A sick system of food production

THERE HAS been a barrage of media concerning the American agriculture industry over the past few decades, with books and movies--The Omnivore's Dilemma, Fast Food Nation, King Corn, Eating Animals and Food Inc., to name a few--unveiling the horrors of the system.

And to be sure, the human and animal rights violations are shocking--the products devoid of nutrients and the extent of corporate power alarming. However, one aspect of the agricultural system given far less weight in the public sphere than necessary is antibiotic usage in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines it, a CAFO has massive congregations of manure, urine, and live and dead animals on a small land area on which the animals are brought food. The facilities put animals at a high risk for bacterial infection due to the nutritionally vacant feed, high waste concentrations and violent behavior between stressed animals. Therefore, high levels of antibiotics are administered to healthy animals for disease prevention, rather than simply intervention.

In addition, some antibiotics have been shown to accelerate growth. Thus, animals are given a hefty amount of drugs without being the least bit sick to increase economic output. An enormous 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to agriculture--13.1 million kilograms.

Under constant selective pressure in CAFOs, bacteria colonies must develop resistance to the drugs for survival. Unfortunately, mammals do not absorb antibiotics well, so the antibiotic compounds end up in wastewater and manure. This wastewater is usually sprayed onto neighboring feed crops. A multitude of studies have shown that genetic resistance to antibiotics can be spread to surrounding communities by bacteria in the air and water around CAFOs.

In fact, all of the diverse classes of antibiotics that have shown resistance around CAFOs are used in human medicine as well--penicillin, ampicillin, cefaclor, clindamycin, erythromycin, tetracycline, kanamycin, streptomycin, etc. Resistance to streptomycin, a first-line treatment for plague, was found by one research team at three CAFOs in Michigan. This is especially frightening considering the recent bubonic plague outbreak in Madagascar.

For humans, this means vital resources for fighting infection and making surgery possible are dwindling. A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) threat report from this year estimated that 2 million people in the U.S. become ill and 23,000 die every year from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

New drug mechanisms are not being invented fast enough to keep up with emergence of resistance. Surgery puts patients at risk for life-threatening urinary tract infections, pneumonia and local wound infections. Therefore, antibiotics are administered before operation to significantly decrease risk and recovery time. Rising antibiotic resistance has the potential to make operations like open-heart surgery out of the question.

AS POPULAR films such as Food Inc. have demonstrated, lower- and working-class people suffer from the health effects of fast-food and industrially produced food, as they cannot afford healthier alternatives.

In the case of antibiotic resistance as well, disadvantaged groups will suffer most. The laborers at CAFOs are at a high risk for developing multi-drug-resistant infections due to prolonged contact with the CAFO, as well as potentially harmful labor. Besides the CAFO laborers, the very young, very old and sick have the highest risk of infection in neighboring communities, as their immune systems are more susceptible.

Most bacterial infections are minor skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI), like a small cut, which require little medical attention. However, major injuries or concurrent illness may result in a serious infection that is difficult to treat.

Antibiotic-resistant infections are only curable by last-line treatments, such as vancomycin, which have developed little resistance. However, resistance is not always identified until too late, and these drugs are very expensive. The CDC calculates the costs of antibiotic resistance in health care and "costs to society for lost productivity" at $55 billion a year in the U.S.

It would seem that it would be in the best interests of all nations to mediate the threat of antibiotic resistance to cut costs to their own institutions and prevent future deaths on a cataclysmic scale. But no, capitalism lives on.

The paltry efforts made by the Food and Drug Administration have been limited to creating "labeling regulations addressing proper use of antibiotics," "partnering [with the CDC] to promote public awareness" and "encouraging the development of new antibiotics." Until recently, the role of agricultural antibiotics (the overwhelming majority of antibiotics used in the U.S.) has been completely ignored besides one CDC recommendation to increase reporting of CAFO drug use (which hasn't happened).

As of December 11, the FDA has "recommended" that pharmaceutical companies re-label antibiotics for food animals so they are no longer available over-the-counter, nor for growth promotion use, and must be prescribed by a veterinarian.

