Cross posted at
Earth Friendly Shopping - Antibiotics in Vegetables?
Food policy in the United States needs a dramatic overhaul. For the past 40 years, our agricultural policies have on large, mono-crop farms, and large confined animal feed operations (CAFO).
We have known for some time that monocrop agriculture with the heavy use of synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers is robbing our topsoil and polluting our water. We currently use 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of modern, supermarket food. As Michael Pallin put it
when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
Confined Area Feed Operations (basically mono-crop agriculture for livestock) adds severe cruelty to animals to the negative environmental and health issues
Now we find that there is another health issue surfacing.
For over 50 years, farmers have injected livestock with antibiotics. They have done this to reduce infections and promote growth. As confined area feed operations have grown more crowded, agribusiness has grown even more dependent on the use of antibiotics. In fact, the Union of Concerned Scientists has estimated that 40% of the antibiotics sold in the United States is used for livestock.
So, what is the problem? Well, the first problem is that the constant, pervasive use of antibiotics breeds strains of resistant bacteria
This enormous amount of drugs is delivered to animals under conditions congenial to the development of resistance. Large numbers of similar animals are raised in the concentrated facilities that characterize contemporary agriculture. Chicken houses, for example, can contain 20,000 birds. And the Environmental Protection Agency has identified 6,600 operations with at least 1,000 beef cattle or 700 dairy cattle or 2,500 hogs or 100,000 chickens.
In such large operations, antibiotics are often delivered to animals in food and water over extended periods. Bacteria are constantly being exposed to the drugs and eliminated from the populations. It is hard to imagine how resistance would not develop under these circumstances. Indeed, industrial livestock systems are hog heaven for resistant bacteria.
This concern is shared by the World Health Organization
Studies in several countries, including the United Kingdom (UK) and USA, have demonstrated the association between the use of antimicrobials in food animals and antimicrobial resistance. Shortly after the licensing and use of Fluoroquinolone, a powerful new class of antimicrobials, in poultry, fluoroquinolone-resistant Salmonella and Campylobacter isolations from animals, and shortly afterward such isolations from humans, became more common. Community and family outbreaks, as well as individual cases, of salmonellosis and campylobacteriosis resistant to treatment with fluoroquinolones have since been reported from several countries.
The antimicrobials used in livestock have become so pervasive, that they have even shown up in the animal’s excrement. As the NRDC notes, these wastes can work into our environment in numerous ways.
On most factory farms, animals are crowded into relatively small areas; their manure and urine are funneled into massive waste lagoons. These cesspools often break, leak or overflow, sending dangerous microbes, nitrate pollution and drug-resistant bacteria into water supplies.
And now, it would seem the icing on the cake - New studies have found that plants fertilized with manure from factory farms can contain these very same antibiotics.
The Minnesota researchers planted corn, green onion and cabbage in manure-treated soil in 2005 to evaluate the environmental impacts of feeding antibiotics to livestock. Six weeks later, the crops were analyzed and found to absorb chlortetracycline, a drug widely used to treat diseases in livestock. In another study in 2007, corn, lettuce and potato were planted in soil treated with liquid hog manure. They, too, accumulated concentrations of an antibiotic, named Sulfamethazine, also commonly used in livestock.
As the amount of antibiotics in the soil increased, so too did the levels taken up by the corn, potatoes and other plants.
Around 90 percent of these drugs that are administered to animals end up being excreted either as urine or manure," said Holly Dolliver, a member of the Minnesota research team and now a professor of crop and soil sciences at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. "A vast majority of that manure is then used as an important input for 9.2 million hectares of (U.S.) agricultural land."
In fact, farms that use this manure can be certified organic. I think that a lot of people buying organic produce might be surprised to know that there might be antibiotics in their veggies. The concentration of antibiotic taken up in vegetables is very low, but it is real, and no studies have been done on the long term effects of persistent, low dose exposure to antibiotics in humans.
It seems the public, at least at some level, understands that the use of antibiotics in livestock is not healthy. Tyson foods, the second largest producer of chickens in the U.S. has gone to great lengths to label their chickens as raised without antibiotics. Unfortunately, in the case of Tyson, the claim wasn’t quite true. It seems that Tyson injected the chickens with antibiotics before they hatched, and continues to put antimicrobials into their feed. The distinction they drew was that the particular antimicrobial Tyson uses, is not used as human medicine. Even so, in light of these two issues, the FDA has told Tyson to stop using the "raised without antibiotics" label.
It is becoming increasingly clear that large confined animal feed operations pose a threat to our health and our environment, in addition to being unnecessarily cruel to the animals involved. We can’t expect these operations to go away immediately, but we do need to start making changes.
- It would be healthier for all of us to reduce our meat consumption - that alone will reduce the carbon footprint of our diet
- We need to enact reasonable laws to reduce the crowding of these operations
- We need to reduce or eliminate the use of antibiotics and hormones in livestock
- While we should encourage the use of manure as fertilizer, instead of synthetic chemicals, the manure should be composted first, to help break down the antibiotics and other potential hazards.