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Objections Over Antibiotic Approved for Use in Cattle
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington post reports that the FDA is expected to approve the marketing of the new antibiotic called Cefquinome for use in cattle. This is over objections of the American medical association, the FDA advisory board and the World Health Organization. Cefquinome is from a class of highly potent 'last line of defense' antibiotics for several serious human infections. It is feared that large scale use in cattle will allow bacteria to develop a resistance to these drugs. This news follows complaints from the FDA that it is no longer getting the funds needed to do the research required for the desired level of food safety."
When was the last time you heard a government department say:
"We have all the funds we need. We'd like to thank the taxpayers." ?
Yeah, me neither.
some invincible strain of ecoli
E. coli is not, and has never been the problem - gram negative bacilli are fairly easy to deal with - we have loads of antibiotic families for them. The BIG problem is the various form of Staphylococci - gram positive cocci - with their built in enzymes that inactivate antibiotics plus all their other enzymes that are just perfect for digesting tissue.
If I had to choose between a gram negative and gram positive infection, I'd choose the gram negative. Shoot me full of an aminoglucoside or a fluoroquinolone and I'll probably be ok. But gram positives... oops.
This stuff is a _BIG_ deal. Vets have been using Vancomycin on chicken farms for YEARS. The more antibiotic we put into the environment, the more we encourage resistant strains. There is no doubt that those strains eventually transmit their resistance genes to human pathogens.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They produce resistant strains precisely because they're so effective at killing bacteria. They kill off everything except that tiny proportion that have a mutation that protects them from the antibiotic. Those survivers then rapidly become the dominant strain and suddenly your wonder drug *doesn't* kill the majority of bacteria any more.
I read something written by natural dairy farmers about their experience helping conventional farmers convert their operations to more sustainable methodology. The converteres were like, "since you can't use antibiotics, what do you do when your cows get sick?" They said that their cows simply don't get sick, because they're properly cared for.
I haven't needed antibiotics since I fired the Medical-Industrial Complex 7 years ago. I got fed up with their inability to do anything for my chronic ear infections besides antibiotic drops and pills. There is a time and a place for everything, but these drugs certainly don't belong in the regular veterinary repertoire.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Page four, paragraph 3:
Oooooops. (I do hope we manage to do a better job over on this side of the pond though, we aren't making new drugs fast enough to be this sloppy with the ones we have)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
BSE ("mad cow" disease) is thought to be caused by prions, not bacteria, last I knew. In other words, this antibiotic has nothing to do with it.
That said, this is positively horrible that we're wasting a potent, last-line-of-defense antibiotic on cows. Why can't they use the antibiotics to which there's already a lot of resistance, anyhow, instead of wasting this one? I mean, you can just shoot a sick cow and dispose of it. I sincerely hope they're not suggesting we do that with sick people.
When that many doctor's organizations are opposing this, it makes you wonder how the hell they can be expected to approve it. Well, okay, I admit to not wondering that much. In the end, I have to think that it all has everything to do with little slips of paper with green ink on them and not very much to do with medicine.
There are so many things wrong with this short post...
Who is to say that bacteria won't evolve defenses either way?
Natural selection isn't anywhere near as likely keep a random mutation which just happens to confer resistance to those drugs when the bacteria aren't being challenged by them. Whereas if they are being challenged with those drugs, drug resistance to them offers a HUGE survival benefit to the bacteria which have and keep this mutation.
The AMA understand this basic part of evolution which you and the Bush administration appear to be ignorant of.
I think they should concentrate their resources on finding -new- antibiotics instead of worrying about what happens to the few that are known. It's a battle that can never be won, and folks should realize that it's better to continuously evolve (live on the edge, in a way) new defenses than to assume our current defenses are silver bullets.
First of all the AMA doesn't have resources directed at finding new antibiotics. The NIH and pharmaceutical companies do.
The AMA does however understand the difficulties and slow pace of drug development. You apparently don't. Finding drugs which can knock out pathogens which also don't have any severe negative reactions acting within the human body is difficult. If they were easy to develop and plentiful we wouldn't already be dependent on a small number that we call a last line of defense against resistant bugs.
September 30, 1980-- The Public Board of Inquiry concludes NutraSweet should not be approved pending further investigations of brain tumors in animals. The board states it "has not been presented with proof of reasonable certainty that aspartame is safe for use as a food additive."
January 1981-- Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of Searle, states in a sales meeting that he is going to make a big push to get aspartame approved within the year. Rumsfeld says he will use his political pull in Washington, rather than scientific means, to make sure it gets approved.
January 21, 1981-- Ronald Reagan is sworn in as President of the United States. Reagan's transition team, which includes Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of G. D. Searle, hand picks Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. to be the new FDA Commissioner.
[...]
July 15, 1981-- In one of his first official acts, Dr. Arthur Hayes Jr., the new FDA commissioner, overrules the Public Board of Inquiry, ignores the recommendations of his own internal FDA team and approves NutraSweet for dry products.
[...]
September, 1983-- FDA Commissioner Hayes resigns under a cloud of controversy about his taking unauthorized rides aboard a General Foods jet. (General foods is a major customer of NutraSweet) Burson-Marsteller, Searle's public relation firm (which also represented several of NutraSweet's major users), immediately hires Hayes as senior scientific consultant.
