happens When a Country Takes its Livestock Off Antibiotics?
April 23, 2014
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria infect two million
Americans every year, causing at least 23,000 deaths. Even more die from
complications related to the infections, and the numbers are steadily growing.
It’s now clear that we are facing the perfect storm to
take us back to the pre-antibiotic age, when some of the most important
advances in modern medicine – intensive care, organ transplants, care for
premature babies, surgeries and even treatment for many common bacterial
infections – will no longer be possible.
Experts have been warning about the implications of
antibiotic resistance for years, but it’s time to face the facts. Many strains
of bacteria are becoming resistant to even our strongest antibiotics and are
causing deadly infections.
The bacteria are capable of evolving much faster than we
are. Secondly, drug companies have all but abandoned the development of new
antibiotics because of their poor profit margins.
Antibiotic Resistance:
How Did This Happen?
Antibiotic overuse and inappropriate
use – such as taking antibiotics to treat viral infections — bears a heavy
responsibility for creating the antibiotic-resistant superbug crisis we are
facing today.
According to Dr. Arjun
Srinivasan, associate director of the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), as much as half of all antibiotics used in clinics and
hospitals “are either unneeded or patients are getting the wrong drugs to treat
their infections.”1
There’s more to the story
than this, however, as antibiotic overuse occurs not just in medicine, but also
in food production. In fact, agricultural usage accounts for about 80 percent of all antibiotic use
in the US,2 so it’s a MAJOR source of human
antibiotic consumption.
Nearly 25 million pounds of
antibiotics are administered to
livestock in the US every year for purposes other than treating disease, such as making the animals grow
bigger faster.
In other parts of the
world, such as the EU, adding antibiotics to animal feed to accelerate growth
has been banned for years. The
antibiotic residues in meat and dairy, as well as the resistant bacteria, are
passed on to you in the foods you eat.
Eighty different
antibiotics are allowed in cows’ milk. According to the CDC, 22 percent of antibiotic-resistant
illness in humans is in fact linked to food.3 In the words of Dr. Srinivasan:
“The
more you use an antibiotic, the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic,
the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to
develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the
environment, we put into livestock, the more opportunities we create for these
bacteria to become resistant.”
This is a much bigger
issue than antibiotics simply being left behind in your meat. For instance,
bacteria often share genes that make them resistant. In other words, the
drug-resistant bacteria that contaminates your meat may pass on their resistant
genes to other bacteria in your body, making you more likely to become sick.
Drug-resistant bacteria
also accumulate in manure that is spread on fields and enters waterways,
allowing the drug-resistant bacteria to spread far and wide and ultimately back
up the food chain to us. You can see how easily antibiotic resistance spreads,
via the food you eat and community contact, in the CDC’s infographic below.
One-Third of the Most
Dangerous Resistant Pathogens Are Found in Your Food
According to the CDC’s
report, there are 12 resistant pathogens that pose a “serious” threat to public
health. One-third of them are found in food. The four drug-resistant pathogens
in question are:
·
Campylobacter, which
causes an estimated 310,000 infections and 28 deaths per year
·
Salmonella, responsible
for another 100,000 infections and 38 deaths annually
·
E. coli
·
Shigella
Previous research
suggested you have a 50/50 chance of buying meat tainted with drug-resistant
bacteria when you buy meat from your local grocery store.4 But
it may be even worse. Using data collected by the federal agency called NARMS
(National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System), the Environmental
Working Group (EWG) found antibiotic-resistant bacteria in 81 percent of ground
turkey, 69 percent of pork chops, 55 percent of ground beef, and 39 percent of
raw chicken parts purchased in stores in 2011. EWG nutritionist and the
report’s lead researcher, Dawn Undurraga, issued the following warning to the
public:5
“Consumers should be very
concerned that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are now common in the meat aisles
of most American supermarkets… These organisms can cause foodborne illnesses
and other infections. Worse, they spread antibiotic-resistance, which threatens
to bring on a post-antibiotic era where important medicines critical to
treating people could become ineffective.”
What Happens When a
Country Takes Its Livestock Off Antibiotics?