This effort is laughable at best. There will be obvious reluctance from the pharmaceutical companies on restricting the availability of their product with no incentive. If labels are changed, it will be easy enough to get a veterinarian to approve the same antibiotics as used previously for growth promotion under the FDA endorsed pretense of "disease prevention."

Even if the amount of antibiotics CAFOs use decreases somewhat in response to this recommendation, studies have shown resistance in CAFOs would stay virtually the same. An article published in Environmental Microbiolgy in 2007 examined resistance of no-use (antibiotics only given to sick animals separated from the herd), mixed-use (some disease prevention), and high-use (growth promotion and prevention) swine CAFOs. No-use farms had 100 to 1,000 times less resistance than the other two classes of farms. However, mixed- and high-use percentages were not statistically different.

Thus, restricting growth promotion alone does virtually nothing to improve the progression of resistance without also restricting unnecessary preventative drugs. A much more restrictive effort must be made.

ALEXANDER FLEMING, the man who discovered penicillin and began the era of antibiotics, predicted the misuse of antibiotics in society as early as 1945: "The time may come when...there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant."

He would be shocked today that not only does the ignorant man do this to his own microbes but to millions of livestock's microbes as well, and the government does nothing to stand in the way.

Despite the U.S. government's complete lack of progress on this issue, some strides have been made in activism.

The Union of Concerned Scientists and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, among others, are leading public education, grassroots and lobbying for a ban on non-therapeutic antibiotics. The Center for Food Safety, Environmental Integrity Project, Food and Water Watch, the Humane Society of the United States, and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement filed a suit against the EPA in August to enforce a proposed mandate for CAFOs to report extensive data federally. And of course, the aforementioned popular efforts have raised public awareness significantly as to the horrors of CAFOS and strongly advocated for organic farming methods.

However, the framing of the issues of the agricultural industry by works like Food Inc. create a false standard of activism in the minds of the American public. Many of those who claim to be passionate about changing our food industry are content with limiting their activism to purchasing USDA organic products. Not only is this an inefficient method of changing regulation, but it completely excludes the lower class--those most affected--who do not have the purchasing power of the upper-middle class. Our main battle strategy simply cannot be "let them eat antibiotic-, GMO-, gluten-, lactose-free cake."

What is desperately needed is unified activism by those who work in and live around CAFOs regardless of class or purchasing power. We must demand from the government a national, as well as international, policy that severely restricts and monitors agricultural antibiotics.

Scandinavia has made the best strides in this area. These are some of the only countries with an effective antibiotic reporting system. Sweden was the first country to ban antibiotics as growth promoters in 1986, and, over the course of the 1990's, decreased its antibiotics for agricultural use tenfold. Thus, Scandinavia has 1-5 percent methicillin resistance in Staphylococcus aureas (MRSA) infections, compared to the 25-50 percent in Southern Europe. Germany and the Netherlands recently followed suit. Organic and Scandinavian farms have proven that using antibiotics only on sick animals is safe and practical.

However, in the globalized society of today, all countries must decrease their use for any country to be safe. Diseases like vancomycin resistant S. aureus (VRSA) in Scandinavia have been found to enter the country through travel and immigration. Despite Scandinavia's efforts, it is unable to escape resistance from the outside. Like climate change, the flippant excesses of one nation affect all others, and, as in most areas, American excess is corpulent.

Lest we wish to incite mass deaths of the young, old and ailing, international standards must be set to address the rampant spread of antibiotic resistance. Restrictions, not just recommendations, must be placed on growth promotion and disease prevention in CAFOs. Furthermore, these restrictions must be enforced by monitoring antibiotic use in agriculture and resistance in surrounding-water quality tests.

This issue is complex, with many opposing parties, but countries like Sweden have proven restrictions on antibiotics to be both possible and effective.

To twist the supposed words of Sarah Brady, "Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when [CAFOs bacteria] who would resist us have been totally disarmed."
Emily Morgan, Boulder, Colo.