How greedy farmers’ addiction to drugs could kill millions
It’s not just GPs. Half of all antibiotics are used on farms to boost profits — breeding superbugs that then pass to humans. The consequences could be catastrophic
EVERY day, Sharon Brennan must take several drugs to keep her alive. While the antibiotics are doing their job for now, that might soon change for the worst.
As the country’s Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, has warned, some bacteria are building up a tolerance to antibiotics, possibly posing a graver threat to humanity than terrorism.
She blames the over-prescription of drugs and has also castigated the farming industry — calling on it to give fewer antibiotics to animals (they are primarily used to prevent disease linked to squalid, overcrowded and stressful rearing conditions or farming methods) because they then enter the human food chain when we eat the meat.
Otherwise, Dame Sally warned, the battle to prevent antibiotic resistance will be ‘a daily grind for ever’.
Her comments follow a similarly apocalyptic warning by Chancellor George Osborne in which he said resistance to antibiotics will become ‘an even greater threat to mankind than cancer’ if the world fails to take serious action.
The truth is that in GPs’ surgeries and hospitals up and down the country, the drugs that have revolutionised medicine — ever since Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, in 1928 — have been handed out so freely that bacteria are finding ways to beat them.
But while doctors and patients are increasingly aware of the dangers, the farming industry blithely seems to ignore the threat.
As the medical world fights to prevent bacteria becoming resistant to life-saving medicines, in the dark confines of chicken, pig and turkey farms, countless drugs are still being pumped into these benighted creatures in order to turn them into food products.
Through the reckless abuse of antibiotics to maximise production and keep costs down, some farmers are putting at risk nothing less than the future health of humanity.
For the reality is that the more often bacteria are exposed to the drugs that can kill them, the faster resistant strains can develop — and so overuse of antibiotics can give rise to deadly illnesses that can withstand all available treatment.
The great fear is that between now and 2050, as many as ten million people worldwide could die as a result of antibiotic resistance created through the excessive use of these drugs.
The crisis around the use of antibiotics on farms dates back to 1953, when the government passed a law that allowed penicillin to be mixed with pig food. Experiments had shown that the drug increased the rate at which animals put on weight.
Hardly any MPs bothered turning up for the debate over what ministers described as a ‘little Bill’ allowing farmers to give animals drugs and, at the time, the health minister saw little to worry about. He dismissed it as ‘an agricultural matter’, declaring that he’d had assurances from the medical profession there would be ‘no adverse affect whatsoever’ on human beings. The legislation duly went through on the nod.
There had been some dissenting voices — and during the Commons debate, one backbench MP warned that farmers might be ‘tempted’ to be careless in their use of drugs that had acquired a reputation as an ‘efficient and magic cure all’.
Another said: ‘May I ask whether we have all gone mad to want to give penicillin to pigs to fatten them? Why not give them good food, as God meant them to have?’
All too soon such fears would be proved justified, as farmers quickly exploited the new law by feeding their animals antibiotics to boost production.
As well as pig farmers realising that small amounts of antibiotic had a remarkable effect on their animals’ growth, studies showed that sows produced more surviving piglets and that hens fed low doses of penicillin laid more eggs.
In the following decades, antibiotic use — with scant regard to any possible side- effects — became the norm in farming.
Mounting concerns finally led to a change of the law in 2006, when drugs for growth promotion were banned across the EU as the ‘final step in the phasing out of antibiotics used for nonmedicinal purposes’ — part of a Europewide strategy to tackle the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Yet despite this ban, farmers continue to give the drugs in huge quantities to animals that have no intrinsic need of them.
The problem is that, even as the industry was forced to stop feeding livestock drugs to boost growth, farmers were increasingly relying on drugs to maximise production another way.
As the world of farming grew ever more industrialised, antibiotics were routinely used to stop animals from getting sick, which was often a knockon effect of them no longer being kept in fields but held in cramped barns.
I spent three years investigating factory farms and saw for myself all over the world the appalling conditions that started this health time-bomb. The result was Farmageddon, a book I co-wrote, exposing the true cost of cheap meat.
While the food and farming industry disingenuously peddles false images of pigs lolling in the sun, chickens scratching about in yards, and contented cows grazing on clover-rich grass, the truth is that most modern farms are brutal places and often, through their focus on intensive farming methods, a breeding ground for sickness.
In factory farms — whose dreadful conditions are shamefully justified on the basis of ‘economic efficiency’ — animals are treated like machines, selectively bred to get fatter faster for the quickest possible conversion from living being to meat.
This ‘pile them high, sell them cheap’ model means they are kept in evercloser confinement, and pushed further and further beyond their natural capabilities — making them weak, stressed and highly vulnerable to disease.
Most chickens — whether they are being reared for meat or eggs — never breathe fresh air or see a blade of grass. Pigs are routinely barracked in small, filthy and grotesquely overcrowded pens. A typical dairy cow is forced to produce so much milk that she becomes exhausted and unproductive by the age of five — a decade less than the natural life-span.
No wonder disease rips through flocks and herds so easily.
When these animals are trucked off for slaughter, their treatment gets worse. The stress of being transported lowers their immune system, allowing bacteria to flourish, meaning they excrete more bacteria in their waste.
Campylobacter, salmonella and, to a lesser extent, E.coli are among the various strains that can infect humans who eat animal products contaminated with these bacteria.
Yet instead of acting to clean up these filthy production systems that allow sickness to flourish among their animals, many farmers simply try to contain any disease by administering preventative drugs to entire flocks and herds of animals before they are actually ill.
