3000 AMERICAINS MEURENT CHAQUE ANNEE D' INFECTIONS RESISTANTES AUX ANTIBIOTIQUES!!!!!
80 % DES ANTIBIOTIQUES PRODUITS AUX USA SONT UTILISES PAR L' INDUSTRIE DE LA VIANDE!!!
OU JUSTE COMMENT EN UN SEUL REPAS VOUS POUVEZ PASSER DE LA VIE A LA MORT
LIRE AUSSI TOXINE DE RON
3,000
Americans will die this year from antibiotic-resistant infections; 80
percent of antibiotics in the U.S. are used by the meat industry. Can
Big Ag and Big Pharma change in time to save this critical medicine for
humans?
One evening in June 2011, at their home in a suburb of Portland,
Ore., Melissa Lee and her husband sat down to a dinner of spaghetti and
meatballs with their 10-month-old daughter. It was one of the first
times Ruby Lee ever tasted meat. What followed, over the next few days,
was a new parent’s nightmare of fever, diarrhea, listlessness, and
doctors—culminating in an urgent phone call about blood test results:
“Get Ruby to the hospital now.”
Ruby’s bloodstream was infected with a virulent bacterial strain,
Salmonella Heidelberg, from the ground turkey she had eaten. She was one
of 136 victims in that outbreak and among the 47.8 million cases,
including 3,037 deaths, of food-borne illnesses in the United States
that year. Medical detective work and DNA fingerprinting soon traced the
outbreak back to Cargill, the privately owned agribusiness giant based
in the Midwest, which had to recall more than 35 million pounds of
ground turkey.
Ruby spent seven days in the hospital on an intravenous drip line.
(The needle had to be moved from hand to foot to arm because her tiny
body kept rejecting it.) Then she spent four days at home with an
antibiotic line threaded into her heart. “The bacteria strain that she
got, we didn’t find out till later, was antibiotic resistant,” Melissa
Lee recalled not long ago. “So the fact that the antibiotic they gave
her actually worked was a minor miracle.” Four other commonly prescribed
antibiotics would have failed. “It was sheer luck that they gave her
the right one.” The problem for Ruby Lee and 2 million
others in the U.S. who contract antibiotic-resistant infections every
year is this: When antibiotics knock out unwanted bacteria, they make
room for other bacteria, which are by some quirk in their genetics
protected from the effect of the antibiotic. These survivors proliferate
and eventually become so dominant that the drug simply has no effect on
the patient. It’s natural selection, and the more antibiotics are in
use, the faster it happens. The result is that important antibiotics no
longer work against staph infections, urinary tract infections,
gonorrhea, tuberculosis, and a growing list of other diseases. We
thought we had conquered these ancient killers at the beginning of the
antibiotic era (which started on D-Day, 70 years ago today), but our old
enemies are back.
So after a lifetime in which a doctor could usually wipe away almost
any infection simply by applying pen to prescription pad, we now stand
at the brink of “a post-antibiotic era.” That’s according to an April
2014 report from the World Health Organization, and it could mean “an
end to modern medicine as we know it,” Dr. Margaret Chan,
director-general of WHO, recently warned.
“Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could
once again kill.” In Britain, the top health official has said that
antibiotic resistance threatens to become an “apocalyptic scenario,”
with effects comparable to those of a catastrophic terrorist attack.
Ruby Lee was sickened by antibiotic-resistant
Salmonella in ground turkey.
(Photo: KeepAntibioticsWorking.com)
We know some of the culprits. The astonishing power of antibiotics to
conquer disease made people so giddy at first that they proposed adding
the drugs to canned foods, or even spraying them into the atmosphere at
hospitals. Patients demanded antibiotics even when they weren’t
necessarily appropriate, for a baby with an ear infection or a viral
sickness. But doctors and hospitals began to see the results of misusing
antibiotics almost immediately, in the form of resistant illnesses.
With many old antibiotics no longer effective and no new ones coming
onto the market to replace them, the medical community is now curtailing
misuse of antibiotics to keep the last few lifesaving drugs effective
for at least a few more years.
One large area of antibiotic misuse has hardly changed at all,
however, partly because until recently no one knew just how
astonishingly large it is: The single largest consumer of antibiotics
worldwide since shortly after World War II isn’t the medical community
at all; it’s the meat industry. The antibiotic era had just begun when
researchers accidentally discovered that the addition to feed of low, or
subtherapeutic, doses of antibiotics made livestock grow faster,
possibly by suppressing bacteria in the gut.
From the start, researchers knew that chronic exposure to antibiotics
would inevitably cause bacteria to become resistant. But the meat
industry has argued that this resistance remains confined to animals and
does not spill over to affect human health; the most it seems it will
concede is Cargill’s statement on its website that “it is an ongoing
debate about whether animal antibiotic use can adversely affect human
health.” Proponents of continued livestock use also point out that
antibiotics have made it possible to keep animals healthy in large-scale
production facilities—enabling industry to provide cheap meat in
abundance for American dinner tables. Routine use of antibiotics, and
the resulting lower cost of meat, has been a significant factor in the doubling
of meat consumption in this country, from just over 90 pounds per
person in 1940 to 184 in the peak year of 2004. (Incidence of heart
disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers has
spiked over the same period; medical science links all of these
conditions to excessive meat consumption, which has put enormous
pressure on the health care system entirely apart from the effects of
antibiotic resistance itself.)
But scientific evidence about the public health risks of antibiotic
use in meat production is becoming increasingly precise. That now pits
much of the health care community and a broad coalition of political,
social, and retail organizations against the giants that dominate the
meat business—among them Cargill, Tyson Foods, ConAgra, Perdue Farms,
Smithfield Foods (acquired by the Chinese firm Shuanghui International
in fall 2013), and JBS S.A. (the Brazilian firm that acquired Swift +
Company in 2007). Those companies account for the lion’s share of the
90-billion-plus pounds of red meat and poultry
produced in the U.S. each year.
Executives at these companies sometimes
acknowledge the need to move away from some antibiotic uses, if only
because of changing consumer attitudes on the issue. But antibiotics
have made it possible to grow more animals faster and in more crowded
conditions—the central premise of the highly concentrated modern
livestock industry—so the prospect of reducing their use has little
appeal. Moreover, demands for changes that could eat into the meat
industry’s bottom line come as it faces sharply increased feed costs and
annual meat consumption that’s down 18 pounds per capita since 2004.
(Accounting varies, but meat producers still manage to rake in well over
$100 billion a year.)
The companies that supply the antibiotics—Zoetis (which spun off from
Pfizer), Eli Lilly’s Elanco, and Phibro Animal Health are some of the
biggest suppliers—also have little incentive to change. Selling drugs
for use in livestock and companion animals has been one of the
industry’s few bright spots, according to pharmaceutical analyst Steve
Scala at Cowen and Company. It’s been a stable source of growth at a
time when the human side of the business looks flat, with drugs becoming
more expensive and difficult to develop.
But the antibiotics controversy could become a drag on that market,
because cases like Ruby Lee’s are becoming disturbingly more common.
Infections that resist antibiotic treatment now kill at least 23,000 Americans
every year and cost the economy as much as $35 billion annually in
added health care and lost productivity. Though doctors, hospitals, and
patients who over- and misuse antibiotics bear some of the blame, new
studies are for the first time implicating livestock antibiotics, too,
and that has increased the demand for limits..............................................
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