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Drug Resistant Superbugs Worse Than Anyone Could Imagine

  • Spence Cooper
  • June 15, 2011

Barry Estabrook is a two-time winner of the prestigious James Beard Foundation Awards for food writing. Deemed “the Oscars of the food world,”by Time magazine, the James Beard Foundation Awards are a coveted honor for chefs, journalists, and authors, among others.

Estabrook’s first award was for his book Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. His blog Politics of the Plate earned Estabrook his second Beard award in 2011.

Last month, Estabrook penned a well researched and must read article regarding the overuse of antibiotics in farm animals — a particularly germane topic in view of the dark and looming crises that persists in Germany, where a deadly enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) outbreak has now killed 37 people.

The latest casualty was claimed on Tuesday when a two-year-old boy became the first child to fall victim to the deadly bacteria. He was the first child to die from EHEC.

Spiegel International reports 782 people in Germany infected with EHEC are suffering from a severe complication called haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), which affects the blood, kidneys and nervous system. Additionally, 2,453 people are suffering from EHEC but not from HUS.

Germany’s outbreak has killed more people and resulted in more cases of severe kidney damage than any outbreak of this kind in recent history.

And although beansprouts are suspected as the source of the outbreak, EU officials still have not determined how the deadly EHEC bacteria got into the organic farm in Bienenbüttel that supplied contaminated beansprouts to restaurants and cafeterias across northern Germany.

A Chinese laboratory sequenced the genes of the bacteria and found it to be a mutated strain that was unlike any previously identified. The lab’s preliminary analysis shows the current infection is caused by an entirely new “super-toxic E. coli strain”.

What is especially disturbing is that Chinese scientists found genes in the newly identified 0104 strain of E. coli bacteria that gave it resistance to eight classes of antibiotics including sulfonamide, cephalothin, penicillin and streptomycin.

Superbugs

It is this super-toxic E. coli strain’s powerful resistance to antibiotics that brings us back to our friend Barry Estabrook, who claims feeding antibiotics to healthy livestock is leading to an emerging human health crisis — one scientists and the government have seen coming for decades.

Estabrook cites a 35 year-old study conducted by Stuart Levy, a professor of molecular biology and microbiology and of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, showing that the problem of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” is even worse than anyone could have imagined.

The study involved two groups of chickens in which half received feed laced with a low dose of antibiotics — which U.S. farmers routinely give to healthy livestock to increase growth rates — while the other half received drug-free food.

Stunning Results

“Within two days,” writes Estabrook, “the treated animals began excreting feces containing E. coli bacteria that were resistant to tetracycline, the antibiotic in their feed. (E. coli, most of which are harmless, normally live in the guts of chickens and other warm-blooded animals, including humans.)

“After three months, the chickens were also excreting bacteria resistant to such potent antibiotics as ampicillin, streptomycin, carbenacillin, and sulfonamides. Even though Levy had added only tetracycline to the feed, his chickens had somehow developed what scientists now call ‘multi-drug resistance’ to a host of antibiotics that play important roles in treating infections in people.

“More frightening, although none of the members of the farm family tending the flock were taking antibiotics, they, too, soon began excreting drug-resistant strains of E. coli.”

Estabrook noted that during the intervening 35 years, study after study has confirmed Levy’s findings.

The following stats Estabrook references are staggering:

* Each year, 70,000 Americans in U.S. hospitals die from bacterial infections that drugs are unable to kill.

* As the number of infectious diseases is on the rise, more antibiotics are administered to livestock than ever before, from 17.8 million pounds per year in 1999 to 29.8 million pounds in 2009.

* Fully 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States are given to livestock, and the vast majority are administered to promote growth and stave off potential infections, not to treat illness.

Estabrook claims that during the decades the FDA has continued to turn a blind eye, a prodigious amount of scientific research has surfaced “showing that antibiotic-resistant bacteria can not only evolve in the guts of farm animals, but can spread from animals to the humans who tend them, and then be passed on to people who have never been anywhere near a chicken house or hog barn”.

Lawsuit Filed Against FDA

Estabrook notes that in May, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animal Concerns Trust, Public Citizen, and the Union of Concerned Scientists joined forces to file a lawsuit against the FDA. The groups want the agency to withdraw its approval for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed.

Groups from the American Medical Association to the American Society of Microbiology, have appealed to the government to restrict the practice.

Louise Slaughter, who was a microbiologist before becoming a Congresswoman, introduced a bill in 2009 called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which calls for the FDA to restrict the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock.

Drug Resistant Superbugs Worse Than Anyone Could Imagine“We are witnessing a looming public health crisis that is moving from farms to grocery stores to dinner tables around the country,” she said. “As the only microbiologist in Congress, I feel it’s my duty to bring public attention to this.”

Slaughter’s bill has yet to pass, but had 127 cosponsors in the last congressional session, more than double its support in the previous Congress. “If we don’t address it,” said Slaughter, “we risk setting ourselves back to the time before antibiotics, when even common infections could kill a person. That’s not any kind of world I want my children and their children to inherit.”

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