Last year, an estimated 65,000 people in the U.S. were killed by drug-resistant infections -- almost the number of people who succumbed to breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.
Antibiotics are becoming frightfully less effective in treating a host of potentially fatal diseases, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, staph infections and gonorrhea. The World Health Organization calls antibiotic resistance a "leading threat" to human health.
The cause, scientists agree, is the rampant overuse and misuse of antibiotics inside and outside of medicine. And the only solution, they say, is to reverse that trend by dramatically limiting the use of antibiotics.
In Washington today, a House subcommittee will begin hearings on the growing danger of antibiotic resistance. It will hear testimony on a range of causes, including the overuse of antibiotics by doctors and the failure of patients to use antibiotics properly.
But before all else, we hope the subcommittee will take a hard look at -- and support a bill prohibiting -- the routine practice of feeding antibiotics by the bushel to livestock. Seventy percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. last year were fed to pigs, chickens and cows. The bulk of those medicines were used not to cure sick animals, but to fatten and protect from disease healthy animals being raised in crowded and unsanitary conditions.
The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act would prohibit feeding seven classes of antibiotics to food animals for "non-therapeutic uses" -- essentially unless the animal is sick. The bill has been defeated several times before in Congress, blocked by the American Meat Institute and drug manufacturers. The bill is endorsed by, among others, the American Medical Association and the American Pharmacists Association.
Opponents of the bill make two key arguments: No one has documented a single case in which the inability to treat a human successfully with antibiotics could be linked to the use of antibiotics in food animals; and without the heavy use of antibiotics, the cost of raising food animals would rise and Americans would pay more for meat.
The first argument is specious. Decades of studies have shown a link between the use of antibiotics and the emergence of antibiotic- resistant bacteria -- "superbugs" that, in a classic example of evolutionary adaptation, can stand up to the strongest antibiotics. As with cigarettes and lung cancer, the general cause and effect is irrefutable, even if one cannot prove it for any one person who falls ill.
The second argument also has little merit. Meat prices would rise, but not by much -- maybe $10 a year per consumer -- the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences says.
In Denmark, where a ban was imposed in 1998, resistant bacteria in livestock shrank, while the pork industry actually grew 43 percent.
Since the discovery of penicillin in 1928, antibiotics have created a golden era in medicine, saving uncounted millions of lives.
But if we continue to throw around antibiotics too freely, like corn in a barnyard, that golden era will soon come to an ominous end.Chicago Sun Times
