Antibiotics in Jeopardy - Special Feature

Nutrition Action Healthletter, March, 2002 by Tamar Barlam

And they can practice safe food handling--not letting the juices from raw meat get into the salad or other raw food, washing their hands after touching raw meat, and cooking their meat thoroughly. That can not only keep people from getting food poisoning. It can also prevent the spread of resistant bacteria like the kind that cause urinary tract infections.

For more information, visit www.cspinet.org or www.keepantibioticsworking.com.

Remember when we took antibiotics for granted? Until last fall, only a fraction of Americans recognized them as the medical miracles they are. Older people who were alive when children still died of scarlet fever may have fully appreciated the drugs. But to most people, antibiotics were medicines that were always available, always effective, and never in jeopardy.

Until anthrax.

Suddenly, millions had to wonder what would happen if they couldn't get effective antibiotics. Some people stocked up on Cipro just in case. A few actually took the drug, even though they had no exposure to anthrax ... not realizing that their actions may have moved us all one tiny step closer to the day when Cipro would no longer work against some bacteria.

The more we use antibiotics, the more bacteria become resistant to them. That's a fact of microbial life. Yet the government, physicians, and the food industry haven't changed their actions enough to protect the drugs that protect the nation. As a result, antibiotics like penicillin are helpless against many of the infections they used to cure. We're losing our life-saving drugs, one by one.

At about the same time Cipro became a household word, scientists reported that roughly 20 percent of urinary tract infections are resistant to the frontline antibiotic used to treat them. The widely suspected source of the resistance: food.

Tamar Barlam is director of the Project on Antibiotic Resistance at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), publisher of Nutrition Action Healthletter. She explains why antibiotics are in jeopardy and what you can do to protect them.

Tamar Barlam, M.D., has served as the Infectious Disease representative on the Pharmaceuticals and Therapeutics Committees of St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City and Beth Israel Hospital and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She spoke with CSPI's Barbara Sorkin and Bonnie Liebman.