In the US, concentrated
animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are hotbeds for breeding antibiotic-resistant
bacteria because of the continuous feeding of low doses of antibiotics to the animals, who become living
bioreactors for pathogens to survive, adapt, and eventually, thrive. The
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) ruled that antibiotic
resistance is a major threat to public health, worldwide, and the primary cause
for this man-made epidemic is the widespread misuse of antibiotics.6
Measures to curb the
rampant overuse of agricultural antibiotics could have a major impact in the
US, as evidenced by actions taken in other countries. For example, Denmark stopped the
widespread use of antibiotics in their pork industry 14 years ago. The European Union has
also banned the routine use of antibiotics in animal feed over concerns of
antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
After Denmark implemented
the antibiotic ban, it was later confirmed the country had drastically reduced
antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their animals and food. Furthermore, the Danish ‘experiment’ proved that removing
antibiotics doesn’t have to hurt the industry’s bottom line. In the first 12
years of the ban, the Danish pork industry grew by 43 percent — making it one of the top exporters of
pork in the world. As reported by Consumer
Reports:7
“What
happens when a country takes its livestock off antibiotics? In 2000 Denmark’s
pork industry ceased using antibiotics to promote the growth of its animals.
Instead of eviscerating the nation’s pork industry, those moves contributed to
a 50 percent rise in pork production, according to a 2012 article in the
journal Nature.8
Frank Aarestrup, D.V.M.,
Ph.D., head of the EU Reference Laboratory for Antimicrobial Resistance and
author of the article, attributes Denmark’s success to three factors: laws banning
the improper use of antibiotics, a robust system of surveillance and
enforcement, and rules that prevent veterinarians from profiting from selling
antibiotics to farmers. ‘Farmers and their livestock can thrive without the
heavy use of antibiotics,’ Aarestrup wrote. ‘With a little effort, I believe
that other countries can and must help their farmers to do the same.’”
What’s Standing in the
Way of Curbing Antibiotic Use in the US?
In a word, industry. For
instance, the American Pork Industry doesn’t want to curb antibiotic use, as
this would mean raising the cost of producing pork by an estimated $5 for every 100 pounds of pork brought to
market. The pharmaceutical industry is obviously against it as well. Even
though they’re not keen on producing new antibiotics to bring to the market,
they want to protect those that are already here – especially those incredibly
lucrative varieties that are used perpetually in animal feed. Even Dr.
Aarestrup, who helped Denmark cut the use of antibiotics in livestock by 60
percent, wrote about the intense industry pressures he faced:9
“Reducing Denmark’s
reliance on antibiotics was far from easy. My lab was visited by pharmaceutical
executives who did not like what we were finding, and I would be cornered at
meetings by people who disagreed with our conclusions. I have even been publicly
accused of being paid to produce biased results. Despite such challenges,
it has been satisfying to see that Danish farmers and their livestock can
thrive without the heavy use of antibiotics. …The practice continues unabated
in the United States, despite a statement from the Food and Drug Administration
[FDA]… suggesting that farmers should stop voluntarily.”
FDA Again Fails to Take
Appropriate Action on Agricultural Antibiotics
The FDA issued its
long-awaited guidance on agricultural antibiotics on December 11, 2013.10 Unfortunately,
it’s unlikely to have a major impact in terms of protecting your health. The
agency is simply asking drug companies to voluntarily restrict the use of antibiotics that are
important in human medicine by excluding growth promotion in animals as a
listed use on the drug label.11 This
would prevent farmers from legally using antibiotics such as tetracyclines,
penicillins, and azithromycin for growth promotion purposes. But it certainly
does not go far enough to protect public health. The guidance contains far too
many loopholes for any meaningful protection.
For example, farmers
would still be allowed to use antibiotics for therapeutic purposes, which would
allow them to continue feeding their animals antibiotics for growth promotion
without actually admitting that’s
the reason for doing so. As reported by Scientific
American:12
“[T]he success of the
FDA’s new program depends on how many companies volunteer to change their
labels over the next 90 days in alignment with the FDA cutoff period.
(Companies that do change their labels will have three years to phase in the
changes.) And then there are myriad questions about how this would be enforced
on the farm.”
In short, while giving
the superficial appearance of taking warranted action to protect public health,
the reality is that they’re simply shills for the industry. Michael Taylor,13 FDA
Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine, and former VP for public
policy at Monsanto, is again responsible
for caving in to industry at the expense of human lives.
