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Dirty Meats
What began as a means of increasing the productivity of livestock farming has grown into one of the burgeoning health crises of our era. explains the imminent threat of antibiotic resistance.
Words
Illustration Loulou & Tummie
On Christmas Day 1948, a British-American biologist named Thomas Jukes walked into a laboratory outside New York City to check the results of an experiment.
What he found that day reshaped agriculture as it was then known. It created the ability to grow livestock inexpensively in enormous numbers, simultaneously sparking a worldwide human health threat that would emerge from the vast farms facilitated by his discovery.
The threat was, and is, antibiotic resistance; the ability of pathogens to protect themselves against the drugs intended to kill them. According to the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, chartered by former British Prime Minister David Cameron, drug-resistant infections currently kill an estimated 700,000 people per year worldwide and may come to kill 10 million per year by 2050. Cameron called that “an almost unthinkable scenario where… we are cast back into the dark ages of medicine.”
