Save medicines for humans, not pigs

When it comes to using antibiotics, the rule should be: two legs good, four legs bad.

Fortunately, someone in Congress agrees, introducing the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act last week.  Follow along at Govtrack.

Get more information on the problem of using antibiotics in livestock from previous posts.

More on livestock antibiotics

I had not read today's paper when I posted earlier.  More on the subject, from Kristof.

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...

Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed.

I hope that this high profile unmasking means some real action will be taken.  This is not a practice we can afford to continue.

Bacon, killing you without clogging your arteries

No, this isn't an article on the nutritional "benefits" of bacon.  It's a note that we use some of our best tools in modern medicine to protect pigs, at the expense of humans. 

Heard of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)?  It's gaining ground because pigs are being given antibiotics and end up harboring the resistant bacteria. 

It's not just bacon that trumps human use of antibiotics.  It's beef.  And a study in Australia a few years back found that prohibiting the prophylactic use of such drugs in livestock improves the chances that these bacteria can be treated in humans. 

So stop giving methicillin to my food.  Save it for me.

Antibacterial soap beats regular soap at marketing, little else

The pervasiveness of "antibacterial" in the health and beauty section has been lamented for years by medical professionals who insist that more prophylactic antibiotic use only leads to more resistant bacteria. However, millions of Americans eschewed this common sense, buying the "safer" soaps by the handfuls. The University of Michigan decided to formally investigate antibacterial soaps, and found that they're not only clever marketing, they're useless:

"What we are saying is that these e-coli could survive in the concentrations that we use in our (consumer formulated) antibacterial soaps," Aiello said. "What it means for consumers is that we need to be aware of what's in the products. The soaps containing [antibiotic] triclosan used in the community setting are no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms, as well as reducing bacteria on the hands."

What antibacterial soaps are good for, however, is helping bacteria mutate into more resistant forms.

E-coli bacteria bugs adapted in lab experiments showed resistance when exposed to as much as 0.1 percent wt/vol triclosan soap.

So show a little marketing resistance and buy regular soap. Clean hands, weak bugs.

When the health of a hamburger trumps your own

The Washington Post has the story on cefquinome, a powerful, recently-developed antibiotic that "belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections." With increasing numbers of bacteria developing antibiotic resistance, it might make sense to judiciously use this drug to treat the most serious human cases of E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and salmonella.

Or, if you're the government agency responsible for drug administration (FDA), you're on the verge of approving it for cattle. This decision notwithstanding that a) there are a number of existing, effective treatments for pneumonia in cattle and b) cefquinome represents the only drug in the medical arsenal against several highly resistant infections and c) that antibiotic use in livestock and poultry - typically done prophylactically - has consistently been linked with the transference of resistant bacteria to humans.

It will bring peace of mind the next time I have a hamburger, as the antibiotic-resistant E. coli twists my bowels, that the cow that provided it was spared pneumonia on its way to the slaughterhouse.

The War On Drug Use, Part 2

Just a couple days after seeing news of antibiotic resistance in US agriculture comes news that drug-resistant salmonella is making rounds in Austrailian fish tanks. Apparently, ornamental fish used in home aquariums are often raised in regulation-free areas of Southeast Asia. By the time they get to an aquarium, the only bacteria left are those that have resisted the massive use of antibiotics in the fish farm.

What's more important, higher sales of ornamental fish or still having a few antibiotics that work on human disease?

The newest front in the War on Drugs

A study in Australia has revealed that prohibiting the use of certain antibiotics in animals helps lower antibiotic resistance in human diseases. Since more vulnerable germs means easier-to-treat disease and shorter treatment times, this is a big deal.

Since many American food producers simply use drugs prophylactically to avoid disease in their animals (that are frequently kept in filthy and densely-packed buildings), perhaps following the Australian model might pay off in terms of easier-to-treat disease.

The good news is that we're already on the way. Last year, the FDA banned the use of cipro-class antibiotics in poultry. Now, how about the cows?