Animal Farms Are Pumping Up Superbugs

oxide7 writes "The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche once famously said, 'That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.' That may or may not be true for human beings, but it is certainly true for bacteria. The superbugs are among us and they are not leaving. Indeed, they are growing stronger. 'The problem is that the animal agriculture industry makes massive use of low-dose antibiotics for growth promotion and in place of effective infection prevention methods,' Young said, adding that the farm animal population is much larger than the human population. The low-dose antibiotics do not kill the disease. They make the disease stronger, more resistant to those and other antibiotics. The animals — the cattle, pigs and chickens — thus treated become superbug factories. The diseases stay in them and they wash off them to infect the surrounding environment."

Comments

Re:Is this a news?

[nedlohs]

The article is about proposed regulation stuck in committee to stop it. So apparently it's news for you at least.

Since when...

[crmarvin42]

is the International Business Times an authority on anything. I'd never even heard from them before today.

Additionally, as someone with a doctorate in animal science and a researcher in the field, I have to say that the case against animal agriculture is overstated. No one will argue that they don't contribute, but the relative importance of antibiotic use in animals (that less than 1% of the population ever come into contact with while they are alive) relative to that of rampant, large-dose, antibiotic abuses in hospitals (You know where all of those sick people hang out, transferring infections back and forth) has never been ascertained empirically.

First, the vast majority of the bacterial species that live in livestock are not capable of living in people. Therefore, the rate of resistance transfer from animal bacteria to human bacteria is relatively low. Evidence exists that these species can, and do transfer resistance gene between eachother. However, the majority of the evidence is "Resistance gene A is present in pig bacteria and human bacteria, and genes are essentially identical, therefore the gene came from animals!" This of course, completely ignores the possiblity that the gene arose to prominence in the human population and then was transferred to a pig via a farm worker that was a carrier. Talk about placing the cart in front of horse.

Second, low levels of antibiotic use in the swine industry is usually only during the first month after weaning. Pigs are weaned at between 18 and 24 days on most farms in order to prevent the sow (aka "Mom") from transmitting certain diseases to the piglets that have little effect on adult animals, but can kill piglets very easily. At this age the maternal antibodies from the colostrum are starting to wear off, but the piglets own acquired immune system is not completely up to the task. Therefore the antibiotics buy the piglets time by reducing the overall microbial load in the intestine, and coincidentally increasing the efficiency of feed utilization (which is good for the environment). Many farms then discontinue the use of prophylactic, or growth promoting antibiotics because antibiotics cost money and feed costs can account for 60-70% of total production overhead. Expensive feed can drive you out of business in a hurry.

Third, to all those bragging about being from the EU, where there is a total ban on prophylactic antibiotics a word of caution. The total amount of antibiotics used in EU agriculture is not actually lower than it was before the ban. The difference is that instead of giving antibiotics to prevent infection, and improve production they are now given to tread disease outbreaks that wouldn't of otherwise happened and to try and minimize reductions in production. Also, the antibiotics of most relevance to human medicine are not routinely used for growth promotion, but they are used to treat disease outbreaks. So, the total tonnage of antibiotics being administered has not really gone down (it did until they banned them in the nursery which was the last phase of the ban), and the antibiotics being used are MORE likely to also be used in human medicine. Bravo, talk about unintended consequences!

Finally, I fail to see how this made the front page here. It is not the usual fare of geek (no computers anywhere), it is not actually news (this controversy has been around for at least a decade), this article contributed nothing new to the discussion (restates already rampant FUD), and the IBTimes are not exactly the NYTimes or LATimes. The only thing I can see in its favor is that it lets the ignorant "Organic" group say I told you so without any real technical points for those few of us in the field to respond to. The original article is link-bait, plain and simple and /. fell for it.

Pathetic