Too much reliance on cattle antibiotics could compromise human medicines
What's more important - the health of your child or the health of the cow your child might eat? And how surprising is it to learn that favoring one might harm the other?
U.S. Rep. Louise M. Slaughter is among those who aren't surprised at all. Her degrees in microbiology and public health help her see that the way cattle are raised in modern America, and the way they are heavily medicated because of it, pose a long-term threat to human health. And her experience in politics tells her what steps are necessary to see to it that people who make drugs for cattle do not have more effective lobbyists than your children do.
Thus Slaughter, a Democrat from Western New York, is arguing that the Food and Drug Administration should not allow the use of new drugs for cows when that use could threaten the effectiveness of similar drugs that might save the lives of people.
The reason the health of people and the health of animals are in conflict, rather than complementary, flows from the wholly unnatural way in which the industrial food system brings beef to most of our tables.
By cramming cattle into trucks, rail cars and feedlots and feeding them stuff the bovine digestive tract was not evolved to properly digest, disease and bacteria that threaten the animals have to be fought off with an ever-growing arsenal of drugs.
But evolution cannot be tricked forever. The germs that make cattle sick, or that might poison the people who eat them, develop a resistance to whatever vaccines and treatments we might throw at them. People then invent a new drug, forcing the Darwinian rise of the next superbug.
The most recent example of that phenomenon is called cefquinome. It's a new antibiotic developed for cattle that is up for FDA approval. Because FDA rules presume that such usages should be approved absent an imminent threat to human health, experts fear that approval will be given and the countdown will begin toward a day when similar drugs will lose their ability to cure horrible infections in people. Those experts include the panel of scientists appointed by the FDA itself, whose recommendation against approving cefquinome for cattle is about to be ignored.
In the case of cefquinome, the move is doubling maddening because, while there are other medicines to treat common lung infections in cattle, none are now as effective as a related drug, cefepime, in treating kinds of infections that human cancer patients are vulnerable to. But once cefquinome gets into the biosphere, cefepime's days are numbered.
Oh, sure, they'll invent another drug. But do you want to be the one suffering from a life-threatening infection while they are still working on it?
Slaughter has petitioned the FDA to follow its expert panel's advice, and has also introduced legislation that would change the process so that the agency would have to give a lot more weight to scientific concerns about antibiotic resistance and comparatively less to industry pressure. That's just the shot in the arm the FDA needs.Buffalo News
