Farming With Medicine
Antibiotic research and development in the 1930’s opened many doors for disease treatment, including veterinary medicine. Livestock animals like cattle and chickens can develop life threatening diseases that are very easy to pass from one animal to the next. Contagious diseases had limited how many animals could be held in any single flock or herd. Too many animals and the entire population could be wiped out by disease. Antibiotics made this nightmare for farmers a thing of the past.
Veticillin, a brand of penicillin, was used to treat cattle that suffered from mastitis. In dairy cattle, mastitis is the persistent inflammatory reaction of the udder tissue. Mastitis could possibly be a fatal mammary gland infection. In the United States, mastitis is the most common disease in dairy cattle, it is also the most costly. This along with many other infections was very hard to treat without antibiotics. The farming industry had a lot of help from a microbiologist in the 1940’s. This man found a compound that treated even more infections that penicillin did.
In 1943, a microbiologist, Selman Waksman discovered the next miracle drug called streptomycin. He found the compound on “a portion of earth extracted from the throat of a sick chicken.” After testing it on animals and humans, it was found that streptomycin was effective on many of the same diseases as penicillin. It was actually more effective to a larger list of diseases. These diseases included TB, pneumonia, UTI’s, typhoid fever and dysentery. Adding antibiotics to the feed of animals made them overall healthier.
Farmers that started using penicillin and streptomycin noticed something astonishing. On the same amount of feed, animals that were being treated with antibiotics were not only healthier, they were growing at a remarkable rate. Soon later farmers started adding antibiotics to the feed for all animals regardless if they were sick or not.
Richard Carnevale-Vice president of the Animal Health Institute explains what farmers had discovered. By adding “these drugs to the feed of animals, they were very useful in increasing the productivity of the animal. They kept them healthy, which was the main thing. They reduced loss of sickness in their animals. And the animal gains the same amount of weight on less feed… Feed is a very big cost.” He adds, “people don’t remember how expensive chicken use to be.” Healthy animals make the cost of raising animals cheaper and that trickles down to consumers.
The use of antibiotics on farms makes meat inexpensive in the grocery store and also creates higher quality chicken, pork, and beef. Over the last 50 years “American meat production has tripled.” Along with antibiotics, vitamins, proteins, and other nutrients were all available in manufactured feeds as additives. The antibiotic market alone at this time “was worth $17.5 million.” Living History Farm.org stated the “twin technology of better feed and better medicine made huge feedlots for hog and poultry confinement operations” possible. Using antibiotics as growth hormones have cultivated the culture of modern-day mass production farming.
Dr.Chuck Hofacre is a veterinary for a farm in north Georgia. Dr.Hofacre said his goal is to “prevent any health issues in this small city of chickens of 100,000.” He continued to explain when one animal gets sick “just like in a city, the disease can then spread through the population fairly quickly.”
According to Lee Ventola, an “estimated 80% of antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used in animals, primarily to promote growth and prevent infection.” In the past farmers would only treat animals with antibiotics when they were sick. Treating livestock with “ antimicrobial agents is said to improve the overall health of animals, providing larger yields and a higher quality product.” Yet, according to the Institute of Medicine, it was estimated that in 1989 half of the 31.9 million pounds of antibiotics consumed in the U.S. were for non-therapeutic use in animals. More recently, The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates “that 24.6 million pounds of antimicrobial agents are used for non-therapeutic purposes in chickens, cattle, and swine compared with just 3.0 million pounds used for human medicine.”
The clash between scientists and farmers started in the 1960’s when the British government published a study called the Swan report. Dr. Gail Hansen referred to it as a “milestone report”. The report stated that antibiotics shouldn’t be used in feed to grow animals faster. Mainly because one of the unintended consequences was antibiotic resistance.
Although one thing the report lacked was a direct link between antibiotics on the farm and human illness. Christine Hoang, assistant director of the Veterinary Medical Association, says there are a lot of unknowns still. She said, “it hard to prove that you gave this drug to that animal and down the line, this person ate meat from that animal and now they have a resistant infection…all because of that drug the animal got a long time ago.” In 1977 the FDA tried to reduce the number of antibiotics on farms. But their dream was short lived.
Former FDA Commissioner, Donald Kennedy, proposed restrictions on two big antibiotics Penicillin and tetracycline. Kennedy feared that by overusing these drugs, farmers were fueling antibiotic resistance. Inevitably threating the health of people. By using antibiotics in such large amounts resistant organisms are being created that my transfer that resistance to organisms that cause human disease.
The FDA was moving in the right direction to stop the rate of resistance but they faced opposition immediately. The farming industry pleaded that the regulation would be financially ruinous. They attacked the FDA by saying their findings were theoretical and simply speculation. The food industry ended up taking the fight to Congress with the help of Congressman Jamie Whitten. Mr. Whitten was the secretary of agriculture and he controlled the entire budget for the FDA. The FDA was at the hands and feet of Whitten and unless more evidence was found that supported their claims the FDA’s budget was going to be dramatically cut. Unfortally this occurred in 1977 so there was not the technology that we have today that can prove their findings.
The food was industry still doesn’t have strict regulation about the use of antimicrobial agents in animal feed. It was suggested that farmers only give antibiotics to animals for therapeutic reasons(infected with a disease) but that is extremely hard to track. Now that farmers across the county have shifted their farming methods it’s hard not feed all animals antibiotics to avoid infections.
Farmers in the United States have moved from a traditional style of farming to an industrial style of farming. Industrial farming is the idea of having a high number of animals in one particular place. “The high population density of modern intensive livestock operations result in sharing of both commensal flora and pathogens, which can be conducive to rapid dissemination of infectious agents.” This results in livestock needing aggressive infectious strategies, which often include the use of antibiotic therapy.
This shift in farming has made antibiotics a necessary part of the process of raising livestock animals. This is a very dangerous trend. America’s food industry is now relying on antibiotics when they were once just a resource to use. This worries scientists because antibiotics were never created to be used as a crutch.
Wrap up this blog with my conclusion story, What’s Being Done Now?