Why Did FDA Ignore Risk
Factors from the Very Beginning?
According to a recent
report14 from
the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the FDA has known that using
antibiotics in factory farms is harmful to human health for over a dozen years,
yet it took no action to curb its use. And now, all they’re doing is asking
drug companies, who make massive amounts of money from these products, to voluntary restrict their use.
The report also found
that 26 of the 30 drugs reviewed by the FDA did not meet safety guidelines
issued in 1973, and NONE of the 30 drugs would meet today’s safety guidelines… As reported by Rodale
Magazine,15 the
FDA is supposed to look at three factors when determining the safety of an
antibiotic-based feed additive. Based on the three factors listed below, the
NRDC’s report16 concluded
that virtually ALL feed additives containing penicillin and tetracycline
antibiotics—both of which are used to treat human disease—pose a “high risk” to
human health, and should not be permitted:
1.
The chances that
antibiotic-resistant bacteria are being introduced into the food supply
2.
The likelihood that
people would get exposed to those bacteria
3.
The consequences of what
happens when people are exposed to those bacteria—would they still be able to
get treated with human antibiotics?
Looking on the Brighter
Side
The impending superbug
crisis has a three-prong solution:
1.
Better infection
prevention, with a focus on strengthening your immune system naturally
2.
More responsible use of
antibiotics for people and animals, with a return to biodynamic farming and a
complete overhaul of our food system
3.
Innovative new approaches
to the treatment of infections from all branches of science, natural as well as
allopathic
There are some promising
new avenues of study that may result in fresh ways to fight superbugs. For
example, Dutch scientists have discovered a way to deactivate antibiotics with
a blast of ultraviolet light before bacteria have a chance to adapt, and before
the antibiotics can damage your good bacteria.17
And British scientists
have discovered how bacteria talk to each other through “quorum signaling” and
are investigating ways of disrupting this process in order to render them
incapable of causing an infection. They believe this may lead to a new line of
anti-infectives that do not kill bacteria, but instead block their ability to cause
disease.18 But
the basic strategy that you have at your disposal right now is prevention,
prevention, prevention—it’s much easier to prevent an infection than to halt
one already in progress.
Natural compounds with
antimicrobial activity such as garlic, cinnamon, oregano extract, colloidal silver, Manuka honey, probiotics and fermented foods, echinacea, sunlight and vitamin D are all excellent options to try before resorting to
drugs. Best of all, research has shown that bacteria do not tend to develop
resistance to these types of treatments. The basic key to keeping your immune
system healthy is making good lifestyle choices such as proper diet, stress management and exercise.
You Can Take Action to
Help Save Antibiotics from Extinction
Avoiding
antibiotic-resistance is but one of several good reasons to avoid meats and
animal products from animals raised in concentrated animal feeding operations
(CAFOs). This is in part why grass-fed pastured meat is the only type of meat I
recommend. If you’re regularly eating meat bought at your local grocery store,
know that you’re in all likelihood getting exposed to antibiotic-resistant
bacteria and a low dose of antibiotics with every meal… and this low-dose
exposure is what’s allowing bacteria to adapt and develop such strong
resistance.
The FDA’s stance toward
antibiotics in livestock feed is unconscionable in light of the harm it wreaks,
and its weakness makes being proactive on a personal level all the more
important. Quite simply, the FDA has been, and still is, supporting the
profitability of large-scale factory farming at the expense of public health.
You can help yourself and
your community by using antibiotics only
when absolutely necessary and by purchasing organic,
antibiotic-free meats and other foods from local farmers – not CAFOs. Even
though the problem of antibiotic resistance needs to be stemmed through public
policy on a nationwide level, the more people who get involved on a personal
level to stop unnecessary antibiotic use the better. You can help on a larger
scale, too, by telling the FDA we need a mandatory ban on sub-therapeutic doses
of antibiotics for livestock—not weak, voluntary guidance.
FDA Deputy Commissioner
and ex-Monsanto attorney Michael Taylor will leave quite a legacy behind. He’s
not only served Monsanto and the other pesticide producers quite well, he seems
to carry the same sentiment over to the antiobiotic crisis. The FDA claims that
a voluntary guideline “is the most efficient and effective way to change the
use of these products in animal agriculture.” It would appear that Taylor’s
concern for human health takes a very distant back seat to industry profits…
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