Breeding an Epidemic Antibiotics and Meat
Modern agriculture is rushing us into an unintended but dangerous form of genetic engineering, including antibiotics, how bacteria become resistant, livestock, the animal-human link, regulatory stonewall.
Modern agriculture is rushing us into an unintended but
dangerous form of genetic engineering.
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Antibiotics and Meat
Nowadays, it's so simple and inexpensive to take an oral
dose of tetracycline or amoxicillin to fight off an
infection that most of us take antibiotics for granted. The
time may be rapidly approaching, however, when we'll have
to learn what it's like to do without these drugs . . . in
large part because of the way American agribusiness raises
meat!
ANTIBIOTICS
To understand this bizarre connection, we'll need to review
the nature of antibiotics themselves. Antibiotics are
chemicals derived from the toxins one microorganism
generates to fight off the assault of another.
Though we know that the Chinese used moldy bean curd to
treat carbuncles and boils several millennia ago, it wasn't
until 1928 that Sir Alexander Fleming discovered that a
mold, penicillin, actually killed competing bacteria. When
penicillin was synthesized in useful, therapeutic
concentrations in 1941, many infectious diseases that had
been practically uncontrollable finally became treatable.
Between 1943 and 1960, the annual production of penicillin
soared—from 29 pounds to 860,000 pounds—and the
fatality rates associated with various diseases plummeted.
Truly, the description "wonder drugs" aptly reflected the
early success of antibiotics in treating disease. For the
first time, doctors had medicine that actually attacked the
cause of bacterial disease. However, not long after
antibiotics began to see widespread use, scientists
discovered an alarming trend. Some bacteria were developing
resistance to antibiotics . . . they were effectively
selecting for a stronger strain of microorganism! And these
resistant bacteria could run rampant when a constant
barrage of wonder drugs wiped out their nonresistant
competitors.
It was another decade, though, before the full effects of
bacterial resistance to antibiotics were felt. In 1968,
Shigella dysenteriae (a virulent strain of
dysentery) broke out in Guatemala and spread throughout
Central America over the course of three years. Doctors
assumed that they were dealing with amoebic dysentery when
the four antibiotics of choice—streptomycin,
tetracycline, chloramphenicol, and sulfonamide—had no
effect. By the time the real cause, resistant bacteria, was
discovered, tens of thousands had died.
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