The End of Food. Thomas F. Pawlick
anymore. Thanks in large part to the modern, corporate food industry, antibiotics are now on the list of dangers to human health. How this happened makes a kind of modern morality tale.
As most of us learned in high school biology class, bacteria are very small, incredibly numerous, and reproduce at a rate that makes rabbits look like they’re practicing celibacy. In 24 hours, the offspring of a single Escherichia coli bacterium could outnumber the entire human population of the earth—and a certain number of that population of bugs will mutate.
All living things can mutate—experience a change in the character of one of their genes, or a change in the sequence of base pairs in a DNA molecule, which can then be passed on to their descendants. In large animals, like humans, mutations aren’t all that frequent, but in a population of millions upon millions of bacteria, reproducing at whirlwind speed, there’s “a whole lotta mutate’n goin’ on,” and each mutation can be passed on to millions of individuals within hours.
Antibiotics work by attacking bacteria in a variety of ways, such as breaking down cell walls or interfering with some vital step in the bacteria’s metabolism. However, when an antibiotic attacks a bacterial colony, it doesn’t always wipe that colony out. Some bacteria survive, either because they already had a genetic trait that blocked the antibiotic (called intrinsic resistance), or because they developed one while under attack (acquired resistance). These resistant bacteria can then go on reproducing, creating a resistant population. In general, the weaker the antibiotic attack, the more bacterial survivors there are—and the bigger the new, resistant population.
The best way to deliberately create a large, resistant population of harmful bacteria—if we are crazy enough to want to do this–would be to make many, many weak attacks on that species of bacteria with low doses of antibiotics. After each attack, there would be a fair portion of resistant survivors, and if the attacks are widespread enough, resistant bugs will soon be popping up everywhere.
This is exactly what our food production system is doing.
When a cow, pig or chicken “catches cold,” that is, develops a mild bacterial infection, its milk or meat production goes slightly down while its body uses energy to fight the infection off naturally. In the old days of family farms with relatively small numbers of stock, nobody thought much of it. Only when a cow or sheep became significantly ill was medication used. But today’s corporate factory-farm systems can’t tolerate such minor blips. Maximizing profit is the name of the game, and nothing can be permitted to decrease production, not even a little bit.
Rather than wait for an animal to “catch cold,” and suffer even a minor slowdown in milk production or weight gain, preventive doses of antibiotics are put into healthy animals’ feed, as a sort of insurance against possible infection. The preventive doses, of course, are lower than those used to treat a full-blown, active infection. They are low, so-called “maintenance” doses—and their use has become more and more common, virtually guaranteeing that resistant bacteria strains will be popping up everywhere.
Of course, modern stock-raising methods aren’t the only cause of the problem. Over-prescription of antibiotics by doctors treating human patients has also contributed to the development of drug resistance. But at least the doctors are treating actual sickness. The stockmen who feed perfectly healthy animals “growth-promoting” antibiotics are not.
As Michael Khoo of the Union of Concerned Scientists reported recently:
About 13 million pounds [of antibiotics] a year are fed to chickens, cows, and pigs to make them grow faster or to compensate for unsanitary conditions. That’s about four times the amount used to treat sick people.
Why is the use in animals a threat to public health? Because the overuse of drugs on factory farms creates antibiotic-resistant bacteria that are difficult to treat. These bacteria can make food-poisoning episodes last longer or recovery from surgery less certain. As bacteria become more resistant, people can no longer be sure that prescribed drugs will actually work. 11
The potential scale of the problem becomes clear when we look at some individual microbes. For example, the bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae has become resistant to penicillin, and is
the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia (about 500,000 cases in the U.S. per year), is a major cause of bacterial meningitis (about 6,000 cases in the U.S. per year), causes about one-third of the cases of ear infection (about six million cases in the U.S. per year), and causes about 55,000 cases of bacteremia [bacteria in the blood, or “blood poisoning”] in the U.S. per year. 12
The worst of the resistant bacteria strains are those that are immune to many different antibiotics, the so-called “superbugs.” More than 90 percent of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria are now penicillin-resistant, and many of them are also resistant to methicillin, nafcillin, oxacillin, and cloxacillin, as well as other antibiotics.13S. aureus is the second most common cause of skin and wound infections, of bacteremia, and of lower respiratory infections. Some 40 percent of such infections are now due to multi-resistant strains. S. aureus blood poisoning “can be fatal within 12 hours.”14
There are now also multi-resistant strains of Salmonella–a common cause of food poisoning,15 and Escherichia coli, which is a major cause of diarrheal illness in children in the U.S. In severe cases of E. coli infection, dehydration can occur, “especially among children, in whom mortality may be quite high.”16
More recently, scientists have reported a new strain of an ancient scourge: syphilis. This sexually transmitted disease, which can cause dementia, paralysis, and death, is caused by a microbe called Treponema pallidum, and until recently was easily cured by a few oral doses of the antibiotic azithromycin. The new strain is resistant to azithromycin, and is showing up in increasing numbers in syphilis patients. Incidence of syphilis itself has increased by more than 19 percent in the U.S. between the years 2000 and 2003.17
By constantly administering “sub-therapeutic” doses of antibiotics (that is, doses below the level needed to cure an actual infection) to the animals on farms, in feedlots, and in transport trucks carrying them to the slaughterhouses, meat producers create millions of resistant bacteria, with populations scattered all over the continent. Small residues of antibiotics may also end up in the meat sold in stores, which means we can be dosed with them when we eat the meat, leading to the creation of resistant bacteria in our own bodies.
So serious is the problem of drug-resistant bacteria that the European Union banned the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in meat and milk production in 1998. Such influential groups as the American Medical Association (AMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have called for major reductions in the use of such antibiotics in North America, but few producers have listened.
In fact, when the McDonald’s fast food chain, responding to heavy consumer pressure, decided in June 2003 to ban meats produced with growth-promoting antibiotics, a storm of protest arose from the company’s suppliers, some of whom claimed banning non-therapeutic antibiotic use would cause “a dramatic increase in animal disease”18 — in other words, that not giving medicine to healthy animals would make them sick.
Yet continuing the practice may have contributed to what scientists call the “nightmare scenario,” recently announced in the U.S. As the wire services reported in July 2002:
Medical experts have long described it as the nightmare scenario of antibiotic resistance: the day when Staphylococcus aureus, cause of some of the most common and troublesome infections to inflict man, becomes resistant to the antibiotic arsenal’s weapon of last resort, vancomycin.
The nightmare scenario has arrived.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has announced the first confirmed case of vancomycin-resistant staph aureus—known in the