Sometimes, we’re too smart for our own good. When Alexander Fleming identified the antibiotic properties of penicillin in 1928, human life and culture changed dramatically. His discovery quickly led to other discoveries, and soon miracle drugs were readily available.
Diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid no longer meant death sentences to those they infected. A great number of children survived the illnesses of their first years to grow to adulthood. Millions of soldiers wounded during the Second World War survived infections.
Industrial livestock farming became possible — with the new and emerging pharmaceuticals, large numbers of cattle, pigs, and poultry could be raised to meaty adulthood in cramped, crowded conditions that would have shortened their lives only decades earlier. This helped fuel a post-war food revolution that put meat, eggs and milk — and bread and cereal from industrial agriculture’s grain side — into the bellies of millions of additional people every year.
Acting on the premise that if a little bit of something is good, a whole lot more must be a whole lot better, we started popping pills as if they were candy-covered peanuts. We started pre-emptively treating our food supply with the drugs, too.
Hey — when winter approaches, we feed anti-freeze into our vehicle radiators, so why not do the same to prevent spread of infection on our dairy and other livestock farms? Why not apply the principle to ourselves to prevent secondary infections when we’re recovering from bouts of the flu?
The result: within decades, the bugs were getting the better of the drugs — and of us. As early as the 1940s, common antibiotics were failing against bacteria-caused diseases that had been held in check only a few years before.
The pattern has held since, with bugs and drugs duking it out within us and within our food supply, and the resourceful bugs winning every round.
The widespread use of antibiotics in animals has been key in the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The more antibiotics animals destined for our stewpots are exposed to, the more methicillin- or Vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae and other common resistant bacteria are found in the animals’ meat and milk.
The more the drugs are fed to our food animals, the more we are exposed to both drugs and resistant bacteria. Evidence indicates that when use of antibiotics in agriculture is banned, presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in animals and food quickly declines.
In B.C., milk-processing plants test milk shipped from dairy farms before adding it to the supply. If a test finds traces of antibiotics in a sample, the entire tank containing the contaminated milk is discarded immediately.
From July 2015 to July 2016, 11 B.C. dairy farmers were fined an average of about $6,000 each for shipping milk that tested positive for antibiotics. They also had to pay all associated costs to dispose of the milk and clean the shipping containers.
Although most of B.C.’s almost 500 dairy farmers give their cows antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals at some point in the herds’ lives, treated cows must be removed from the food supply until all drug residues have cleared their systems. Farmers are responsible for testing their own cows, even though many commercially available tests are limited in the antibiotics they detect.
This is not to say that use of drugs in the food supply is the sole or even primary cause of the development of antibiotic-resistance in disease-causing bacteria around us. We, too, must accept responsibility for the way we incorrectly or inappropriately dose ourselves with drugs and how that contributes to the problem.
We must also acknowledge that our obsession with sterilizing our environment with antibacterial compounds — now found at high levels throughout our environment and in our bodies — is accelerating the development of antibiotic resistance. Already, new, improved, resistant versions of the bacteria that cause pneumonia, tuberculosis, shigella, typhoid and other infections are taxing our health-care systems.
Because of ignorance or laziness or hubris or some other common characteristic of human nature, a suite of tools that once saved millions from death has dulled and become ineffective, and the risk of dire, deadly diseases knocking us sideways increases every year.
