May 5th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

It’s widely understood that the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in health care has a daunting long-term cost: Bacteria that aren’t killed by the drugs can adapt, breeding new strains that are immune to current drugs.

But while proper use by patients is critical to antibiotics’ efficacy — if your doctor prescribes them, by all means take the full course — a new article in the Journal of Natural Products suggests our focus should be on farms as much as hospitals.

University of Kansas professor Lester Mitscher, who wrote the article, points out that more than half of the world’s antibiotics go not to human patients but to animals — not to cure infections, but as routine additions to feed (used to speed growth), the very kind of blanket, unregulated use that fosters the development of superbugs. The Union of Concerned Scientists asserts that the fraction is far more than half, and that in addition “approximately 13.5 million pounds of antimicrobials prohibited in the European Union are used in agriculture for non-therapeutic purposes every year by U.S. livestock producers.”

Many converts to organic foods are convinced that the solution is to buy meat from animals raised without exposure to antibiotics. But Mitscher (who says of his own shopping habits “I will eat anything that will not recover if left alone!”) hopes his article will redirect consumers’ attention. “A bit of antibiotics occasionally in foodstuffs,” he argues, “is probably less harmful than expensive or unwholesome food. The real worry is whether food available to the public harbors drug resistant bacteria.”

Since drug resistant bacteria can spread through environmental and direct physical contact, buying an expensive hunk of naturally raised beef isn’t necessarily going to keep you safe. Though larger demand for organic goods should, of course, lead to the wider adoption of healthful agricultural practices.

Mitscher says that, for individuals, the wisest measures are simple ones: wash and cook food thoroughly, follow prescriptions to the letter, don’t spit on the sidewalk. “These do not require technical innovation,” he notes, “but are hard to implement as they require education and good compliance.”

Meanwhile, Mitscher hopes his history of antibiotics will help convince industrial farmers to stop their routine use, saving drugs for only those occasions when a bacterial infection requires them.

As for scientists, Mitscher still hopes for development of “triple threat” antibiotics that will be able to inhibit the ability of microbes to mutate. In their absence, there’s little choice but to use what we have intelligently: “It is hard to argue against saving lives even if one expects that this will work only for a while. If we keep throwing things at the bacteria we make their lives increasingly more complex. They, after all, pay an energy price for
elaborating ever more complex defensive mechanisms.”

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