Saving Antibiotics

Christopher D. Cook, author of Diet For A Dead Planet, has an op-ed up today in the Ithaca Journal with nine suggestions for a sustainable food future that the Obama administration could set in motion. They're good. But look more closely at suggestion number five:

A moratorium on — and gradual phasing out of — concentrated animal feeding operations, aka factory farms, which are among the nation's top polluters of water and air, and breeders of widespread and virulent bacterial strains.

The livestock industry insisted just last month that they need to be allowed the 'off label' use of our strongest antibiotics in order to stay in business, and therefore should not be subject to additional enforcement of prescription drug usage. In fact, they use 25 million pounds of antibiotics, a whopping 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the US, for nontherapeutic purposes.

Steady, low dose administration of antibiotics through the feed of entire herds or flocks of animals can both speed growth and allow animals to survive conditions that would otherwise kill them. But there's a problem with this, which you'd be familiar with if your doctor has ever explained why antibiotic over-prescription is a problem; giving humans excess antibiotics for colds (though they don't help colds, which are viral) or other unnecessary uses increases the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria strains. This is a reason why hospitals, where preemptive antibiotic use is widespread to compensate for the high risk of infection, are themselves major producers of antibiotic resistant disease strains. In fact, antibiotic use can leave antibiotic residue in muscle tissue, which means that there's a risk that humans are being unnecessarily exposed to antibiotics through their factory farmed meals.

Though there isn't a lot of data on the spread of resistant bacteria from farms to humans, consider that after Denmark and then the European Union banned antibiotic use for growth promotion, antibiotic resistant disease strains decreased in both human and animal populations. And when I say that there isn't a lot of data, I mean that very few researchers are funded to study the matter. In spite of that, a 2008 report by the Worldwatch Institute indicated that factory scale poultry farming was a likely vector for avian flu, aka bird flu.

While avian flu is a virus, it's a basic tenet of public health that crowded, unsanitary conditions are a reliable source of virulent diseases. Some of those diseases will be bacterial, and for those strains, ongoing exposure to sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics is virtually guaranteed to breed drug resistance. Though it's seen as controversial to apply to farm animals what's common sense in the prevention of disease outbreaks in humans: provide adequate sanitation, clean food and water, and reduce overcrowding.

If antibiotics are to be preserved for human use, it's important for people to be responsible about taking the full course when prescribed, and as prescribed, and not pressuring doctors to prescribe them when their necessity is unclear. Likewise, the livestock industry needs to stop using them as a cure all for the dangerously unsanitary living conditions they provide for our food animals.

Corporations whose officers insist that they have rights of personhood should be held to the minimum standards of personal accountability that are asked of actual persons.