-Caveat Lector-
<<Many may be familiar with the controversy over innoculating bipeds (OKA
"humans") against several many diseases (measles, mumps, poxes, e.g.). Now it
seems there may a new controversy over making harmful bacteria resistant to
antibiotics. Kinda like inoculating them against us. There's a part in the
second article that states:
"Unlike the slow process of building resistance in the first place, a single
mutation can restore the fortifications in full."
This tells me that science has created some sort of doomsday scheme that might
just unfold itself when least expected. Could be wrong, but, even if one
wanted to, how would one "err on the side of caution"? Live in a bubble? Wear
a mask? A<>E<>R >>
>From TheGuardian (UK)
(NewUnlimited)
> Alarms rang 50 years ago
>
> Scientists warned 30 years ago that overuse of medicines in animals would
> eventually affect humans Links, reports and background: more about antibiotics
> in food
>
> James Meikle and Paul Brown
> Tuesday September 7, 1999
>
> Alarm bells started ringing over the widespread use of antibiotics in
> agriculture almost as soon as they made their entry into livestock farming in
> the US 50 years ago. By 1969 scientists in Britain were warning of the "real and
> potential danger" that overuse in animals would help speed the rate at which
> bacteria in humans developed resistance to the medicines.
>
> In 1999, when use of antibiotics on farm animals and pets had increased by at
> least 3 times, another group of scientists was predicting "calamitous
> consequences" if the control of infection in human populations by antibiotics
> became ineffective.
>
> They said there was conclusive evidence of a link between humans, animals and
> food, even if the extent to which it contributed to the overall problem of
> resistance was still uncertain.
>
> The arrival of the wonder drugs not only changed the face of human medicine, it
> also revolutionised agriculture in the US and Europe. Their use has been crucial
> to the growth of intensive farming. They not only allowed effective and rapid
> treatment for diseases, they prevented whole herds or tightly-packed flocks from
> catching infections. They also became a key factor in speeding up the growth of
> animals destined for the food tables.
>
> It was discovered that poultry grew 5% faster when routinely fed small doses of
> the drugs. This, combined with breeding and other changes helped halve the
> lifespan of the broiler chickens to just six or seven weeks before slaughter.
>
> Today nearly all UK broilers are given these drugs to feed Britain's hunger for
> cheap meat. In the last week Britain's biggest producer has recanted on accepted
> practice and decided to phase out growth promoters by the end of the year. Most
> pigs are routinely fed antibiotics too. Their use has been common in the US
> since 1949 and Britain since 1953.
>
> Soon all agricultural use of antibiotics was under review. By 1967, 168 tonnes
> were being injected or fed to animals in the UK, compared with 240 tonnes to
> humans. But when relative weights of the "patients" were taken into account, a
> committee headed by Michael Swann told the government two years later, the use
> of the drugs in human medicine probably accounted for four times that in
> agriculture and veterinary medicine.
>
> It called for tighter controls on their use, and far better monitoring. On this
> front, hardly anything happened. Other countries were no better. Until the
> mid-1990s, the blip of concern seemed to have disappeared from the political
> radar screen.
>
> Only last month the advisory committee on the microbiological safety of food
> reported that 921 tonnes of the drugs were used in animals in 1997, although
> some animal drug industry sources argue a truer figure would be just over 750
> tonnes because the higher one includes medication against parasites in birds
> that is not technically antibiotic.
>
> Even so, human use of drugs may only have risen to 560 tonnes in the same 20
> year period.
>
> And now the animal industry's official body also suggests that as much as 209
> tonnes of antibiotics are used for growth promoting alone, twice the figure
> suggested by the advisory committee.
>
> The committee disputed claims by some farmers, vets and drug industry
> representatives, that there was still no compelling evidence of drug resistance
> in livestock, and asserted "that resistant bacteria in food animals have arisen
> as a consequence of the use of antibiotics in the farm environment and current
> husbandry practice".
>
> That meant, it said, that there should be less use of all antibiotics, not just
> growth promoters. Committee members were particularly worried by the
> agricultural use of flouroquinolones, synthetic antibiotics often used in severe
> cases of human infections such as E. coli, salmonella and typhoid.
