Greetings Gang, Dr T here
Hidden Health Hazards of Antibiotics in Meat
Will the madness never end?
A related news story highlights one hidden source of antibiotics that can have a significant and long-term impact on your gut flora and overall health. Writing for the New York Times David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 1990 to 1997, warns that antibiotic-resistant pathogens in livestock are on the rise as a result of the fact that, in the US, antibiotics are routinely fed to livestock not only to fight infection, but to promote unhealthy (though profitable) weight gain.
“While the F.D.A. can see what kinds of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are coming out of livestock facilities, the agency doesn’t know enough about the antibiotics that are being fed to these animals,” he writes. “This is a major public health problem, because giving healthy livestock these drugs breeds superbugs that can infect people. We need to know more about the use of antibiotics in the production of our meat and poultry. The results could be a matter of life and death. … It may sound counterintuitive, but feeding antibiotics to livestock at low levels may do the most harm.
When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of penicillin, Alexander Fleming warned that ‘there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to nonlethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.’ He probably could not have imagined that, one day, we would be doing this to billions of animals in factory-like facilities.”
The link between antibiotic use in livestock and antibiotic-resistant disease is so clear that the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feed has been banned in Europe since 2006. In sharp contrast, according to the first-ever report by the FDA on the topic, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) used a whopping 29 million pounds of antibiotics in 2009, and according to Kessler, that number had further risen to nearly 30 million pounds in 2011, which represents about 80 percent of all reported antibiotic sales that year.
What’s more, on December 22, 2011, the FDA quietly posted a notice in the Federal Register that it was effectively reneging on its plan to reduce the use of antibiotics in agricultural animal feed – a plan it has been touting since 1977.
Instead, the agency decided it will continue to allow livestock producers to use the drugs in feed unabated. Only one class of antibiotics, cephalosporin, has been restricted from use in livestock. This class of antibiotics, which are regularly prescribed to humans, are implicated in the development and spread of drug-resistant bacteria among humans that work with, and/or eat, the animals. As of April 5, 2012, the antibiotic (cephalosporin) is no longer be allowed for use in preventing diseases in livestock, although they are still allowed for treatment of illness in livestock.
news story highlights one hidden source of antibiotics that can have a significant and long-term impact on your gut flora and overall health. Writing for the New York Times David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 1990 to 1997, warns that antibiotic-resistant pathogens in livestock are on the rise as a result of the fact that, in the US, antibiotics are routinely fed to livestock not only to fight infection, but to promote unhealthy (though profitable) weight gain.
“While the F.D.A. can see what kinds of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are coming out of livestock facilities, the agency doesn’t know enough about the antibiotics that are being fed to these animals,” he writes. “This is a major public health problem, because giving healthy livestock these drugs breeds superbugs that can infect people. We need to know more about the use of antibiotics in the production of our meat and poultry. The results could be a matter of life and death. … It may sound counterintuitive, but feeding antibiotics to livestock at low levels may do the most harm.
When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of penicillin, Alexander Fleming warned that ‘there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to nonlethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.’ He probably could not have imagined that, one day, we would be doing this to billions of animals in factory-like facilities.”
The link between antibiotic use in livestock and antibiotic-resistant disease is so clear that the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feed has been banned in Europe since 2006. In sharp contrast, according to the first-ever report by the FDA on the topic, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) used a whopping 29 million pounds of antibiotics in 2009, and according to Kessler, that number had further risen to nearly 30 million pounds in 2011, which represents about 80 percent of all reported antibiotic sales that year.
What’s more, on December 22, 2011, the FDA quietly posted a notice in the Federal Register that it was effectively reneging on its plan to reduce the use of antibiotics in agricultural animal feed – a plan it has been touting since 1977.
Instead, the agency decided it will continue to allow livestock producers to use the drugs in feed unabated. Only one class of antibiotics, cephalosporin, has been restricted from use in livestock. This class of antibiotics, which are regularly prescribed to humans, are implicated in the development and spread of drug-resistant bacteria among humans that work with, and/or eat, the animals. As of April 5, 2012, the antibiotic (cephalosporin) is no longer be allowed for use in preventing diseases in livestock, although they are still allowed for treatment of illness in livestock.