Here is a news story that could determine whether you live or die. Many of the world's scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless -- so a few people can get richer, for a while. If they aren't stopped soon, the World Health Organization warns we are facing "a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics". It will be a world where transplant surgery is impossible. It will be a world where a simple appendix operation will be as routinely lethal as it was in 1927, before the discovery of penicillin. It will be a world where pneumonia and TB and gonorrhea are far harder to deal with, and claim many more of us. But it's a world that you and I don't have to see - if we act on this warning now.
As the scientists I've interviewed explain it, antibiotics do something simple. They kill, slow down or stall the growth of bacteria. They were one of the great advances of the 20th century, and they have saved millions of us. But they inherently contain a problem -- one that was known about from very early on. They start an arms race. Use an antibiotic against bacteria, and it kills most of it -- but it can also prompt the bacteria to evolve a tougher, stronger, meaner strain that can fight back. The bacteria is constantly mutating and dividing. The stronger the antibiotic, the stronger some bacteria will become to survive. It's Darwin dancing at super-speed.
So the more we use antibiotics, the more we lose them. It's a battle played out on human bodies and in human wounds, with sky-high stakes. In many developed countries today, MRSA kills more people than Aids. The obvious conclusion, then, is that we should use antibiotics sparingly, and only when they are really needed to treat the sick. But in one crucial area we are doing the exact opposite -- for the sake of a few people's profits.
In the United States, Latin America, and Asia, animals being farmed for meat and milk are being automatically given antibiotics in their food all day -- irrespective of whether they are healthy or sick. It's like slathering your child's Cornflakes with antibiotics, all year round. Some 80 per cent of all antibiotics in the US go straight into farm animals. This speeds up the race massively. It's like taking bacteria to the gym and giving them a constant work-out -- and then unleashing them on the rest of us.
You can see how this process makes bacteria stronger and tougher -- and at work on humans -- in a startling study by Professor Barry Levy in the New England Journal of Medicine. His team went to a chicken farm where antibiotics had not been used before, and started to put the antibiotic tetracycline into their feed. Before the start of the experiment, there was no tetracycline-resistant bacteria on the farm. Within two weeks, 90 per cent of the chickens were excreting tetracycline-resistant organisms. Even more strikingly, half of all the humans living on the farm were by then excreting tetracycline-resistant bacteria too.
This process partially explains the evolution and spread of many superbugs. Only a fortnight ago, a new strain of MRSA was found in British milk that could be transmitted to human beings. To some degree this arms race is an inevitable part of nature - but our factory farms are massively artificially accelerating it. They are bringing the day when antibiotics won't work much closer.
Why? Why would factory farms automatically feed antibiotics to healthy animals, given the obvious risk? If you cram animals together, give them little room to move, and make them grow and produce far beyond the level they would in natural circumstances, they will routinely get ill -- and they do. It is cheaper for their owners to simply automatically and preemptively drug them all, than to try to treat their illness individually, or to create an environment where sickness is not standard.
The animals in these factory farms can become reservoirs of stronger superbugs. Sometimes it spreads to us through contamination of raw meat, but more often it filters out through workers who have contact with the animals. Dutch pig farmers are 760 times more likely to be carrying pig-MRSA than the rest of the population. This story ends eventually with the death of antibiotics -- and routine operations becoming deadly once more.
We always knew factory farming was a scar on our conscience, but it turns out it is also an urgent threat to our health. Of course, factory farming is not the only source of growing antibiotic resistance. Doctors have been over-prescribing them, and patients have too often not been taking their full course, enabling tougher bacteria to survive and thrive. But this is the most egregious cause.
A few years ago, it looked like the European Union had taken the lead, by banning the routine use of some types of antibiotics simply to promote the growth of animals. But research published this week by the Soil Association suggests farmers are sidestepping the real issue. The prescription of modern cephalosporins, the antibiotics which are most widely believed to promote stronger variants of MRSA in animals and humans -- has quadrupled in the past decade in Britain. Why? They are advertised to farmers, who are under greater pressure than ever to get more and more out of their herds because supermarkets have ratcheted up the pressure for quick profit. Decent small farmers who want to resist these trends find themselves out of business.
Britain's former chief medical officer Liam Donaldson says this over-prescription is so dangerous to us all it should be banned. Yet David Cameron's Government ignored the official recommendation from its own veterinary advisers to take even the much milder step of banning the advertising of antibiotics to farmers. In the US, all attempts to ban the routine feeding of antibiotics -- led by Representative Louise Slaughter -- are routinely smothered by the farming lobby.
