Antibiotic Misuse in the Global Agricultural Sphere
According to the CDC, one of the biggest public health threats facing the modern world is the notion of antimicrobial resistant diseases. Antimicrobial resistance is a borderline existential threat to all people, because in the microscopic world, humanity is put at the same risk whether a disease becomes resistant to our antimicrobial drugs in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, or the Americas. Due to the fast-paced, global nature of modern life commonly featuring air, sea, and trans-continental travel through and between nations, all people are put at risk by just a single strain of a transmissible “superbug” with no cure. The short video below, published by the CDC, briefly explains the concept of antibiotic resistance.
There has been a sizable amount of media coverage in the past decade surrounding this conversation. The New York Times has published multiple articles, such as “The Rise of Antibiotic Resistance” by their editorial board in 2014. The Washington Post as well, publishing the article “Antibiotic resistance is a severe health threat. But there’s a glimmer of hope.” by their editorial board in November of 2019. From what I have read, these articles tend to focus on how human use cases contribute to the problem, such as the over-prescription of active antibiotic drugs or the frequent use of such medications by people with colds and similar viral infections. These phenomena are certainly well-studied. The scientific journal Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety, a journal that “focuses on pioneering efforts and innovative studies pertaining to the safe use of drugs in patients,” published an article finding these factors to be some of the leading causes of the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. However, there is another important factor within this discussion, that of the global agricultural sector.
If you’re like me, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about how your food is made. Like many Americans, I have lived my entire life in a position privileged enough that I don’t have to spend much attention on such a massive part of the world. Attitudes such as that create a culture of relative indifference towards things such as farming practices or agricultural policies, both domestic and abroad, but that can make us miss the more troubling parts of food production, especially regarding antibiotic resistance. The CDC has an about page regarding food and food animals, describing the meaning behind labels like “antibiotic free” on packaging and briefly mentions a specific animal farming policy, preventative antibiotic use, which could be one of the major causes of risks posed by agricultural antibiotic usage. Preventative antibiotic use, a long-running practice under scrutiny since as early as 1977 according to the US General Accounting Office, is characterized by mixing general-purpose antibiotics as a food additive with animal feed to “promote growth” and prevent livestock from getting or spreading infections. There has been a considerable amount of study regarding this practice and others, such as this paper from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International’s scientific journal Molecules, detailing how the rampant use of antibiotic drugs in farm animals creates “antibiotic pollution”, increasing the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant organisms and quantity of toxic material in soil and wastewater.
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has stamped down on the practice of preventative antibiotic usage in recent years, by requiring veterinary oversight for farmers seeking to mix antibiotic drugs with their animal feed. Rules now require that drugs only be given to animals when medically necessary, as determined by a licensed medical professional. However, The Guardian reported in 2018 that the usage of antibiotic drugs are still being used flagrantly by farmers, since “a loophole allows US farmers to continue to use many antibiotics targeted by the ban in much the same way as they could before the ban, including drugs previously used for growth promotion.” The Guardian advocates for further policy reform and oversight to combat this issue within the US.
The US agriculture sector isn’t nearly the only country still using copious amounts of antibiotics, this is an issue across every corner of the globe. According to the Canadian government and the European Medicines Agency, Canada, the nations of Europe, and many other countries are taking steps to curb the use of drugs in food production. Even still, according to the US National Academy of Sciences, “Global consumption of antimicrobials in food animal production was estimated at 63,151 (±1,560) tons in 2010 and is projected to rise by 67%, to 105,596 (±3,605) tons, by 2030,” with most of the growth expect to be within the world’s latest emerging economies, “Antimicrobial consumption for animals in [Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa] countries [are] expected to grow by 99% by 2030, whereas their human populations are only expected to grow by 13% over the same period.” An article by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based non-profit organization seeking to publicize matters of the public interest, from 2018 suggests that this could be due to a lack of access to suitable resources capable of replacing antibiotic drugs for growth promotion within these parts of the developing world. Despite the risks their usage poses to the world as a whole, the farmers in these regions continue to use them due to a lack of awareness or a lack of access to economically viable alternatives.
The effects the continuous use of agricultural antibiotics within developing regions is under constant study. An article from 2019 published in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution, a respected publication focused on “all aspects of environmental pollution and the mitigation measures related to ecosystem & human health” and operated by Elsevier, describes how the frequent and persistent use of antibiotics on West and Central African farmland has caused antibiotic-resistant genetic material to become prevalent within the nearby waterways outside of cities and populous regions. The purported cycle is depicted in the above infographic. Because sewage and farming wastewater mix within waterways, frequent exposure is caused between human-transmissible bacteria and harsh antibiotic drugs. This promotes the propagation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as they are the only microorganisms that can survive against the presence of harsh antibiotics in the wastewater.
According to an article from the BioMed Central Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control scholarly journal, “a global forum for all those working on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of health-care-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance development in all health-care settings,” a general lack of hygiene and hygiene resources, access to vaccines, pharmaceutical regulations, microbiotic research resources, comprehensive medical treatment, the use of antibiotics agriculturally, and further challenges, the possibility of a multi-drug resistant strain of a deadly disease-causing bacteria could be created is a serious threat.
As we have seen recently with the global response to COVID-19, infectious pathogens have the potential to turn the world upside down. Of course, viruses are and will always be unaffected by antibiotics since they aren’t really alive. However, bacteria are just as capable of causing terrible disease, and in many cases, just as transmissible. If a lethal bacteria resistant to even our strongest, most reserved pharmaceutical surfaces, we will have no immediate method of treatment. The development of a cure or treatment plan could be delayed by months or years. While the rise of these risks and the newfound prevalence of these resistant bacteria is due in much part to the over prescription and overuse of antibiotics by common people, another large part is by industrial agricultural use. While it is a part of the world that few people spend time being concerned about, the oft overlooked risks that it creates are substantial; both in the developed world, and the regions of the world still developing.