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happy as pigs in antibiotics...

pigantibiotics

U.S. Meat Farmers Brace for Limits on Antibiotics
By ERIK ECKHOLM

RALSTON, Iowa — Piglets hop, scurry and squeal their way to the far corner of the pen, eyeing an approaching human. “It shows that they’re healthy animals,” Craig Rowles, the owner of a large pork farm here, said with pride.

Mr. Rowles says he keeps his pigs fit by feeding them antibiotics for weeks after weaning, to ward off possible illness in that vulnerable period. And for months after that, he administers an antibiotic that promotes faster growth with less feed.

Dispensing antibiotics to healthy animals is routine on the large, concentrated farms that now dominate American agriculture. But the practice is increasingly condemned by medical experts who say it contributes to a growing scourge of modern medicine: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including dangerous E. coli strains that account for millions of bladder infections each year, as well as resistant types of salmonella and other microbes.

Now, after decades of debate, the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to issue its strongest guidelines on animal antibiotics yet, intended to reduce what it calls a clear risk to human health. They would end farm uses of the drugs simply to promote faster animal growth and call for tighter oversight by veterinarians.

The agency’s final version is expected within months, and comes at a time when animal confinement methods, safety monitoring and other aspects of so-called factory farming are also under sharp attack. The federal proposal has struck a nerve among major livestock producers, who argue that a direct link between farms and human illness has not been proved. The producers are vigorously opposing it even as many medical and health experts call it too timid.

Scores of scientific groups, including the American Medical Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, are calling for even stronger action that would bar most uses of key antibiotics in healthy animals, including use for disease prevention, as with Mr. Rowles’s piglets. Such a bill is gaining traction in Congress.

“Is producing the cheapest food in the world our only goal?” asked Dr. Gail R. Hansen, a veterinarian and senior officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which has campaigned for new limits on farm antibiotics. “Those who say there is no evidence of risk are discounting 40 years of science. To wait until there’s nothing we can do about it doesn’t seem like the wisest course.”

With the backing of some leading veterinary scientists, farmers assert that the risks are remote and are outweighed by improved animal health and lower food costs. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence that antibiotics used in food animals have a significant impact on the effectiveness of antibiotics in people,” the National Pork Producers Council said.

But leading medical experts say the threat is real and growing. Proponents of strong controls note that the European Union barred most nontreatment uses of antibiotics in 2006 and that farmers there have adapted without major costs. Following a similar path in the United States, they argue, would have barely perceptible effects on consumer prices.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/us/15farm.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

antibiotics for breakfast...

Advocates of “organic” or “natural” foods get up in arms about some of the practices at big commercial hog farms—especially putting antibiotics into the livestock feed to make the animals grow faster. The idea simply makes some people uncomfortable, but more importantly, the overuse of antibiotics in animals, just like in hospitals, can worsen the problem of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. According to a study out of Ohio State University, however, pigs that went without antibiotics were more likely to carry human pathogens like salmonella and trichinella.

The team of scientists led by Wondwossen Gebreyes studied around 600 pigs. About half lived in indoor commercial hog farms and received antibiotics; the other half lived the old-fashioned way, outdoors and antibiotic-free. The non-treated swine showed more salmonella infections, 54 percent compared to 39 percent of the treated pigs, and more infections of toxoplasma and trichinella.

At first, it might appear that we’ve reached an impasse: If we keep pumping livestock full of antibiotics, bacteria will continue to become more resistant and we’ll lose our best weapons against them, but if we stop giving livestock antibiotics, our meat will be more dangerous, so pick your poison.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/06/12/antibiotic-free-pigs-carry-more-pathogens-but-is-that-a-bad-thing/

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We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.

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“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and unsanitary conditions?”

The answer is simple: politics…..”

http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/antibiotic-abuse-in-pig-feed-breeds-drug-resistant-pathogens-part-2/

complacent with our use of antibiotics...

An emergency medicine expert has called for an investigation into the danger to human health of feeding animals antibiotics to promote growth.

The president of the Australian Society for Infectious Diseases, Dr Thomas Gottleib, is worried about the flow-on effects on the food chain.

He says heavy use of antibiotics in animal health, agriculture and the medical world is feeding antibiotic resistance in humans.

"We've been using antibiotics since they've emerged in the 1950s as drugs that we can use on any occasion where there's a potential infection," he said.

"We've become very complacent with our use of antibiotics.

"There was an incredible use of antibiotics both in the medical world, in animal health and in agriculture, and all this large volume of use is feeding antibiotic resistance both in Australia and worldwide.

"We in Australia are not isolated from the rest of the world because the impact of antibiotic use anywhere in the world eventually impacts on us because we travel, and bacteria travel, and the risk of resistance developing is just becoming more and more evident."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-26/animal-antibiotics-contributing-to-human-resistance/3696320

Many farmers have made it

Many farmers have made it common practice to give animals antibiotics to ensure they are healthy, even if the animal would not otherwise be healthy. The Food and Drug Administration, however, will be limiting a few of this practice in order to keep human antibiotic resistance from growing. Article source: Animal antibiotic use partially banned by FDA