Advocacy Project: The Untreatable Epidemic

When people talk about factory farming and modern agricultural practices, we tend to think about pollution, animal cruelty, and fattened, hormone-filled meat. These are definitely important concerns; but there is an even more insidious problem that can become a major threat to public health– antibiotic-resistant infections.

Right now, 80% of the antibiotics made in the U.S. are fed to factory-farmed animals to promote growth and to counter unsanitary living conditions. Most of this ends up in manure, which is used to fertilize our vegetables. The rest of this 80% remains in the meat that we will eat. Throughout this process, bacteria have countless opportunities to be exposed to antibiotics in small amounts. The low concentrations of these drugs don’t wipe out all the germs in the animal/region/food, but they kill enough non-resistant bugs that the ones who happen to be resistant would have less competition for resources. With more space and nutrients available to them, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are free to grow out of control and completely take over whichever animal/region/food the antibiotics happen to be in. In addition, resistant bacteria have the ability to copy their DNA and transfer it to their non-resistant peers.

Here’s the CDC’s illustration of the chain of resistance and infection:

(Courtesy of the CDC)

                                                            (Courtesy of the CDC)

If there are high enough numbers of these bacteria, they will become pathogenic and cause diseases. And the most concerning part is that these are the same medicines that are used to treat human diseases. So if someone shows up to the hospital with resistant infections, the drugs would no longer work.

This is exactly what’s been happening with the recent outbreak of Salmonella in the United States. So far, about 500 people have been infected in 25 states. There are seven strains of bacteria involved, all of which are resistant to antibiotics. This has been traced back to a poultry producer in California that – you guessed it – use antibiotics in their animal feed.

The CDC estimates that at least 2 million Americans end up in the hospital with antibiotic-resistant infections each year, and this number is increasing.

resistant_infections

                     (Via steiros.com)

There is no doubt that antibiotic resistant is a major problem. But New York representative Louise Slaughter proposed a bill last year called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA) that, if passed, would require the FDA to re-review its approval for seven major classes of antibiotics used in agriculture that are also important for human infections. This could mean huge changes in the way factory farms work. Unfortunately, there has been so much lobbying against this bill that it has been referred to committee and pretty much forgotten. My advocacy project is trying to drum up support for PAMTA through a petition and a letter to our representative, Glenn Thompson. But even if this bill is never passed, hopefully people will become more aware of this issue and more things will be done to address it.

 

Partial List of Sources:

http://www.steiros.com/Antibiotic_Stewardship.html

http://www.fosterfarms.com/about/raise.asp

100% Certified Lab-Grown

As the population continues to increase exponentially, world hunger is becoming a much more widespread and serious issue, and more extreme measures are being taken to solve it. One of those ways is growing meat in petri dishes.

This August, a completely lab-grown burger was fried and eaten in London after having been grown from cow stem cells in a lab. This burger is all muscle– because there were no fat or skin or cartilage cells to begin with, there was no such tissue in the meat. This development could have some interesting implications for world hunger– if meat can be mass-produced in places with climates that can’t support large numbers of animals, everyone can get their protein.

Widespread use of this discovery could also help environment in some major ways. Right now, it’s estimated that confined animals produce three times as much waste as humans in the US, and account for a huge percentage of carbon and methane emissions. Runoff from factory farms ends up in groundwater and ecosystems, causing diseases to develop in places that they shouldn’t be developing in.

So how much value do lab-grown burgers have? Are they the next “pink slime”? Or are they the solution to world hunger and the destructive consequences of factory farming?

Or do you think hunger can be fixed in a much less creepy and “scientific” way? After all, meat is being produced so fast, and there is so much of it, that it has already become less expensive than vegetables. Things like Epic Meal Time, a Youtube series that features recipes for 60-pound 6 piece chicken nuggets, among other food items, show that getting enough animal protein in your diet is clearly not an issue in some places. Should we focus first on the politics and socioeconomic barriers that contribute to world hunger, instead of trying to fix everything with science?

 

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/science/a-lab-grown-burger-gets-a-taste-test.html

http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-factory-farms-and-environment

(Special Health Issue) A Dose of Arsenic

This Tuesday, the FDA announced a ban on three arsenic-containing compounds that have been used in over 100 drugs that are fed to pigs, chicken, and turkey. This was because of a recent discovery that chicken sold in grocery stores (and probably at Redifer and Pollock buffet) contained more than four times the arsenic it is allowed to. These chemicals are used to “prevent disease, increase feed efficiency, and promote growth.” I had no idea what “feed efficiency” meant, so I Googled it and found out that it’s “a ratio describing the amount of feed consumed per unit of production (e.g. milk, eggs, gain).”

Screen Shot 2013-10-04 at 2.02.26 AM

This is an important issue because arsenic can cause lung and skin cancer, hard black scab-like growths on skin, liver lesions, and a whole host of problems with almost every organ system.

So why didn’t the FDA ban these chemicals in the first place? Doesn’t every chemical that could possibly end up in our food have to go through FDA approval first?

It’s important to realize that in low amounts, dangerous chemicals often don’t have major health effects. Mercury levels in shrimp are so low that even the cholesterol is probably more harmful. We’ve been eating a little bit of arsenic in our meat for years before the FDA banned it several days ago. And on a molecular level, all proteins are just really fancy ammonia molecules, which sounds a lot more horrifying than it really is.

Screen Shot 2013-10-04 at 2.25.24 AM<– really fancy ammonia molecule

It’s often easy to demand that all unpalatable chemicals be banned, but there are few other practical options for raising animals on such a large scale. If we don’t want the cost of meat to skyrocket and entire forests to be shaved to clear land for pastures, lab-produced (and possibly dangerous) chemicals would need to be used. In fact, a fourth arsenic-containing compound that many people would like banned, is the only known treatment for histomoniasis, a liver parasite that can kill many young turkeys.

With these three drugs withdrawn, factory farms will have to replace them with others. Diseases still have to be prevented, and growth (both animal growth and economic growth) still has to be promoted, arsenic or no arsenic.

Should the FDA start specifying what companies should do, instead of what they shouldn’t do? Or will they just be playing Whack-a-Mole with dangerous chemicals in food, no matter what? Should we demand a list of the ingredients in animal feed as well as the ingredients in our food?

This issue is much more complex than it first seems, but could there be a solution?