It might seem strange that governments all over the world are taking such a gamble with public health, in the face of the best scientific advice. But Big Agriculture has armies of lobbyists and open checkbooks, while the people trying to protect the public have only the facts and reason and truth on their side. The squandering of life-saving antibiotics is one example of a bigger trend hijacking global politics. Small groups of rich people, determined to maximize profits, are buying or bamboozling politicians into serving their interests and into ignoring the interests of the vast majority of the population. This is the trend that is making it so hard to (say) re-regulate the banks to prevent another global crash, or prevent the unraveling of the climate.
It doesn't have to be this way. The majority of the population can organize and shout louder than these self-interested juntas of profit. There are inspiring examples. In Lincolnshire, there were plans to import the first US-style mega-farm into this country by a group of tycoons who claimed their cows "do not belong in fields". But public pressure forced the Environment Agency to investigate, and the plans to be abandoned. Fighting back on issues like this works - and we need to step it up.
Otherwise, the history books -- written by people far more vulnerably to bacteria than you and I have ever been -- will record something startling. Our demand for cheap meat turned us, in turn, into cheap meat.
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won't hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
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Andrew Gunther: Cargill's Tainted Turkey: Just the Tip of the Iceberg?
The good thing with agriculture though is that most of the antibiotics are classified as class three drugs by the USDA meaning they are a totally different strain than used in human medicine therefore not at risk of causing human resistance.
The problem comes when farmers can no longer use these types of medicine because of decisions made by misinformed lawmakers. What then happens is animals get sick, and farmers are then forced to use antibiotics such as cephalosporins and tetracyclyns that are very critical in controlling diseases in Humans. Your example of the European Union in the article is spot on, limit the amount of desease in livestock animals safely and it will cost more to treat it after it occurs (both in dollars and effects on society)
http://scienceblogs.com/deanscorner/2011/06/big_ag_and_antibiotics_culture.php
Bingo. This is the news the public needs to hear.
This article would have been complete with clearer blame being placed on those who fill the "open checkbooks" of Big Ag - the consumer.
Bacteria becoming effectively immune to most antibacterial agents is just one part of a much larger issue that is, sadly, not getting the public exposure it really needs. The industrial food economy is, ultimately, unsustainable. It relies on massive inputs of fertilizers, which are no longer dirt-cheap, and it relies on a number of other unsustainable practices that will steadily start breaking down under demand pressures over the next 40-50 years.
Our pet peeve's getting bigger & more popular by the day!!
Hello Johann,
For years we've been trying to speak out about all things related to the manufacture of our Food and now there's Huff & all you guys doing it for us. Thank you. We do need a very serious conversation about Food as well. Yea, just like we must do on the IMF et al......!!!!
Seems most Western systems in place today are hugely problematic..... Guess it's only a matter of time before we all begin to talk about m'der of a different sort.
:(
"these self-interested juntas of profit"
J. W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with House of Saud connections, wrote in The Grim Reaper that information he acquired from Saudi bankers cited 80% ownership of the New York Federal Reserve Bank by far the most powerful Fed branch by just eight families, four of which reside in the US. They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.
CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallister’s claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches. He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York. Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals who own large shares of the Fed. [3] The Schiffs are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are Citigroup insiders, who married into the Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25080 endpost
once again:
"Small groups of rich people, determined to maximize profits, are buying or bamboozling politicians into serving their interests and into ignoring the interests of the vast majority of the population. This is the trend that is making it so hard to (say) re-regulate the banks to prevent another global crash, or prevent the unraveling of the climate.
It doesn't have to be this way. The majority of the population can organize and shout louder than
these self-interested juntas of profit."
"these self-interested juntas of profit" start with who controls the global banking system. n'est-ce pas?
Huffington leadership, DO SOMETHING.
Granted, instituting limits on how many antibacterials farmers can inject into livestock is a nice step, and definitely helps reduce this impending issue. It is only part of the overall slate of changes we would need to make, and just that part alone will be difficult and time-consuming enough.
Unfortunately, greed and expediency always prevail. I'm afraid it will continue to be a monstrous challenge to serve our burdensome population. I'd like to see the emerging trend of small local farming replace factory farming. Oh,well....
Feel sorry for Him~
PS:
Thanks for making us :)
The
Quality.... and Manufacture of our food is a Big concern..... Or else how can one undertake preventive health care and keep one's self Healthy.... eh....??
I get a charge out of the 80% figure that authors now quote as if it were an actual fact. The largest single class of drugs included in that statistic are not antibiotics, but coccidiostats (rumensin, bovatec, corid) that are not absorbed from the GI tract and are never used in people. So much for conventional wisdom....
Putting their profits first - coupled with states too bribed to regulate - we are looking at the Farm-superbug version of the Bank Crisis of 2008 under the same model of bank-centered Capitalist Western democracy.
The pattern is emerging -
Money renders bank-centered Capitalist Western democracies useless in protecting people from any wealthy and powerful industry. This pattern will repeat itself until each mega-industry gets its chance of at destruction. But, at the center of all corporate ownership are BANKS - the clear enemy of all people in the world.