Antibiotics with your meat?
It is not healthy for humans to consume this meat. The response of the European Economic Community to the routine feeding of antibiotics to U.S. livestock was to ban the importation of U.S. meat. European buyers do not want to expose consumers to this serious health hazard. By comparison, U.S. meat and pharmaceutical industries gave their full and complete support to the routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock, turning a blind eye to the threat of disease to the consumer.

Unknown to most meat-eaters, U.S.-produced meat contains dangerously high quantities of deadly pesticides.

The common belief is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture protects consumers' health through regular and thorough meat inspection. In reality, fewer than one out of every 250,000 slaughtered animals is tested for toxic chemical residues.

-- from Pulitzer Prize nominee John Robbins' book Diet for a New America.

Studies Mixed on Risks of Antibiotics
in Animal Feed

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are common in American meat, and the microbes survive in the human intestine for a week or more, where they could potentially be the source of drug-resistant infections in people.  Those are among the conclusions of three studies published in today's New England Journal of Medicine. However, the new research also suggests the interaction among animals, people and microbes may not be as simple and predictable as previously believed.

Antibiotics are routinely given to chickens, pigs and cattle to prevent illness and to promote growth. The drugs are put in feed or water in concentrations below that used to treat infections. The practice, while commonplace, is controversial because it encourages the emergence of antibiotic-resistant microbes. In 1998, the European Union prohibited the use of antibiotics as animal growth-promoters if the drugs are similar to ones used in human medicine. Numerous groups are pushing for a similar ban in the United States.

Reference:  David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post
October 18, 2001, Thursday, Final Edition
Section: A, Pg. A06

Studies Find Resistant Bacteria in Meats

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are widespread in commercial meats and poultry and can be found in consumers' intestines, researchers are reporting. The findings suggest that many food-borne illnesses will not respond to the usual treatments, and that some cases may even resist all current drugs.

Three studies to be published today in The New England Journal of Medicine provide new evidence of a problem that physicians and scientists have been warning about for decades: the routine use of antibiotics to enhance growth in farm animals can encourage the growth of drug-resistant bacteria, which may threaten people who undercook their meat or consume food or water contaminated by animal droppings. Furthermore, because genes that confer resistance to drugs can jump from one organism to another, the studies suggest that resistance can spread to many types of infections.

The problem goes beyond food poisoning. An antibiotic-resistant strain of the common intestinal bacterium E. coli was recently found to cause many urinary tract infections that resisted treatment. Researchers suspect that people may have picked up the resistant strain from food. The overuse of antibiotics in human medicine has also contributed to the emergence of antibiotic resistance, experts say.

The new findings mirror the results of many earlier studies. Dr. Sherwood L. Gorbach, an infectious disease specialist at Tufts University's medical school who wrote an editorial accompanying the new reports, urged a ban on the routine use of low-dose antibiotics to aid animal growth and prevent infection, as it sets up ideal conditions for the emergence of resistant bacteria.

This year, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group based in Cambridge, Mass., estimated that 26.6 million pounds of antibiotics are administered to animals each year, with only 2 million pounds used to treat active infections; the rest is used to prevent infection or promote growth. Three million pounds of antibiotics are used in people each year.

The Food and Drug Administration has tried for years to tighten controls over the use of antibiotics in farm animals, a practice the European Union banned in 1998.

Dr. Gorbach recommended that antibiotics for farm animals be prescribed by veterinarians only to treat infections, and that certain antibiotics critically important in human medicine never be given to animals.  In one of the new studies, directed by Dr. Frederick J. Angulo, a veterinarian at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers examined 407 samples of chicken from 26 supermarkets in four states: Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota and Oregon. The researchers found that 237 of the chicken samples were contaminated with the bacterium Enterococcus faecium, which was resistant to a potent combination of antibiotics.

The same bacteria were also found in 3 of 334 stool samples from people being treated as outpatients.

The antibiotics that the bacteria resisted, quinupristin and dalfopristin, used in combination, are critically important in treating E. faecium infections that are resistant to vancomycin, the usual treatment for this organism.

Dr. Jianghong Meng, of the University of Maryland, said that, while new practices in the food industry are helping to control harmful organisms, the agricultural sector "is not doing a very good job of controlling the emergence of resistant organisms."