Meat Industry Still Denying Antibiotic Resistance

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/48722974@N07/5405025510/sizes/z/in/photostream/" target="_blank">eutrophication&hypoxia</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Can you can stuff farm animals together by the thousands and dose them daily with antibiotics, without creating resistant pathogens that affect humans?

Yes, of course you can, insists the meat industry. “Not only is there no scientific study linking antibiotic use in food animals to antibiotic resistance in humans, as the US pork industry has continually pointed out, but there isn’t even adequate data to conduct a study,” the National Pork Producers Council declared in a statement last week.

According to the Pork Producers, a recent report from the Government Accounting Office confirms their view. But as Helena Bottemiller in Food Safety News and Tom Laskway on Grist show, what the GAO is really saying is that regulators like the USDA meat-inspection service have done a lousy job of collecting data on factory-farm antibiotic use. The report states the case bluntly, right in the opening paragraph:

HHS [Health and Human Services] and USDA have collected some data on antibiotic use in food animals and on resistant bacteria in animals and retail meat. However, these data lack crucial details necessary to examine trends and understand the relationship between use and resistance. … Without detailed use data and representative resistance data, agencies cannot examine trends and understand the relationship between use and resistance.

So the GAO is chastising the oversight agencies for failing to collect good data; and the industry is pretending that the lack of good data implies the lack of an underlying problem. It would be funny if real people weren’t dying from what the FDA calls “treatment failure” after being infected with pathogens that antibiotics would normally wipe out.

Meanwhile, the GAO makes clear that factory farm antibiotic abuse does pose a threat to public health. The report states it in plain English:

Unsanitary conditions at slaughter plants and unsafe food handling practices could allow these bacteria to survive on meat products and reach a consumer. Resistant bacteria may also spread to fruits, vegetables, and fish products through soil, well water, and water runoff contaminated by fecal matter from animals harboring these bacteria. If the bacteria are disease-causing, the consumer may develop an infection that is resistant to antibiotics.

While US regulators dither and the meat industry treats their incompetence as vindication, a team of Danish, Australian, and Canadian researchers have brought forth damning evidence on the link between factory farming and resistance. For a study just published in Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, the team isolated strains of antibiotic-resistant E. coli found in humans and compared them with resistant strains found in pigs, poultry, and cattle.

The result:

Resistance in E. coli isolates from food animals (especially poultry and pigs) was highly correlated with resistance in isolates from humans. This supports the hypothesis that a large proportion of resistant E. coli isolates causing blood stream infections in people may be derived from food sources.

Of course, as I’ve written before, none of this is a secret. All the relevant US regulatory and disease-tracking agencies—USDA, FDA, CDC—have acknowledged that factory farms are brewing up pathogens that antibiotics are increasingly unable to treat.

The challenge is getting them to act on it. The real hold-up isn’t the industry’s talent for issuing reality-defying press releases. It’s the industry’s talent for exerting influence on regulators.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate