Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the fittest contest that promotes the reproduction of antibiotic-resistant strains. Humans come into contact
with these strains through their food, the air, the water, and the soil.
Feed companies and factory farms, Lawrence says, have unrestricted access to these drugs, with no gov-
ernment oversight. In 2008 CLF partnered with the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Produc-
tion to produce policy recommendations in the report “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal
Production in America.” The commission recommended phasing out the use of antimicrobials currently
added to feed in food animal production, in order to preserve antibiotics for treatment of infectious diseases
in people.
Cases of the bacterial infection known as MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) are now
killing between seventeen thousand and eighteen thousand Americans a year, and this is likely related to
the use of low-dose antibiotics in swine and other animal production. 9 MRSA is a type of staph infection
that does not respond to the antibiotics commonly used to treat the disease. In the past it was a hospital-ac-
quired infection, but increasingly it is acquired outside of the medical setting. The medical establishment
is aware of what is going on, according to Lawrence, but it's just not doing everything necessary to stand
up to the drug and livestock industries.
Even the conservative American Medical Association has passed a resolution against the use of non-
therapeutic antibiotics. Lawrence wrote to the directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases at the NIH and of the CDC about his concerns and received written confirmation from both that
the misuse of antibiotics in industrial food animal production is directly linked to antibacterial resistance
in human pathogens. 10
Another activist physician, Dr. David Wallinga, the senior adviser in science, food, and health at the
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), says that MRSA can be found in some farm operations
and retail meats, as well as in previously well people. Wallinga says that the MRSA bacteria often lives
in the nose and on skin: “People can carry the bacteria unknowingly and without getting sick, but it also
can cause serious human infections of the bloodstream, skin, lungs (pneumonia), and other organs. . . .
Rising numbers of people are falling ill with a kind of staph untreatable with these drugs.” 11 He adds that
a 2009 study found MRSA highly prevalent in 49 percent of swine and 45 percent of swine workers for a
large-scale commercial confinement company with farms in Iowa and Illinois. Wallinga also notes that a
Canadian study found pigs carrying MRSA on almost half of Canadian pig farms tested. 12
While the European Union and the most respected health agencies in the world, including the World
Health Organization, agree that the use of antibiotics as a component of animal feed to promote growth
should be banned, the United States has failed to take strong action. It is not just the livestock industry that
lobbies to prevent legislation or regulation from hampering its use of low-dose antibiotics, the powerful
pharmaceutical industry finds the misuse of antibiotics highly profitable. This combined political influence
has stymied legislative and regulatory action on antibiotics.
Wallinga and Lawrence are both advocates of legislation that would phase out the nontherapeutic use
of medically important antibiotics in livestock. The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act
(PAMTA), most recently introduced by Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY), has been introduced in
thirteen different iterations over seven sessions of Congress—every Congress from the 106th to the 112th.
It was named the Preservation of Essential Antibiotics for Human Diseases Act of 1999 in the 106th and
subsequently referred to as the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. The bill has had
only one hearing during this entire period of time.
The regulatory authorities—especially the USDA—also have been unwilling to take sufficient action to
protect the effectiveness of antibiotics. President Obama's secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, told the
National Cattlemen's Beef Association, “USDA's public position is, and always has been, that antibiotics
need to be used judiciously, and we believe they already are.”
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