ANIMALS ON DRUGS - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 85

produced at a single plant in Arkansas, demonstrating the flaw with a food system that consolidates pro-
duction and deregulates safety. Salmonella Heidelberg, the offending bacteria, is a “superbug” that has
mutated to become resistant to antibiotics. For most people, diarrhea, vomiting, and nausea mark salmon-
ella poisoning, but it can cause a serious infection of the blood that can be fatal.
And worse is coming, according to a multinational team of scientists who documented illnesses caused
by Salmonella Kentucky in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. This new strain of salmonella
is resistant to Cipro, the powerful antibiotic that is usually used to treat the illness. The primary carrier:
poultry. 5
Dr. Robert Lawrence is not surprised that poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
The organization of which he is the founding director—the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future
(CLF)—has a research staff that has investigated and written extensively on the growing threat of antibiotic
resistance and its relationship to industrialized animal production. CLF is an interdisciplinary group of fac-
ulty and staff that focuses attention on equity, health, and the Earth's resources. 6
Lawrence's stamina and energy are more reminiscent of someone in the early years of their career than
a person who began his career in the late 1950s. Not only a medical doctor and an expert on antibiotic res-
istance, he is now an activist academic willing to publicly challenge agribusiness and factory farms. In ad-
dition to filling his position at CLF, he is a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
and professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His staff says he wears many hats:
one day he might be in Oklahoma testifying as an expert witness against Tyson for polluting a million-acre
area along the Illinois River, and the next day he could be in South Africa for a meeting on HIV.
Lawrence is the son of a minister, and he recollects his father telling him that he “could do whatever he
wanted as long as it was socially useful.” He says that in the narrow confines of his life at that time, “so-
cially useful” meant being a minister or a doctor. He chose doctor, although he thought he might practice
as part of a ministry in Africa.
Lawrence has had a long and distinguished career; after graduating from Harvard Medical School, he
practiced tropical medicine in Latin America and ran the first multiracial primary care facility in North
Carolina. In 1974 he was appointed as the first director of the Division of Primary Care at Harvard Med-
ical School, and then he was recruited to run the Rockefeller Foundation's Public Health Program for
Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It was during this time that he became interested in agriculture, because
he worked in an atmosphere where “the silos were coming down” in the grant making for health, agricul-
ture, the environment, and population.
By the time Lawrence was recruited by Johns Hopkins he was a convert to sustainable agriculture and
convinced that industrialized animal production was a major cause of the health problems plaguing Amer-
icans. One of CLF's most important missions is combating antibiotic resistance. According to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2 million people in the United States contract resistant infec-
tions each year, and ninety thousand of them die. Almost all bacterial infections are now resistant to the
specific antibiotic that was initially the most effective treatment for it.
The livestock industry is engaged in a shameful misuse of antibiotics. CLF's Dr. David Love examined
FDA data and calculated that 29 million pounds are used each year. His analysis showed that animal agri-
culture was responsible annually for almost 80 percent of the antibiotics used. 7
The threat of antibiotic resistance emerging for the “wonder drugs” of the twentieth century was iden-
tified early on. Lawrence cites the 1945 Nobel Prize lecture by Alexander Fleming, who discovered peni-
cillin and warned of antibiotic resistance: “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the
laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them.” 8 Lawrence goes on to say that
the habitual use of low doses of antibiotics in animal feed is the precise formula for developing antibiotic
resistance. Low doses of antibiotics are able to eliminate only the most susceptible bacteria in a survival of