Use Of Antibiotics On The Farm Is No Threat To Humans
August 31, 2001
In the US, The Campaign Against Veterinary Use Of Antibiotics Is Discouraging Research
On Antibiotics That Could Protect Our Food Animals
CHURCHVILLE, Va.–National Public Radio recently broadcast a frightening report. It claimed that the use of antibiotics on farm animals may result in those same antibiotics no longer working against human bacterial diseases, because the strain has become resistant to the drugs. There’s not much evidence to support this idea, however.
Even NPR admitted that the biggest factor in antibiotic-resistant bacteria is human doctors, who too often prescribe the drugs for non- bacterial ailments they can’t cure, such as flu viruses and allergies.
Every medical professional knows that the rapidly reproducing bacteria will inevitably develop resistance to every drug. Our real safety comes from continual research to develop new antibiotics.
Meanwhile, the 30-year debate in the medical profession is over whether antibiotics on farms contribute to antibiotic resistance in human medicine.
NPR did not advance that debate.
NPR anchor Linda Wertheimer opened the report by declaring, “America’s cattle and pigs take antibiotics far more often than you do.” But humans use about 10 times as much antibiotic medication for each pound of body weight as do food-producing animals.
Moreover, there’s little complaint about the 90 percent of farm antibiotic use in treating animal diseases. These drugs save the lives of millions of creatures each year.
About 10 percent of farm antibiotic use is at low levels, in the feed itself. This antibiotic use helps the birds and animals grow faster on less feed. This is controversial, but it helps prevent disease epidemics from starting in the herds and flocks.
Most of the medication in poultry feed contributes nothing to antibiotic resistance in humans. It’s mostly drugs known as ionophores, a type of antibiotic that can be used to kill microscopic parasites called coccidia.
NPR put a human face on the resistance problem–a man deathly ill from a severe bacterial infection (campylobacter) in his intestinal tract. NPR suggested he might have gotten it from eating chicken. The man was given a strong antibiotic called ciprofloxacin (CIPRO), but it failed to cure him. Later, the man’s intestinal tract was found to contain CIPRO-resistant bacteria.
NPR didn’t tell us, however, that the man was not tested for bacteria until after he’d been given CIPRO! Shouldn’t we expect the bacteria surviving in his stomach after CIPRO treatment to be CIPRO-resistant?
Reporter Daniel Zwerdling reported the Food and Drug Administration “wants to go after antibiotics again,” though he did note FDA officials say the case against antibiotics in feed is purely circumstantial.
Zwerdling took his listeners to Denmark, where the government has banned use of antibiotics in hog and poultry feeds. While Zwerdling marveled at the careful sanitation on a Danish poultry farm, he failed to report the biggest difference between the Danish and American poultry industries: Danish consumers are more than five times as likely to get sick from campylobacter bacteria as Americans, and more than twice as likely to get a salmonella infection.
Is this related to the ban on antibiotics? There’s been no documented improvement in Denmark’s antibiotic resistance picture since the ban.
Meanwhile, more Danish hogs and poultry are getting sick. Therapeutic use of antibiotics in Danish poultry houses has increased 30 percent since they stopped antibiotic use in feeds.
In the United States, the campaign against veterinary use of antibiotics is discouraging research on new antibiotics that could help protect our food animals and our pets. If farmers announced that city folks should go back to horse trolleys and hand-crank telephones, they’d be laughed out of town.
Today’s city folks can recommend a return to 19th century farming mainly because they don’t understand the consequences. Britain’s recent mass hog and cattle burials due to foot-and-mouth disease were startling to see on TV, but they would have seemed commonplace in 1850. Massive disease epidemics were then common among herds and flocks, but today’s veterinary medications largely prevent them.
Today’s urban dwellers have never seen hogs (which can’t sweat) sweltering in the summer sun–and destroying a creek bank to get relief in the mud.
The most critical problem in moving First World farms back to the 19th century model, however, is that outdoor pastures for our cattle, hogs and poultry would take many millions of acres of land away from wildlife habitat.
I’d love to hear National Public Radio do an in-depth report on the lost wildlands, polluted streams and animal suffering that would accompany the return to outdoor animals and “natural farming” recommended by such groups as Greenpeace and Riverkeepers’ Alliance.
That would be less politically correct than recycling elderly, undocumented European food scares, but it would contribute more to the American dialogue.
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of BridgeNews.
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Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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