Robert Lawrence: By using antibiotics as growth promoters rather than to treat sick animals, the industry is placing at risk the health of the public.
Robert Lawrence is a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Lawrence said that bacterial infections in Americans are becoming harder to treat. That’s because of the widespread and non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animals. The drugs are used to fatten animals, and speed them to market.
Robert Lawrence: And we have now learned that the widespread use of antibiotics as growth promoters in the industrial food animal industry has been responsible for selecting out resistance genes in a wide range of bacteria against antibiotics that are important not only to animal health, but also to human health.
Lawrence helped guide a 2.5 year independent study released in 2008 that looked at factory farming, where animals are raised in close confinement. The study concluded that the use of antibiotics as growth promoters should stop. Other studies at pig and poultry farms revealed resistance to common antibiotics in four kinds of bacteria, including staph and E. coli.
Robert Lawrence: The reason that we’re highly confident that the emergence of these resistant organisms is related to the use of low-dose antibiotics in animal feed or water as growth promoters is that none of the bacteria were resistant to vancomycin, an antibiotic that has never been approved by the FDA for use in animal treatment.
Lawrence also thinks it’s important to investigate the possibility that ‘community-acquired’ cases of the bacterial infection known as ‘MRSA’ – methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – could be related to the swine industry.
Robert Lawrence: We do know that MRSA – methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – is now killing between 17 thousand and 18 thousand Americans a year. Much of that has been in hospital-acquired infections, so-called nosocomial spread. But increasingly in recent years newly diagnosed cases of MRSA are so-called community acquired cases. And we just desperately need to know in order to protect the health of the American people whether or not those community-acquired cases are linked in some way to the swine industry.
Contaminated water from farms could also be tainting crops grown for human consumption, warns Lawrence.
Robert Lawrence: We know that we had a terrible problem with e.coli contaminated spinach a year and a half ago. There have been other episodes where irrigation water used on large produce farms in the central valley of California have been contaminated by the outflow of confined animal feeding operations. Regularly, the large amounts of waste from poultry and swine in particular is applied on fields that are growing usually corn and soybeans to produce the animal feed, but sometimes growing vegetables for human consumption, and contamination can occur that way as well.
Our thanks to:
Robert Lawrence served for three years as an epidemic intelligence service officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Public Health Service. Dr. Lawrence is the Center for a Livable Future Professor and Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, Health Policy, and International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
In spite of Lawrence’s helping guide a 2.5 year independent study, it would appear the study missed the fact that antibiotic resistant bacteria are being created in water and wastewater treatment plants. Farms and grazing land are being used as land treatment sites for these antibiotic resistant bacteria as well as other pathogens.
In 1981, Armstrong et. al, in the study, Selection of antibiotic-resistant standard plate count bacteria during water treatment, found “ the selective factors operating in the aquatic environment of a water treatment facility can act to increase the proportion of antibiotic-resistant members of the SPC [Standard Plate Count] bacterial population in treated drinking water.” “These bacteria were isolated from the flash mix tank, where chlorine, alum, and lime are added to the water.”
In 1981, EPA scientist, Mark Meckes, studied the Effect of UV light disinfection on antibiotic-resistant coliforms in wastewater effluents. in “filtered activated sludge effluents before and after UV light irradiation” and found “Multiple drug resistance patterns of 300 total coliform isolates revealed that 82% were resistant to two or more antibiotics. Furthermore, 46% of these isolates were capable of transferring antibiotic resistance to a sensitive strain of Escherichia coli.” Meckes concluded, “ Additional investigations should be conducted to determine what effect other wastewater disinfectants, such as chlorine or ozone, may have on the antibiotic resistant fraction of the bacterial population. There is an additional need to determine the sanitary significance of the results of such investigations.”
Coliform are all of the Enterobacteriaceae family of bacteria such as E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, Vibro, etc.
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This is not accurate and not scientifically correct. Farmers care about their animals and the food they feed their very own families, and are not going to grow or raise anything they can’t feed their own families. People need to be educated about the where their food comes from and to realized that it is a right for peolple to eat meat if they want just as it’s a right to be vegan. It’s not inhumane and I hope people will do research instead of believing all they here. Take a trip to a farm. The amount of people that are distanced from farms is enormous, and they are prey to those people that want to turn the country into total vegetarians and rule out our agricultural heritage.
As the end of the antibiotic era looms, we must investigate alternative forms of resistance to infectious bacteria. Indeed, penicillin gives us our first clue: infect ourselves with synergistic organisms that eat bacteria for breakfast! Push the concept of Probiotics to our outer as well as our inner skin. Just imagine the horror of antibiotic-resistant Helicobacter pylorii, recently associated with cancers. It is perhaps pertinant that our DNA contains the complete genome of a bacteria. It is not unimaginable that we rewrite that code to contain a strongly bacteria resistant organism like a Proteus species. Our very survival may depend on it.