A prime example of this ugly practice is in the industrial rearing of pigs.
In natural conditions, piglets begin weaning themselves off their mothers’ milk at the age of around three months. On organic farms, they are left with their mothers for a minimum of eight weeks. On factory farms, however, they are separated grossly prematurely, at between three and four weeks — so that the sow can be impregnated again as quickly as possible.
Traumatised and struggling to adapt to solid food in unfamiliar and overcrowded surroundings, the piglets are very vulnerable to disease — which is why more antibiotics are used to keep them alive.
In Denmark, Europe’s centre for cheap bacon, piglets weaned on factory farms are given 20 times more antibiotics than those reared on organic farms (where drugs are rarely needed). Chickens and dairy cows are similarly treated — dosed up with antibiotics in their water and feed.
Conveniently for the farmers, there is evidence that antibiotics administered ‘ preventatively’ can also help boost animals’ growth, enabling them to get around the ban on using the drugs as growth accelerators.
It’s no coincidence that sheep, in general the last remaining farm animals reared as nature intended, almost exclusively outdoors, barely ever need such drugs.
The scale of drug use by the livestock industry is staggering: around half of all antibiotics manufactured in the world are squandered in this way — used not to treat illness, but as a prevention policy, to offset the terrible conditions in which livestock are kept.
One chilling consequence is that humans are getting ill, instead.
During the original Commons debate in 1953, Dr Barnett Stross, an MP with a medical background, most presciently foresaw how it would play out.
He cautioned: ‘We are really treading into strange country. If pigs are fed in this way, new types of bacteria may evolve and thrive which are resistant to the penicillin . . . if there be migration of the bacteria to humans, we may find ourselves in trouble. I do not want to frighten anybody, but these are matters we may look at.’
The official parliamentary record, Hansard, records that fellow MPs greeted his warnings with scornful guffaws.
Just as he predicted, however, the ‘wonder drugs’ of the medicine cabinet are now so widely used that they are losing their potency in human medicine. Every dose of antibiotics given to either a human or an animal is a chance for resistant bacteria to develop.
The practice in farming of giving low-dose antibiotics as a preventative measure is particularly dangerous, because it creates ideal conditions for bacteria to fine-tune their resistance, as more survive after a low dosage compared to higher doses that are given in extremis.
The resistant bacteria can then transfer from animals to people, via meat.
The economist Lord Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, has described this as ‘ a classic
The truth is most modern farms are brutal places The animals are weak, stressed and highly vulnerable
example of short- term private interest in conflict with mediumterm public good. In this case, the private gains are modest and the public damage is huge.’
Combine the irresponsible use of antibiotics in farming with the widespread misuse of antibiotics in human medicine and the truth is that were are approaching a terrifying new age in which life-saving drugs we have taken for granted for decades won’t work.
The World Health Organisation has warned that in this so-called ‘postantibiotic era’, there will be no way to cure many common infections.
There may, therefore, be no effective treatment for a range of diseases such a typhoid, tuberculosis, pneumonia, meningitis, tetanus, diphtheria and syphilis.
This is not some dim and distant prospect. It is already happening.
Just a few days ago, doctors warned of a devastating new strain of gonorrhoea that is proving resistant to traditional antibiotic treatment.
In the coming months, we will know if our the Government is serious about tackling the crisis.
recognising the urgency of the situation, the European Parliament has proposed a ban on routine use of antibiotics on farms. Under the new rules, farmers would no longer be allowed to dispense drugs to entire flocks and herds in a ‘ pre- emptive strike’ to ward off disease.
Such changes sound encouraging, but it remains to be seen whether Britain will back the plan.
Those who care about the issue are not convinced.
There are disturbing signs that the agricultural industry will simply carry on as before — under the guise of an approach known as ‘ metaphylatic use’. This would allow the treatment of all their animals with antibiotics if just one individual is ill. It would be a deeply worrying step.
For Sharon Brennan and thousands of people like her who are dependent on drugs to maintain their health, the issue of antibiotic resistance is already a matter of life or death — every day.
Following a double lung transplant, the 35-year-old cystic fibrosis sufferer is in better health than she has been for years, but an infection could kill her. She has seen several friends succumb to bugs that can no longer be treated, as antibiotics lose their force. Sooner or later, she fears, the medicine on which she herself depends will no longer work.
‘I see myself and my friends on the very frontline of the battle,’ she said. ‘We are the people that are dying because there are no longer antibiotics that can treat our infections.’
She despairs that people such as her will survive complicated surgery, but then get pneumonia or a chest infection.
‘If the drugs don’t work, that’s pretty much end-game,’ she says.
No wonder there is mounting alarm in the health profession. As a result, politicians are putting pressure on pharmaceutical companies to find new drugs.
Mr Osborne has promised incentives to such firms to encourage them to accelerate the necessary research. remarkably, though, the Chancellor made no mention of the farming industry. In a parallel gross abrogation of responsibility, ministers seem to be prioritising the profits of food giants and farmers over public health.
In the absence of politicians taking a lead, the rest of us must act.
First, we must change what we eat — refusing to buy meat from animals pumped with drugs.
If it’s chicken, turkey or pork, and it’s not free-range or organic, the chances are that the animal was reared on a factory farm where it was kept alive using medicines.
Of course, meat produced on farms with more careful welfare regimes is more expensive — but that seems a small sacrifice if it means keeping antibiotics potent and protecting future generations.
Ministers seem to prioritise profits over public health