This week is National Public Health Week (NPHW), sponsored by the American Public Health Association. Although there are many important issues to highlight, few compare to the scope of antibiotic resistance. The World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed the rise and spread of drug-resistant bacteria as one of the most significant threats to global health. Dr. Nedret Emiroglu, Director of Communicable Diseases, Health Security, and Environment at WHO/Europe summed up the problem, saying, “It is becoming more and more difficult for patients to recover from infections, as the resistance of pathogens to the power of antibiotics and, worse, to last-resort antibiotics, is increasing steadily.”
In the last few weeks, antibiotic resistance has made its way to the news cycle. First, an international team of researchers found a 65% rise in worldwide consumption of antibiotics from 2000 to 2015. A New York Times article detailed how routine antibiotic use is common practice in America’s beef industry. Lastly, a man from the U.K. picked up the world’s worst-ever case of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. We’re quickly heading toward a post-antibiotic world, and if we hope to slow down the rapid rise of superbugs, we need to drastically cut antibiotic use in healthcare and agriculture.
Despite the threat of losing the effectiveness of antibiotics, 70 percent of the medically-important antibiotics in the U.S. are sold for use on livestock and poultry. In many cases, these life-saving drugs are used preventively in healthy animals as insurance against diseases that might occur from unsanitary, crowded conditions on industrial farms. Although in the past few years chicken industry leaders such as Perdue and Tyson have strongly committed to limiting antibiotic use, our beef and pork industries are lagging behind.
To protect public health, we are calling on some of the top meat purchasers to use their market power and stop buying any meat raised with our life-saving medicines. We have already convinced McDonald’s to stop selling chicken raised on medically-important antibiotics. But Mickey D’s is also the country’s largest purchaser of beef and a major pork purchaser, so we are working to get the Golden Arches to no longer sell any meat raised with these important medicines.
As the Public Interest Research Group, we want to bring the public into our work. That’s why I recently spent a week knocking on doors all over Massachusetts to educate people about antibiotic use in the meat industry, and how people can change it through marketplace action. I spoke to a nurse, who told me that she constantly sees patients with antibiotic-resistant infections. I spoke to a woman who had lost her job the previous week, but was so grateful that I was making sure her children would have a safe future, so she supported our work. I also met a teenager who had been in a car accident and was in a back brace, who overheard the conversation I was having with his mother. He stood up to grab his wallet to donate to our cause. If we lose the effectiveness of antibiotics, we lose a foundation of modern medicine. Knowing that some of our favorite fast food restaurants have the ability to help stop the overuse of antibiotics in the meat industry spurs hope.
The public is calling for change and McDonald’s. can protect public health by committing to no longer selling any meat raised on these important medicines. Place an order for McDonald’s to “hold the antibiotics” during this National Public Health Week.