>
> Among evidence from around the world it used to substantiate this view was a
> food poisoning incident in December 1996, in which turkey meat appeared the most
> likely cause. One of 13 old people who fell ill on an outing died. Five,
> including the victim, were subsequently found to have a bug resistant to a human
> antibiotic whose close relative was widely used in turkey flocks. Nevertheless,
> as the public health laboratory in England and Wales told the Commons
> agriculture committee last year: "This may be the first of many such outbreaks."
>
>
> Last summer an outbreak of salmonella poisoning in Denmark was linked to pork.
> Seven people went to hospital, six were treated with antibiotics but the
> treatment had no effect on four of them. One died.
>
> Research carried out by Henrik Wegener of the Danish veterinary laboratory
> proved the link between one type of growth promoting antibiotic and bacteria
> resistant to the same family of drugs in humans. The resistant bacteria only
> occurred in humans who ate meat from animals and birds regularly fed these
> growth promoters.
>
> A number of growth promoting antibiotics have been suspended by the European
> Union, avoparcin in 1997, and another four since July this year. The moves have
> been justified on the precautionary, or "better safe than sorry", principle
> because of the possible link between humans and animals. A debate is raging over
> avilamycin, one of only two growth promoters left available to the poultry
> industry, since there are high hopes a similar human antibiotic called
> everninomycin will soon be able to fight hospital superbugs. Critics of present
> practices argue that its prospects must not be compromised before it is even
> available, but others, while accepting scientific surveillance, says the use of
> the drug in feed, and the slight increase it can mean for farm productivity,
> could help make the difference between profit and loss.
>
> Roger Cook, of the National Office for Animal Health, representing
> manufacturers, said: "This product has been on the animal market for years. One
> of the reasons it is on the animal market is because the medical profession said
> it did not want it. Now the medical profession has got in a muddle and they are
> saying 'Hang on, can we have it back please?'. This is like big brother having
> broken his own toys wants his little brother's back.
>
> "If you follow that back to its logical conclusion, that if an antibiotic is
> used in human medicine, it cannot be used in animal medicine, there is going to
> be no antibiotic available for animal treatment."
>
> And he warns against comparing bare tonnage figures on consumption of humans and
> animals. "The potency of different antibiotics varies enormously. It is like the
> difference between a pint of beer and a pint of whisky. Using a tonne of a very
> modern antibiotic in human medicine could be the same as using 10 or 15 tonnes
> of first-generation ones developed in the 1950s."
>
> The organisation also says most of the growth in the animal antibiotic market
> has been in drugs almost abandoned for human use. Defenders of the present
> system maintain the existing monitoring of antibiotic residues in meat, deemed
> insufficient by the advisory committee, prove there is no big problem. But the
> effect of growth promoters cannot be measured in that way. They are not absorbed
> into flesh anyway.
>
> But others, while accepting that using antibiotics to treat human infections in
> intensive care units or indeed outbreaks in intensive livestock buildings do
> help develop resistance in bacteria, are really worried about the persistent use
> of the drugs in low doses to prevent diseases, even before they are apparent, in
> animals.
>
> Richard Young, of the Soil Association, leading campaigners against the
> agricultural use of antibiotics, maintains: "Society has got to ask whether it
> can afford to eat cheap meat any longer. Some small increase in the cost of meat
> has got to be cheaper than people dying."
>
> Additional research by Sally James.
---------AND------------
> Heads in the ground
>
> Medicine's finest days may soon be over. Even if we stop the routine use of
> antibiotics on farms now, it is too late to prevent resistant bacteria rendering
> many modern drugs useless Links, reports and background: more about antibiotics
> in food
>
> Steve Jones
> Tuesday September 7, 1999
>
> In earthquakes, buildings fall down: but, in most places, engineers learn from
> their mistakes and ensure that they stay up next time. Life is not like that.
> Earthquakes are nasty, but much the same. Biology, however, has its own agenda,
> which means that it fights back against any attempt to interfere. It is called
> evolution.
