Crop Plants Take Up Antibiotics
... Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota.
Today, close to 70 percent of the total antibiotics and related drugs produced in the United States are fed to cattle, pigs and poultry, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. ... People have long been exposed to antibiotics in meat and milk. Now, the new research shows that they also may be ingesting them from vegetables, perhaps even ones grown on organic farms.
...Past studies have shown overuse of antibiotics reduces their ability to cure infections. Over time, certain antibiotics are rendered ineffective.
Scientists believe antibiotics also may have contributed to the explosive rise in asthma and allergies in children over the last 20 years. Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, following 448 children from birth for seven years, reported that children who received antibiotics within their first six months had a higher risk of developing allergies and asthma.
Such health concerns led the European Union in 2006 to ban antibiotic use as feed additives for promoting livestock growth. But in the United States, nearly 25 million pounds of antibiotics per year, up from 16 million in the mid 1980s, are given to healthy animals for agriculture purposes, according to a 2000 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. ...
Antibiotic resistant bacteria are a serious and growing threat. And it took five years of hassle to get the poultry industry to stop feeding a Cipro-like antibiotic to chickens, in spite of Cipro-resistant infections going up 21 percent between its introduction and the eventual ban.
The meatpacking industry, and the packers have enormous sway over growing practices even when they don't grow the animals themselves, doesn't have our best interests at heart. Obviously. Any excuse to keep growing our food animals in filth, they'll take it.
Even when it's slowly saturating our food system with wasted stores of otherwise valuable medicine.
Do you know what the human effects of steady, low-dose antibiotic consumption are, aside from the greater risk of resistant infection? I'm guessing it can't be good for the probiotic gut bacteria that help us process B vitamins and other essential nutrients from our food, and I know that antibiotic use (of any type, but especially long term) can also increase the likelihood of yeast infections. Fun.
Before there were antibiotics, any infection could turn into a death sentence. Any injury or surgical wound could open the doorway to an illness far more threatening than the mechanical tissue damage. They were, are, miracle drugs.
Bacteria are very hardy organisms, though. Maybe not individually, but as a species. They reproduce so fast that even one of them that's resistant enough to survive a dosing of antibiotics can restart the infection and potentially spread the disease. And while they reproduce by cell division, natural cloning, they can share DNA with each other and confer resistance on unrelated bacteria.
The faster drug resistance spreads, the faster an antibiotic stops being useful. Human society could be in real trouble if drugs as powerful as Cipro, the antibiotic used to treat anthrax, become less useful before there are replacements.
This is playing with fire, and it's dangerous even if no one can predict a date when it will burn the house down.
For more information, you could try Keep Antibiotics Working.
(Photo credit: IamSAM on Flickr.)
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