Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | Nov. 4, 2001 | John Fauber
If you bought a chicken at the grocery store this week, it's almost a sure thing it had been fed antibiotics during its lifetime.
In fact, the routine use of antibiotics in farm animals has become so widespread that public health advocates fear it is contributing to the creation of new super strains of drug-resistant diseases that are harmful or deadly to people.
Now, a growing contingent of consumer groups, physicians and infectious disease experts is saying the widespread use of antibiotics in healthy animals - to promote growth or to prevent disease - must be curtailed.
They point to figures estimating that animals get 20 million pounds a year of antibiotics, humans only 3 million pounds.
With the reports last month in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine that antibiotic-resistant salmonella bacteria were found in supermarket chicken and ground meat samples, these advocates have turned up the volume on demands that the practice - a byproduct of America's increasingly large-scale corporate farming culture - be curtailed.
Last week, a coalition of groups launched "Keep Antibiotics Working: The Campaign to End Antibiotic Overuse."
"Recent concerns about bioterrorism underscore the importance of having powerful, effective antibiotics available to treat human disease," said David Wallinga, a Minneapolis physician and director of the antibiotic resistance project at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade.
No action in 30 years
For more than 30 years, scientists have known that the large-scale use of antibiotics in healthy farm animals might be creating antibiotic-resistant bugs. But federal health officials have yet to ban any animal antibiotic because of peril it causes humans.
Consider:
In the 1970s, the Food and Drug Administration tried but failed to prohibit the use of penicillin and tetracycline as growth promoters in otherwise healthy farm animals. Last year, the FDA began the process to ban the use in chickens of the animal equivalent of Cipro - the drug now being used to treat anthrax infection in people. But that drug, Baytril (enrofloxacin), has remained on the market and likely will for some time while its maker, Bayer, fights the action. This year, the FDA has talked about banning the use of the growth-promoting antibiotic virginiamycin, the animal equivalent of a powerful human "drug of last resort," a medication that is the only effective treatment for many potentially deadly hospital-acquired infections. But so far, no action has been taken, and none is expected for at least a year.
Some defend practice
Not everyone favors curtailment.
Drug companies, veterinary groups and livestock producers say antibiotics play an important role in preventing and treating illness in farm animals.
Banning their use for disease prevention and growth promotion will only increase the need to use antibiotics to treat sick animals and will raise costs to consumers, they say.
And others say the practice makes sense in the context of high-production agriculture.
"Can you imagine a day care with 20,000 kids?" said Derek Lee, with Wisconsin Pasturelands, a Madison organic foods cooperative. "If one kid had a cold, they all would get sick. They (factory farms) have to give them antibiotics or else there would be massive losses."
Still, one of the most pressing public health concerns of the 21st century is the continued emergence of new, super strains of diseases that are resistant to even the most powerful antibiotics known to medicine.
Bacteria mutate all the time, and some of those mutant strains will be more resistant to the antibiotics they're being exposed to. Because the antibiotics can't kill them, they multiply. Not only that, they have the potential to transfer that resistance through bits of their DNA to other types of bacteria.
Most health experts agree that the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in humans is the primary cause of drug resistance.
However, the widespread use of antibiotics in chickens and other livestock now also is considered a major culprit.
Today, many of those antibiotics that would require a doctor's prescription for human use are available for animals to anyone, even without a prescription from a veterinarian.
"You can walk into a Fleet Farm and buy them by the pound," said the agriculture and trade institute's Wallinga.
In fact, a reporter was able - quite legally - to buy antibiotics such as penicillin and tetracycline as well as disposable sterile needles at a similar store in the Milwaukee area, Farm & Fleet, without any prescription.
Research on the perils of widespread use of antibiotics in farm animals has been piling up since the late 1960s.
What many believe is the smoking gun came earlier this month in studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers with the Food and Drug Administration and the University of Maryland found that one in five samples of supermarket ground meat and poultry collected in the Washington, D.C., area was contaminated with salmonella, and that the vast majority of those strains were resistant to antibiotics.
Salmonella is a bacterium that causes an estimated 1.4 million cases of food poisoning, including more than 500 deaths, in the United States every year.
More than 30 drugs
Over the years, more than 30 antibiotics have received FDA approval for use in livestock, and many of those same drugs also are used to treat people.
In 1998, the National Academy of Sciences said that up to 80% of cattle, sheep, swine and poultry in the U.S. are given antibiotics at some point. The academy said that much of the 19 million pounds of antibiotics given to farm animals annually is added to water and feed and used to promote growth and to help prevent animals in close quarters from transmitting diseases.
The practice of regularly feeding a so-called "sub therapeutic" dose of antibiotics to animals allows more animals to be raised at a lower cost.
But because the animals are exposed to small doses of drugs, any microbes they carry may be more prone to develop a resistance to them, the academy said.
"Potentially life-threatening microbes can be passed from animals to humans," the academy said. "Infants, the elderly and others with weakened immune systems are at higher risk from drug-resistant infections, as are farm workers."
If the practice is not curtailed, there will be more cases of pathogen-based disease, which will become more difficult to treat, resulting in longer hospital stays and more fatalities, said Sherwood Gorbach, professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Gorbach, who wrote an editorial in the New England Journal issue, said antibiotics should be used to treat sick animals and only under the supervision of a veterinarian, not to promote growth or prevent disease.
FDA's hands are tied
FDA officials who have been studying the issue say they are somewhat hamstrung in their ability to act across the board.
As long as drugs are approved as safe and effective, the agency can't act to ban all non-therapeutic uses, said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, which regulates the use of antibiotics in animals.
Sundlof conceded drug resistance has become a major human health concern, but the agency can act to ban individual drugs only with compelling evidence.
Some of the pressure against the bans has come from the drug industry, which maintains that feeding animals antibiotics to prevent disease is necessary.
"It is very important in the first line of defense," said Ron Phillips, a spokesman for the Animal Health Institute, which represents companies that make animal drugs. "We need to raise healthy animals so we can buy safe and wholesome meat."
The institute does an annual survey of its member companies. Its most recent data show that 20.5 million pounds of animal antibiotics were sold in 1999, up from 17.8 million pounds in 1998.
The institute said 13% of the 20.5 million pounds were antibiotics used to promote growth. The rest was for disease prevention and treatment, although no breakdown between the two was made.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that as little as 2 million pounds actually is used to treat sick animals. Some 70% of all antibiotics in the U.S. are fed to healthy pigs, poultry and beef cattle, the organization estimates.
By contrast, humans use only an estimated 3 million pounds of antibiotics a year, the union said.
Because of growing consumer demand for organic meats, some companies, like Gold'n Plump Poultry, which has a large chicken processing operation in Wisconsin, are playing both sides of the fence.
Gold'n Plump, which is based in St. Cloud, Minn., processes about 640,000 chickens a week at its operation in Arcadia, Wis. Those birds receive regular, low-grade doses of antibiotics in their feed to prevent disease, said Julie Berling, marketing director. The drugs also promote faster growth, although that is not the primary intention, she said.
At the same time, Gold'n Plump also has introduced a line of certified organic chickens, known as North Country Farms. Those birds receive no antibiotics, she said. They also are allowed to roam outside, and all of their feed is certified organic.
For now, the product, which was introduced in March, is considered a niche market.
For wider solutions, physicians and consumer groups point to Europe, where several countries have banned the use of antibiotics for growth promotion and disease prevention and, instead, have turned to improved animal husbandry as a way to control disease.
The methods include less crowding and more freedom of outdoor movement; improved hygiene, with more frequent removal of animal waste; more ventilation and light in barns; and healthier animal feed.Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