>
> The idea is simple. Darwin called it "descent with modification"; which nowadays
> means "genetics plus time", a series of successful errors - mutations - that
> allows those best able to copy themselves to prevail by natural selection.
>
> Bacteria show what selection can do when it gets the chance; and some of its
> best chances are - quite literally - being handed to it on a plate.
>
> Farmers, like Bourbons, have learned nothing from the mistakes of others: from
> the shambles that accompanied antibiotics in medicine. They plan their rural
> factories as if they made soap and not flesh. Eat meat or not, we will all soon
> pay the price.
>
> The Murray Collection is a series of reference strains of bacteria gathered
> before 1950 and kept in suspended animation ever since. Every strain is, when
> reanimated, susceptible to all the antibiotics used today. They are a reminder
> of what a revolution those drugs made. Wards were once filled with patients
> dying from infections of the blood. After penicillin, they could be cured with
> ease. Those glorious days will soon be over, because of evolution, and - worst
> of all - the problem is growing for reasons that have nothing to do with health.
>
>
> Twenty years ago, penicillin could kill the bacterium that causes meningitis. In
> some places, three-quarters can now defy it. In Norway, where antibiotics are
> controlled, one septicaemia strain in 500 is resistant to more than one drug,
> while in Greece, where they are available over the counter, half are.
>
> Plenty of European countries use more than a tonne a day, and, in Kenya,
> tetracycline and ampicillin are sold on the street. Farmers use much more, as
> they add "growth promoters" (anti-biotics, that is) to animal feed. True, most
> are not used in medicine; but - given the obsolescence of the standard drugs -
> they soon may be. Again, Africa leads the way. It is easier to add a powder than
> to clean up a farm, and Kenyan chickens are filled with bacteria resistant to
> tetracycline.
>
> For bacteria, venereal disease evolved early. Infectious third parties called
> plasmids, sections of mobile DNA, are multiplied each time their hosts divide.
> Some can hop from host to host, carrying resistance genes as they go. In
> Madagascar a single strain of plague bacillus has genes against seven
> antibiotics, all carried on a single plasmid. On American farms, bacteria in
> human guts have become resistant to the growth promoters. Some resistance in gut
> bacteria can enter pathogens (such as the agent of gonorrhoea) and, at a stroke,
> give them protection.
>
> What is to be done? The relative success of Norway in keeping resistance at bay
> and the news that this country's largest chicken producer has banned the use of
> growth promoters suggests that the answer is simple: stop the drugs and in time
> the new genes will disappear, just as black moths disappeared when the air was
> cleaned up.
>
> Now comes alarming news. Resistance is indeed expensive, and some bacteria spend
> half their energies on it, with long and complicated biochemical pathways that
> evolution takes years to craft. Keeping such bugs in culture without the
> antibiotic means any mutation that removes the pricy resistance is favoured and,
> quite soon, they lose their defences.
>
> All very comforting; but only part of the story. Start the drug again and there
> is an instant response that gives high levels of protection. That is because to
> lose just one step in the chain saves most of the expense: much of the carefully
> crafted armour stays around, silent, unused and - apparently - scarcely noticed
> by the bacteria's internal economy. Unlike the slow process of building
> resistance in the first place, a single mutation can restore the fortifications
> in full. We may go for unilateral disarmament by abandoning the use of growth
> promoters on farms in the hope that one day the drugs may be useful in medicine,
> but it is too late. Our enemies have no incentive to follow: their armies can be
> kept on standby at almost no cost.
>
> So feckless have we been that medicine's finest days may soon be over. The last
> new class of such drugs was discovered 20 years ago and no more are on the
> horizon. To refuse to stock genetically manipulated soybeans while happily
> selling chickens stuffed with resistant bacteria is a sad comment on our
> understanding of risk.
>
> The only hope seems to be to become a vegetarian: but - didn't you know? -
> farmers now spray crops with growth promoters to increase their yield.
>
> • Professor Steve Jones, who writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph, is the
> author of Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated, published by
> Doubleday at £20.
>
> Find extensive background, useful links and full report texts on the Guardian
> network at www.newsunlimited.co.uk/ antibiotics
A<>E<>R
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