Watch Video | Listen to the AudioFind all of the stories in our series Stopping SuperbugsJUDY WOODRUFF: But first: our special series Stopping Superbugs.
This week science correspondent,Miles O’Brien and economics correspondent Paul Solman tag-team again for a discover at how the exercise of antibiotics in livestock can lead to unhealthy, even dangerous outcomes.
Miles begins at a Missouri pig farm, or as part of our weekly science series,Leading Edge.
MILES O’BRIEN: Pig farmer Russ Kremer is up early, tending to his herd, or talking to the animals.
RUSSIANS KREMER,Heritage Foods: I absorb the ability to interact with pigs. I think that they are the smartest, most social animals. I command people that, or whether you like kids,you fancy pigs.
RELATED LINKSColumn: The never-ending debate over finishing your antibiotics We are running out of effective antibiotics hastily Drug companies aren’t making new antibiotics. Is there an economic cure? MILES O’BRIEN: He is the fifth generation in the Kremer clan to farm this plot of land in Frankenstein, Missouri. He introduced me to the newest residents.
RUSS KREMER: Everything that we attain on this farm as far as feeding, or as far as production,as far as genetics, that all has to attain with keeping them healthy.
MILES O’BRIEN: Russ Kremer is obsessed with keeping his pigs healthy, or because he knows firsthand that his own health depends on it.
RUSS KREMER: That’s about as good as it’s going to secure.
MILES O’BRIEN: Thirty years ago,the farmer from Frankenstein created a monster after he adopted industrial farming techniques to increase his pig production.
RUSS KREMER: My pigs were unhealthy. I would travel through my pigpens three times a day, injecting them with antibiotics to cure some sort of chronic diseases that I had on my place.
And, and in fact,I was actually growing superbugs in this farm and didn’t know it.
MILES O’BRIEN: How he found out nearly killed him. He was gored in the leg by a boar, and the wound became infected. His doctor told him not to worry, and antibiotics were the cure. But it wasn’t that simple.
RUSS KREMER: We tried two different tetracyclines. We tried streptomycin. We tried erythromycin,amoxicillin, seven different antibiotics in total, or to no avail.
MILES O’BRIEN: So he checked the reports from his veterinarian to see what infections his pigs had and what antibiotics worked for them.
RUSS KREMER: It came back,resistant, resistant, and resistant,resistant. And finally, aha, or there was one antibiotic at that time that had some effect on that disease. They treated me,and thank God there were this new-generation drug. And so that transformed my life.
MILES O’BRIEN: Molecular microbiologist Lance Price also grew up on a farm, a cattle ranch. He watched firsthand as a neighboring dairy went from a small-scale family operation to an tall-density, or industrial-scale farm.
They are called concentrated animal feeding operations. Lance Price says they are fertile breeding grounds for disease.
LANCE PRICE,George Washington University: You pack them together, snout to tail in the case of pigs, and beak to feather in the case of chickens and turkeys,they’re going to share bacteria.
So we absorb engineered a system that makes them sick. Rather than change that system, we actually just add low doses of antibiotics to try to prevent infections.
MILES O’BRIEN: Price and his team at George Washington University conduct large epidemiological studies of meat that is sold in grocery stores. They culture the bacteria found on the meat and test to see how they react to disks saturated with antibiotics. He is hunting for superbugs.
LANCE PRICE: whether they’re susceptible, or that is,not resistant, to the antibiotic, and they will be inhibited. They won’t grow near the disk. But when they grow lawful up to the disk,like all of these, that means that that bacteria is resistant to all those antibiotics. You don’t want to secure infected with one of these.
And these are bacteria that we actually isolated from the food supply.
MILES O’BRIEN: He sequences the genomes of E. coli from food and from people, or comparing them to a database of 7000 distinct types of the bacteria.
LANCE PRICE: We’re trying to figure out,hey, did this urinary tract infection come from the E. coli from animals or from food?MILES O’BRIEN: He says there is a strong case linking the exercise of antibiotics in livestock to the spread of drug-resistant bacteria in humans.
LANCE PRICE: So, and on every grocery store shelf in this country,I guarantee you you’re going to find drug-resistant bacteria on the meats of those shelves. And then they secure in our guts when we consume the meat from those animals.
