Cows and drugs

Cows are pumped up on drugs

(NaturalNews) Writing in theNew York Times, former FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy warns that the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock is a major threat to human health.

"More than 30 years ago ... we proposed eliminating the use of penicillin and two other antibiotics to promote growth in animals raised for food," Kennedy writes. "When agribusiness interests persuaded Congress not to approve that regulation, we saw firsthand how strong politics can trump wise policy and good science.

Already in the 1980s, Kennedy notes,scientistsknew that the non-therapeutic use ofantibioticsto prevent infection inhealthyanimals and make them grow faster was leading to the evolution ofdrug-resistant bacteria. To make matters worse, the antibiotics used inanimalsare largely the same as those used in humans, meaning that when these livestock-producedsuperbugsinfect humans, doctors have few ways to deal with them.

An estimated 90,000 people die from hospital-acquired infections in theUnited Statesevery year. Seventy percent of theseinfectionsare antibiotic resistant.

Thelivestockindustry insists that it needs to use antibiotics to keep its animals healthy. But according to the Union for Concerned Scientists, 70 percent of the antibiotics used inagricultureare given to healthy animals that are only at risk ofinfectionbecause they are kept in crowded, unsanitary confinement. And after Denmark banned non-therapeuticantibioticuse in the 1990s, the prevalence ofdrug-resistantbacteria in farm animals plummeted, while costs to livestock producers increased only slightly.

In 2005, the United States banned the use of fluoroquinolone antibiotics in poultry. Now the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act has been introduced, which wouldbanany non-therapeutic antibiotic use in animals unlessdrugcompanies could prove there was noriskof contributing to the development of superbugs.

A ban on non-therapeutic antibiotics in agriculture is supported by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Pharmacists Association, the Infectious Diseases Society ofAmerica, the American Public Health Association, and the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/029686_cows_drugs.html#ixzz1vtBJ7TvF

Antibiotics used on animals

70 Percent of antibiotics used on animals slaughtered for food
(NaturalNews) Widespread antibiotic use in animal agriculture is drawing increasing fire as a primary cause of the growing prevalence of drug-resistant and ever more lethal superbugs.

"There is clear evidence of the human health consequences [from agricultural use of antibiotics, including] infections that would not have otherwise occurred, increased frequency of treatment failures (in some cases death) and increased severity of infections," the World Health Organization wrote in 2003.

Seventy percent of allantibioticsused in the United States are used promote growth or preventinfectionin healthy farmanimals-- in other words, animals that are not showing any signs of disease.

"The heavy reliance on routineantibioticuse is a byproduct of the way we raise animals forfood: packed into dim and dirty enclosures where they live amid their own filth, eat food that they haven't evolved to digest, and are pretty much stacked atop one another," writes columnist Ezra Klein in theWashington Post.

The foodindustryclaims that such antibiotic use is necessary to keep food prices low for consumers.

"That really is a strange defense," said U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter. "We keep animals in such deplorable conditions that they'll become sick as a dog if we don't dose them?"

The industry's argument is weak on financial grounds as well, Klein says. According to a study conducted by researchers at Tufts University, antibiotic resistantinfectionscost the U.S. health-care system $50 billion per year. In contrast, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ending non-therapeutic antibiotic use in farm animals would raise the cost of meat consumption by $5 to $10 per person per year.

"I'd pay that for a lower risk of super-staphylococcus," Klein writes.

Slaughter has introduced a bill, H.R. 1549, that would ban non-medical use of the most effective human antibiotics.

"The bill preserves the seven most effective classes of antibiotics for human use only," she said. "They can be used to treat sick animals, but they can't be used to simply raise animals."

Sources for this story include:www.washingtonpost.com.

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/028024_antibiotics_animals.html#ixzz1vcRPtngf

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs started on animal farms

(NaturalNews) The growing emergence and prevalence of antibiotic-resistant superbugs capable of killing humans was not always the gravely serious problem it is today, as some of these deadly strains actually originated as benign pathogens in humans. But the widespread practice of feeding antibiotics to livestock living on factory farms is at least one of the primary triggers that has caused these once-harmless bacterial strains to become vicious killers.



A recent study published in theAmerican Society for MicrobiologyjournalmBioexplains how the infamous methicillin-resistantStaphylococcus aureus(MRSA) superbug strain CC398, for instance, appears to have actually originated as a type of harmless probiotic in the body known as methicillin-susceptibleS. aureus(MSSA). According to Lance Price and his colleagues, MSSA morphed into deadly MRSA as a result of migration into livestock being fed excessive amounts of antibiotics.

"Modern food animal production is characterized by densely concentrated animals and routine antibiotic use, which may facilitate the emergence of novel antibiotic-resistant zoonotic pathogens," write the authors in their paper. "Our findings strongly support the idea that livestock-associated MRSA CC398 originated as MSSA in humans" (http://mbio.asm.org/content/3/1/e00305-11).

Factory farmers commonly feed antibiotics like tetracycline and methicillin to their livestock, poultry, and even fish, in order to make them grow faster. These drugs also help mitigate the filth-induced disease that is part and parcel of the factory food system, which confines animals in unsanitary living conditions and summons them to unnatural diets that cause them to develop frequent infections (http://www.naturalnews.com/028031_antibiotics_infections.html).

Various environmental and public health groups have repeatedly tried to convince theU.S. Food and Drug Administration(FDA) to properly regulate the use of antibiotics in animal feed, but the agency has continually refused. Even after a lawsuit was filed against it last summer, the FDA quietly reversed a previous promise to begin regulating antibiotics, and conveniently published an announcement about this right during the Christmas season when few were paying attention (http://www.guardian.co.uk).

In January, however, the FDA did finally decide to protect some antibiotics from becoming useless by prohibiting their use in livestock, but these particular drugs represent a measly 0.2% of those typically used on factory farms anyway, according toNew Scientists. So as it stands, superbug-producing factory farms are free to continue churning out deadly pathogens while the FDA pretends that everything is just fine.

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/035265_superbugs_animal_farms_food_safety.html#ixzz1vF5QNrUj