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.

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.