You can't take the sky from me...
Now correct me if I'm wrong but isn't MRSA a blanket term for like 10 or 15 strains of resistant bacteria?
No, it's a specific term: Methicillin resistant Staph aureus. There are MANY multi-resistent bacteria in a hospital environment - both in the type of bacteria and the degree of resistance, but MRSA is quite specific.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No, but we could see a return to plauges that kill 30% of the population, similar to the fraction of Hiroshima killed by the atomic bomb or its immediate aftermath, but affecting entire countries or continents. I think I would call that "the big one". Certianly it would catastrophically disrupt our society and economy, as transportation shut down and businesses providing key services disappeared. We are more reliant on each other than we ever have been in the past.
That said, it is still unlikely that a disease exactly like the black plauge would happen. Sanitation is one of the few defenses against infection that bacteria have not evolved resistance to. My guess is the next big disease will look more like AIDS than avian flu.
As stated above MRSA stands for methacillin resistant staphylcoccus arueus. In the United States, this is actually a misnomer since just about every lab uses oxacillin to test for resistance, so its technically ORSA. In either case, MRSA or ORSA, denotes resistance of staph to our most potent beta-lactum type of antibiotics (in other words, derivatives of penicillin).
MRSA or ORSA can vary in their sensitivity to non beta-lactum antibiotics. For instance, in many parts of the US, MRSA is sensitive to Clindamycin, but in others it is not.
So the short answer is, yes, different strains of MRSA can vary in their sensitivity to an antibiotic that is not related to a penicillin. MRSA, however, is universally resistant to all penicillin types of antibiotics, including the penicillin cousins, the cephlosporins.
The difference in price is largely lost in the cost of organic feed, which is often twice conventionally raised feed. I think there would be less reliance on antibiotics in beef operations if there were an antibiotic-free classification priced somewhere between organic and conventional. This would allow the purchase of conventional feedstuffs to fatten the cattle to the consumer's liking while reducing antibiotic use in livestock. The beef industry, no matter how small or large, makes management decisions based on profit.
The dairy industry in America is currently testing a model such as this with processors creating a third classification between organic and conventional with dairy products from cows NOT treated with growth hormones. There is a public opposition to the use of this hormone (which large dairy farms defend by saying it's FDA approved). Will it make a difference to the consumers? Will consumers pay for it? In my opinion, there are far too many people that pick the lowest costs foods for this to make a difference. I hope I'm wrong.
How could Gore have voted for the invasion since he was no longer a Senator in 2003? He couldn't.
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My personal impression of US capitalist "libertarians" is that they come off as spoiled brats who want to be able to do whatever they want, Tragedy of the Commons be damned.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Well, one of my farmer friends grows vegetables, and he described to me the lengthy rules and regulations on the subject. To have his land certified "Organic," he needed to meet to strict requirements. Land which had been used traditionally, (non-organically) has to remain unsprayed and untreated with synthetic fertilizers for 8 years, afterwhich the certifiers tested the land for residue. A farm upwind of his had been spraying during that time, and the residue was measured in his soil. As a result, he has yet to be certified.
However, "Organic", as you point out, does not mean "Free Range" or "Ethically Produced". It's just a standard by which chemical and genetic qualities are measured. --But it's the only standard currently attempting to set a worthy bar with regard to the chemical purity of food production. The FDA by comparison is riddled with corruption and is heavily influenced by lobyists. There are numerous shameful examples of how the government food safety bodies have sided with industry over public health.
I would also hesitate before I called the American food supply safe. Safe implies a great deal; just with regard to GM foods, there are a lot of unknowns, (as well as several nasty 'knowns'), but such foods are largely unregulated. In Canada, it is not legally required that such things as Canola Oil be appropriately labeled if they have come from GM crops. There have been studies which show marked reason for there to be concern over this.
Meats which come through the orthodox system, I simply cannot find any rational reason to trust. One of the reasons I moved away from a large city was so that I could meet and know my food producers. It is true; some of them are not people I'd want to support, while others are stellar examples. In the end, no human system of labeling is going to be entirely trustworthy. You have to get out there and walk in some mud to get the 'dirt' so-to-speak. Based on all the organic farmers I now know, I do find reason, however, to place a lot of trust with them. Certainly a great deal more than some of the jerks I've met who run the factory chicken farms around here. The difference in philosophical attitude is very often night and day.
One factory chicken farm out here was being financed by a big corporate venture, and they cajoled the local government into allowing them to put a plant right above an aquifer where many people draw their well water. People fought this for a couple of years, had impartial studies done to see what would happen to the water supply, and despite the dire test results the corporations got the go ahead. It's enough to make you see red. People who push for that kind of travesty are either stupid or evil or both. They are also the kind of people who sneer at the idea of 'Organic' foods.
So I hope you will pardon me if I come at this subject with some bias.
In the end, though, my experiences have been very positive; it's amazing what you can learn by diving into a subject! To think that I was a committed city slicker four years ago leaves me regularly amazed.
-FL