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"Past the Age of Miracles: Facing a Post-Antibiotic Age"
In a keynote address last year, the Director-General of the World Health Organization warned
that we may be facing a future in which many of our miracle drugs no longer work.
"A post antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it."
"Things as common as strep throat or a child scratched knee could once again kill."
The Director-General's prescription to avoid this catastrophe included the global call to "Restrict the use of antibiotics in food production to therapeutic purposes."
In other words, only use antibiotics in agriculture to treat sick animals.
In the United States meat producers feed literally millions of pounds of antibiotics to farm animals who aren't sick
just to promote growth or prevent disease in the often cramped, stressful, unhygienic conditions in industrial animal agriculture.
The FDA estimates that 80% of the antimicrobial drugs sold in the U.S. every year now go to the meat industry.
The discoverer of penicillin warned us back in the 40s that misuse could lead to resistance,
but the meat industry didn't listen and started feeding drugs like penicillin to chickens by the ton.
The Food and Drug Administration finally wised up to the threat in 1977 and proposed stopping the feeding of penicillin and tetracyclines to farm animals.
That was 36 years ago.
Since then, the combined political power of the factory, farming, and pharmaceutical industries has effectively
thwarted any legislative or regulatory action, and this stranglehold shows no sign of breaking.
We realized this reckless practice was a public health threat decades ago, and yet what's been done about it?
"Present (farm animal) production is concentrated in high-volume, crowded, stress environments,
made possible in part by the routine use of antibacterial (drugs) in (the) feed,"
the U.S. congressional Office of Technology Assessment wrote as far back as 1979.
"Thus the current dependency on low-level use of antibiotics to increase or maintain production,"
"while of immediate benefit, also could be the Achilles' heel of present production methods."
Industrial operations use antibiotics as a crutch to compensate for the squalid conditions
that now characterize much of modern agribusiness.
The unnatural crowding of animals and their waste creates such a strain on the animals' immune systems
that normal body processes like growth may be impaired.
That's why a constant influx of antibiotics is thought to accelerate weight gain by reducing the infectious load.
The problem is that the "Each animal feeding on an antibiotic becomes a "factory"
for the production and subsequent dispersion of antibiotic-resistance bacteria,"
offering a whole new meaning to the term factory farm.