of family farms with relatively small numbers of stock, nobody thought much of it. Only when a cow or sheep became significantly ill was medication used. But today’s corporate factory-farm systems can’t tolerate such minor blips. Maximizing profit is the name of the game, and nothing can be permitted to decrease production, not even a little bit.
Rather than wait for an animal to “catch cold,” and suffer even a minor slowdown in milk production or weight gain, preventive doses of antibiotics are put into healthy animals’ feed, as a sort of insurance against possible infection. The preventive doses, of course, are lower than those used to treat a full-blown, active infection. They are low, so-called “maintenance” doses—and their use has become more and more common, virtually guaranteeing that resistant bacteria strains will be popping up everywhere.
Of course, modern stock-raising methods aren’t the only cause of the problem. Over-prescription of antibiotics by doctors treating human patients has also contributed to the development of drug resistance. But at least the doctors are treating actual sickness. The stockmen who feed perfectly healthy animals “growth-promoting” antibiotics are not.
As Michael Khoo of the Union of Concerned Scientists reported recently:
About 13 million pounds [of antibiotics] a year are fed to chickens, cows, and pigs to make them grow faster or to compensate for unsanitary conditions. That’s about four times the amount used to treat sick people.
Why is the use in animals a threat to public health? Because the overuse of drugs on factory farms creates antibiotic-resistant bacteria that are difficult to treat. These bacteria can make food-poisoning episodes last longer or recovery from surgery less certain. As bacteria become more resistant, people can no longer be sure that prescribed drugs will actually work. 11
The potential scale of the problem becomes clear when we look at some individual microbes. For example, the bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae has become resistant to penicillin, and is
the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia (about 500,000 cases in the U.S. per year), is a major cause of bacterial meningitis (about 6,000 cases in the U.S. per year), causes about one-third of the cases of ear infection (about six million cases in the U.S. per year), and causes about 55,000 cases of bacteremia [bacteria in the blood, or “blood poisoning”] in the U.S. per year. 12
The worst of the resistant bacteria strains are those that are immune to many different antibiotics, the so-called “superbugs.” More than 90 percent of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria are now penicillin-resistant, and many of them are also resistant to methicillin, nafcillin, oxacillin, and cloxacillin, as well as other antibiotics.13S. aureus is the second most common cause of skin and wound infections, of bacteremia, and of lower respiratory infections. Some 40 percent of such infections are now due to multi-resistant strains. S. aureus blood poisoning “can be fatal within 12 hours.”14
There are now also multi-resistant strains of Salmonella–a common cause of food poisoning,15 and Escherichia coli, which is a major cause of diarrheal illness in children in the U.S. In severe cases of E. coli infection, dehydration can occur, “especially among children, in whom mortality may be quite high.”16
More recently, scientists have reported a new strain of an ancient scourge: syphilis. This sexually transmitted disease, which can cause dementia, paralysis, and death, is caused by a microbe called Treponema pallidum, and until recently was easily cured by a few oral doses of the antibiotic azithromycin. The new strain is resistant to azithromycin, and is showing up in increasing numbers in syphilis patients. Incidence of syphilis itself has increased by more than 19 percent in the U.S. between the years 2000 and 2003.17
By constantly administering “sub-therapeutic” doses of antibiotics (that is, doses below the level needed to cure an actual infection) to the animals on farms, in feedlots, and in transport trucks carrying them to the slaughterhouses, meat producers create millions of resistant bacteria, with populations scattered all over the continent. Small residues of antibiotics may also end up in the meat sold in stores, which means we can be dosed with them when we eat the meat, leading to the creation of resistant bacteria in our own bodies.
So serious is the problem of drug-resistant bacteria that the European Union banned the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in meat and milk production in 1998. Such influential groups as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have called for major reductions in the use of such antibiotics in North America, but few producers have listened.
In fact, when the McDonald’s fast food chain, responding to heavy consumer pressure, decided in June 2003 to ban meats produced with growth-promoting antibiotics, a storm of protest arose from the company’s suppliers, some of whom claimed banning non-therapeutic antibiotic use would cause “a dramatic increase in animal disease”18 — in other words, that not giving medicine to healthy animals would make them sick.
Yet continuing the practice may have contributed to what scientists call the “nightmare scenario,” recently announced in the U.S. As the wire services reported in July 2002:
Medical experts have long described it as the nightmare scenario of antibiotic resistance: the day when Staphylococcus aureus, cause of some of the most common and troublesome infections to inflict man, becomes resistant to the antibiotic arsenal’s weapon of last resort, vancomycin.
The nightmare scenario has arrived.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has announced the first confirmed case of vancomycin-resistant staph aureus—known in the medical world as VRSA—found last month in a Michigan man.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” Dr. Donald Low, microbiologistin- chief at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital says of the confirmation. “It’s ominous.” 19
Low worried that the day is fast arriving when common infections like S. aureus won’t be treatable with any antibiotics at all. That was the situation before penicillin was discovered. In those days, “many surgical procedures which now routinely save lives would have been too dangerous because of the risk of infection.”20
Some scientists, seeing how slowly society is responding to the situation, believe most antibiotics will soon be useless, and research will have to turn to the relatively untested (in the West) use of bacteria-killing viruses called bacteriophages, or to chemical agents, as our only means of disease control—a high price to pay for a few more pounds of milk or meat, and a few more cents of financial profit.
There is also the possibility that antibiotic residues in food might cause allergic reactions in some people. A study presented to the European Respiratory Society’s annual conference in 2003 reported that giving children an antibiotic before six months of age more than doubles the risk they will have asthma before their seventh birthdays. Babies who take antibiotics are also more likely to develop allergies to pets, ragweed, grass, and dust mites.21
Recently, the British Soil Association reported that people on diets involving high egg consumption may be in danger from lasalocid, an antibiotic commonly used by poultry farmers.22 Residues of the drug were found in 12 percent of egg samples tested by the U.K. Veterinary Medicines Directorate. Although there are no reports of human illness induced by lasalocid, “similar drugs have been reported
