MRSA ST398 & the Overuse of Nontherapeutic Antibiotics
We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.
Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.
And the biggest antibiotics defying pathogen of them all is MRSA (pronounced “mersa,” it stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Kristof reminds us it “already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.” A new strain, ST398, has emerged.
Kristof blames the overuse of antibiotics in healthy animals for the antibiotic resistance in both people and animals:
[T]he central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.
The Pultizer-prize-winning Kristof is no foe of farmers. He grew up on a farm and has tuned in to food. He called for a Secretary of Food rather than a Secretary of Agriculture and followed-up after Vilsack’s appointment suggesting a Deputy Secretary of Food.
Still, over at ScienceBlogs Mike the Mad Biologist says there’s better evidence:
The problem I have with Kristof’s column is that MRSA ST398 isn’t a hypothetical. The reason the spread of MRSA ST398 into the healthcare system scares the crap out of me isn’t that it might happen: it’s already happened. We already have documented evidence from the Netherlands, where ST398 has started to show up in the healthcare system in agricultural regions of the country. And in Sweden, ST398 is present in the community.
These are countries with reasonably good antibiotic use policies, so I’m not exactly optimistic. I’m glad Kristof raised the issue, but the reflexive conservative denialists will attack the column, when he could have provided much stronger evidence.
Kristof’s column is a follow-up to another last week, Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health, in which he discussed hog-to-to human transmission of MRSA. The pork lobby’s rebuttal calls that piece “highly speculative.” Mike expected as much:
The other gambit the ag lobbies will use is analogous to the smoking lobby: we don’t know for certain, blah, blah, blah. In the antibiotic resistance surveillance field, it’s known as ‘statistically sound sampling.’
7 Responses to “MRSA ST398 & the Overuse of Nontherapeutic Antibiotics”
Antibiotics have, in the developed world at least, caused a fundamental change in the human condition. The change has been so fundamental that nobody even sees it anymore.
What's worse is that the Netherlands has a very aggressive MRSA hospital control program known as 'search and destroy': they screen all patients (and isolate those with MRSA). They do the same for hospital workers (mandatory sick leave if you're a carrier). If it's still showing up in their hospitals, we're really in trouble.
As it applies to the US, inappropriate usage of antibiotics by physicians is a much bigger factor than agricultural use. In that sense this article is really aiming at the wrong target. It's like attacking pollution by focusing on snow blowers.
It's really important to know the full story before forming conclusions. Here is the AVMA testimony before Congress on the issue of antibiotic use in livestock.
First, this is not at all analogous to Big Tobacco claiming that the data wasn't conclusive. In this case, as detailed in the link I provided, Denmark already experimented with a moratorium on livestock antibiotic additives and the results not only didn't help AB resistance problems, they ended up with new problems of food borne disease.
And that's part of the issue too. Far from being about preventing a little piggy's ear infection, the use of antibiotics prophylactically in livestock serves the purposes of decreasing food borne pathogens like Salmonella and promoting more efficient growth (which keeps meat products affordable and helps feed a growing world population.)
For the last 9 months I have been tracking the MRSA ST398 situation and have compiled an extensive research website that brings together information from over 70 sources. Visit http://www.st398.com link above for extensive background to this story.
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[...] Kristof’s Column: [Via Mike the Mad Biologist] Always listen to the Mad Biologist. By way of Joe Windish at The Moderate Voice, we find out, just as I predicted, that the pork lobby would claim we don’t know enough about [...]