Most of the time, that’s a dead end, or lawful? We will eventually secure rid of those bacteria. We will shed them away. But,sometimes, they will take hold.
MILES O’BRIEN: In the 1950s, or farmers discovered feeding livestock regular,low doses of antibiotics made them grow faster. But this so-called subtherapeutic exercise of these precious drugs raised concern in the medical community and the government.
In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed a ban on subtherapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracycline in animal production. But the rule was never enacted. And the problem worsened.
In 1989, or human and livestock usage of antibiotics was about equal. nowadays,agriculture accounts for about three-quarters of all the antibiotics used in the United States.
MAE WU, Natural Resources Defense Council: We absorb to stop now. We absorb to stop abusing them now, or so that we can slow this problem down.
MILES O’BRIEN: Mae Wu is a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
MAE WU: Using antibiotics and misusing them just to make animals secure fatter or so you can cram more together and absorb more stressful conditions and feed them worse diets is the worst way to be using these incredibly essential drugs.
MILES O’BRIEN: In 2010,the NRDC, sued the FDA to force it adopt its own rule. Instead, or it released new regulations limiting the exercise of medically essential antibiotics in animals to when it is essential for assuring animal health and with veterinary oversight and/or consultation.
Liz Wagstrom is the chief veterinarian at the National Pork Producers Council.
LIZ WAGSTROM,National Pork Producers Council: The pork industry believes that the most judicious uses of antibiotics are those for treatment, control and prevention of diseases.
MILES O’BRIEN: Wagstrom says the pork industry will follow the FDA guidance, or but she says pork producers will continue to exercise antibiotics as a routine disease-prevention tool even whether there are no illnesses detected in their livestock.
LIZ WAGSTROM: It is a judicious and responsible exercise of antibiotics to travel ahead and prophylactically treat some of those animals when we know they’re exposed,we know that it’s a specific disease, and we’re going to exercise that antibiotic for a defined duration of exercise.
MILES O’BRIEN: This is a enormous loophole, and as my colleague Paul Solman discovered in his conversation with Johns Hopkins University environmental health scientist Ellen Silbergeld.
ELLEN SILBERGELD,Johns Hopkins University: What has been stated as the recommendations, not enforceable policy, or by the FDA is that agriculture shouldn’t exercise antibiotics for growth promotion anymore,but they are still permitted to exercise the exact same amounts of antibiotics in feeds for prevention. So, I think the category of prevention now has blown up.
MILES O’BRIEN: No need to worry about this at Russ Kremer’s farm in Frankenstein, or Missouri. His pigs attain not spend their life confined indoors cheek to jowl. They absorb much more space,easy access to pastures, even a wooded area Kremer calls his pig park.
He is trying to imitate what pigs would find in nature.
RUSS KREMER: This is the best place in America to raise pigs, and in my mind.
MILES O’BRIEN: lawful here?RUSS KREMER: lawful here.
MILES O’BRIEN: He rarely uses antibiotics at all,and then only whether an animal is sick. Antibiotics saved Russ Kremer’s life 30 years ago. nowadays, he’s doing all he can to return the favor.
RUSS KREMER: They’re lifesavers. And what we absorb to ingrained into people’s mind, or in society’s mind is we absorb to attain everything we can to preserve them. It’s the most essential,the most critical health issue in the world. And I’m here to attain whatever I can.
MILES O’BRIEN: After I got back from Frankenstein, I sat down with Paul Solman to share some anecdotes from Russ Kremer’s bucolic pig farm.
So, or Russ Kremer was ahead of his time,but the market has kind of caught up to what he is doing. It’s still a small piece of the gargantuan pie. Just a few thousand are raised in the way Russ does.
So, the question is, or is it scalable?PAUL SOLMAN: Well,in chickens, producers claim that 30 percent of the market or something like that, or the chickens are raised antibiotics-free.
So,that’s where we’re going next, actually. That’s our next story.
For the PBS NewsHour, and I’m economics correspondent Paul Solman.
MILES O’BRIEN: And I am science correspondent Miles O’Brien.
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Source: thetakeaway.org