Deadly Dosing - antibiotics used too much in livestock - Brief Article

Vegetarian Times, Feb, 1999 by Dave Plank, Cristin Marandino

Drugs, superbugs and the coming millennium. Are you safe?

Pumping livestock full of antibiotics has become so commonplace that we almost take it for granted. Now; thanks to emerging research, scientists from powerful institutions like the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the World Health Organization (WHO) and even the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are worried that drug-resistant strains of bacteria produced as a result of this practice may become the next millennium's most daunting human public-health challenge.

Over the past few decades, ranchers have been aggressively using antibiotics to ward off diseases and fatten up cattle, sheep, swine and poultry by allowing them to metabolize more feed and grow at an accelerated rate. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 60 to 80 percent of all American livestock animals are given the drugs. And scientists believe that this rampant overuse of antibiotics is causing the DNA of infectious pathogens like salmonella, E. coli and campylobacter to change and make the diseases resistant to the drugs that traditionally wiped them out. Once resistant, the deadly bacteria can easily survive in the animals and be transmitted to humans as contaminated meat, explains Kansas State University's James Coffman D.V.M., chairman of the NAS panel that produced a report called The Use of Drugs in Food Animals. "That threat," warns Coffman "is real, and is documented."

Coffman says that animals are routinely kept on low doses of antibiotics, such as penicillin, tetracycline and streptomycin, to neutralize the repercussions of filthy living conditions. Modern, high-density feed lots crowd tens or even hundreds of thousands of animals into pens with only a few square feet of living area for each. Waste is supposed to be carried away by drainage systems operating beneath the animals, but the systems don't always work. The end result is a cramped, dirty, stressed-out animal that often needs drugs to stay healthy or even alive. However, should a disease get passed into the food supply, the antibiotics prescribed to combat it in humans are often useless, as the bacteria that cause the disease are already resistant to the "cure."

Even the FDA, which regulates agricultural antibiotic use, is wary of the practice. In a recent press release, the FDA stated that it "believes the current use of subtherapeutic [small doses to stop disease] drugs by livestock producers is safe, but favors more research into the area of antibiotic resistance among livestock-borne pathogens." While the number of deaths due to antibiotic resistance is low, it is growing annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. And with tens of thousands of cases of food-borne illnesses reported every year, the situation is primed to get worse. "We've seen an explosion in the numbers of organisms that don't respond to therapies with drugs that have worked for years. We need to start paying closer attention to what we give out [antibiotics] for," says Julius Franke, M.D., an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Colorado.

Halting the widespread use of antibiotics won't be easy. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., estimates that a ban would raise the cost of beef, poultry, pork and dairy products by $1.2 billion to $2.5 billion per year. Such an increase would stem from the greater expense of raising animals without antibiotics--in other words, in cleaner, more humane conditions. Still, the group is urging the FDA to ban subtherapeutic use of these drugs, calling it a "significant hazard to public health." Agricultural and medical experts at the WHO concur, saying there is indeed cause for concern, as well as for government monitoring. It recommends raising livestock in lower-density quarters and doing more research into the development of nonantibiotic drugs.

Unfortunately, the government has no plans to tighten up regulation, and experts fear that antibiotic resistance will have to reach epidemic proportions before the government takes action. At this point, pressuring your congressperson through letters and phone calls is the most viable option.