Save antibiotics for people, not poultry

St. Louis Post Dispatch | Editorial staff | July 21, 2009

Pop quiz: Most antibiotics in the United States are used for (a) healthy farm animals or (b) people with potentially life-threatening infections?

The answer, by a long shot, is healthy farm animals. Over the past 60 years, antibiotics have transformed once-deadly infections in humans — tuberculosis, pneumonia and typhoid — into treatable, mostly survivable illnesses. But some 70 percent of the antibiotics consumed in this country are used on healthy farm animals.

The antibiotics promote faster growth and prevent illness in poultry, pork and beef — especially animals raised in crowded and unsanitary conditions on factory farms. That means higher profits for farmers and lower costs for consumers.

But it also means more antibiotic-resistant bacteria — so-called superbugs — that cannot be killed by the usual first-line antimicrobial drugs. Such bacteria pose a grave threat to all of us. The Obama administration said last week that it wants to ban the routine use of antibiotics in healthy farm animals. Legislation that would do just that is pending in Congress.

The farming industry, predictably, opposes such restrictions. A spokesman for the pork industry argued last week that "there are no good studies" linking drug-resistant bacteria to agricultural use of antibiotics.

In part, that's because many of the same antibiotics being overused on factory farms also have been overused by doctors and hospitals. That makes it difficult to tease out how much of the problem is agricultural in origin and how much is medical.

But there's plenty of evidence that indiscriminate use of antibiotics by farmers is a big part of the problem. Tests of water and soil samples around large factory farms have shown colonies of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

During the 1980s, researchers linked human infections with a strain of multi-drug resistant salmonella to exposure to cattle on dairy farms. By 1997, more than a third of human salmonella infections in the United States involved a strain that was resistant to five classes of antibiotics.

Drug-resistant strains of campylobacter, the most common cause of bacterial food-borne illness in the United States, developed in the 1990s.

Researchers from the University of California-Berkeley have pinpointed overuse of antibiotics on factory farms as a potential cause of a drug-resistant strain of e. coli that causes serious urinary tract infection in women.

Antibiotic resistance isn't new; it's been occurring since shortly after the drugs became available in the 1940s. It was a minor problem at first because newer classes of antibiotics were pouring off drug company production lines.

But that's no longer true. Very few new antibiotics have been released in recent years. Even so, some microbes already are developing resistance to them.

That forces doctors to use second- and third-line drugs, many of which have potentially serious side effects such as kidney damage. It also raises costs. The annual cost of treating infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria may exceed $12.5 billion.

The bill now pending in the House of Representatives would withdraw federal approval for routine use of antibiotics in animal feed. Farmers still could use antibiotics to treat sick animals, but they no longer could be used simply to promote growth.

Following the lead of Sweden and Denmark, the European Union restricted the use of antibiotics on farms in 2006. The United States should follow suit.

We can't afford to sacrifice human health just so factory farms can turn a fatter profit.

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