What If Our Anthrax Cure Stopped Working
November 7, 2001
“What If Cipro Stopped working?” was the November 3rd headline over a New York Times commentary piece obviously designed to scare us about death from anthrax. The authors of the commentary say inaccurately that the widespread use of an antibiotic similar to Cipro in chickens “has already been shown to decrease Cipro’s effectiveness in humans for some types of infections.”
The reality is that a coalition of eco-groups is playing on our legitimate bioterrorism concerns to get a ban on the veterinary antibiotics that protect the health of our cows, pigs, and chickens. This “coalition in favor of more sick animals” includes the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and something called the Food Animal Concerns Trust.
The coffers of the environmental groups must be running low. For two months now, the nation’s headlines have focused on hijacked planes becoming giant missiles, deadly anthrax spores being sent through our mail, and the U.S. military risking soldiers’ lives against armed enemies who want to kill us and destroy our society. Instead of donating money to eco-groups, the U.S. public has been buying American flags and T-shirts that say “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Terrorists.”
Meanwhile, there’s no evidence that veterinary use of antibiotics makes any significant difference to human medicine. Most of the bacteria that plague birds and animals are slightly different strains than the ones that plague humans. The only real overlap is in the food borne bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacyer¾and if those become bacterially resistant, we can kill the bacteria with electronic irradiation.
In fact, if we value our health, we should be irradiating our meat and produce right now. We aren’t, mainly because many of the same groups trying to scare us about veterinary antibiotics claim (despite safety approvals from 40 governments) that irradiation is also dangerous to our health.
The eco-coalition cites the case of a young Nebraska boy, whom they say got Salmonella resistant bacteria from his father’s cattle. But the boy was not tested for bacteria until two days after he entered a U.S. hospital¾the most likely place in the world to find antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
We know why humans are encountering more antibiotic resistance: we’re misusing antibiotics in human treatment. One-third of U.S. antibiotic prescriptions are written for ailments they can’t cure, such as colds, allergies and flu. Patients demand antibiotics, and doctors go along. Then, too often, we stop taking the prescription as soon as we feel better, leaving many of the toughest bugs alive to reproduce.
The only real long-term solution to antibiotic resistance is to keep developing new antibiotics. (We can then rotate them with oldies-but-goodies like penicillin.) Unfortunately, we are discouraging drug companies from investing in the new antibiotics that are becoming critical to both human and animal health care. During the anthrax panic, Canada overrode its own patent law to order a huge quantity of Cipro from a generic maker. The United States government threatened to do the same thing.
The very eco-groups in the “Keep Antibiotics Working” campaign also supported the big anti-corporate demonstrations in Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and Genoa, Italy. The eco-activists constantly argue that pharmaceutical companies make too much money at the expense of sick people, even as the increasingly-stringent testing they demand drives the cost of developing a new drug as high as $500 million.
Even so, several new human antibiotics are under development. However, the furor over banning veterinary medicines has essentially stopped all research on new veterinary antibiotics.
Why do eco-groups seem to want fewer new drugs and more animal disease? Perhaps because they blame modern farming for producing too much food, and thus encouraging “overpopulation.” (In reality, the current one-time surge in human numbers is essentially due to the lower death rates produced by vaccinations, treated drinking water, and other public health measures.)
The eco-activists also ignore the fact that high-yield farming lets us feed today’s 6 billion people today with virtually no more land for farming than we used 50 years ago. Confinement feeding of birds and livestock, a major user of preventative medicines, is saving millions of acres of land for wildlife.
The Sierra Club should applaud the veterinary antibiotics that protect our herds and flocks and the humaneness of disease prevention.
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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