By Medical Discovery News

July 21, 2012

Resistance to antibiotics has become a crisis that is overall alarmingly ignored. Some scientists believe without new antibiotics, medicine as practiced now will have to fundamentally change. Doctors struggle to control bacterial infections that continually evolve into lethal killers because current antibiotics are useless against them.

Bacteria have grown resistant because antibiotics have been overprescribed for the past 50 years and patients often quit taking antibiotics as soon as symptoms go away, giving bacteria an introduction to the antibiotic without killing them. Several bacteria are now considered super bugs, meaning they’re resistant to multiple antibiotics. Recent numbers show these super bacteria killed nearly 100,000 Americans in one year alone.

While doctors in the U.S. are becoming more aware and restrained in prescribing antibiotics, they account for less than 20 percent of the antibiotics used. The rest, more than 80 percent (28 million pounds), go to agriculture. But this massive amount of antibiotics is not being used to treat sick animals. Instead, subtherapeutic levels are routinely injected or added to animal water and feed to boost livestock weight and compensate for the unsanitary, packed conditions of commercial American farms.

These conditions create the perfect petri dish to produce resistant bacteria. As bacteria multiply in these tight, unsanitary conditions, the animals such as chickens, turkeys, pigs and cattle are treated with common human antibiotics that include streptomycin, kanamycin, and millions of pounds of penicillin. Studies show long-term subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics may be more conducive to producing resistant bacterial strains than the short-term, high-level antibiotic treatments of humans.

These bacteria, which thrive in the intestinal tract of animal, can contaminate human food  during slaughter, processing, and food preparation. The result is that more people die from foodborne illnesses. Looking at outbreaks caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria over the past several decades, the Center for Science in the Public Interest concluded the responsible bacteria were resistant to 14 different antibiotics. Of those, seven are classified by the World Health Organization as critically important to human medicine and eight as highly important.

The issue has become critical enough that the EU banned the use of penicillin for animal growth, then in 2006 banned the use of all antibiotics for animal growth on farms. Though the Food and Drug Administration tried at one time to follow the EU’s move by banning penicillin use, farm lobbyists prevailed. Now the FDA is asking pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily limit the sale of antibiotics to farms to just medical treatments and only through a veterinarian (they are now available through retail stores open to the public).

This pits the FDA against the powerful agriculture industry, which defends the practice as a proven way to produce economical animal-based food products. They argue that banning antibiotics will raise food costs astronomically.

But follow-up studies in countries such as Sweden and Denmark show better handling of farm animals led to a decrease in the need for antibiotics, and retail prices on meat did not rise dramatically. Denmark cited just a one percent rise in pork prices.

Ignoring the problem is not an option as people continue to die from bacterial infections that can’t be treated by existing antibiotics, especially since many drug companies have stopped developing new, more powerful antibiotics.

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