Veganwolf.com
The Hidden Link Between Factory Farms and Human
Illness
Mother Earth News February/March 2009
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Natural-Health/Meat-Poultry-Health-Risk.aspx
The
Hidden Link Between Factory Farms and Human Illness
By Laura
Sayre
You may be familiar with many of the problems associated with
concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. These "factory
farm"
operations are often criticized for the smell and water
pollution caused by
all that concentrated manure; the unnatural,
grain-heavy diets the animals
consume; and the stressful, unhealthy
conditions in which the animals live.
You may not be aware, however,
of the threat such facilities hold for you
and your family's health -
even if you never buy any of the meat produced in
this manner.
Factory farms are breeding grounds for virulent disease,
which can
then spread to the wider community via many routes - not just in
food, but also in water, the air, and the bodies of farmers, farm
workers and their families. Once those microbes become widespread in
the
environment, it's very difficult to get rid of them.
A 2008 report from
the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal
Production, a joint project of
the Pew Charitable Trusts and the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health, underscores those
risks. The 111-page report, two years in the
making, outlines the
public health, environmental, animal welfare and rural
livelihood
consequences of what they call "industrial farm animal
production."
Its conclusions couldn't be clearer. Factory farm production is
intensifying worldwide, and rates of new infectious diseases are
rising.
Of particular concern is the rapid rise of
antibiotic-resistant microbes, an
inevitable consequence of the
widespread use of antibiotics as feed
additives in industrial
livestock operations.
Scientists, medical
personnel and public health officials have been
sounding the alarm on these
issues for some time. The World Health
Organization and the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) have
recommended restrictions on agricultural
uses of antibiotics; the
American Public Health Association (APHA) proposed
a moratorium on
CAFOs back in 2003. All told, more than 350 professional
organizations - including the APHA, American Medical Association, the
Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the American Academy of
Pediatrics - have called for greater regulation of antibiotic use in
livestock. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared
antibiotic-resistant infections an epidemic in the United States. The
FAO recently warned that global industrial meat production poses a
serious threat to human health.
The situation is akin to that
surrounding global climate change four
or five years ago: near-universal
scientific consensus matched by
government inaction and media inattention.
Although the specter of
pandemic flu - in which a virulent strain of the
influenza virus
recombines with a highly contagious strain to create a bug
rivaling
that responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic, thought to have killed
as
many as 50 million people - is the most dire scenario, antibiotic
resistance is a clear and present danger, already killing thousands
of
people in the United States each year.
People, Animals and
Microbes
From one perspective, picking up bugs from our domesticated
animals
is nothing new. Approximately two-thirds of the 1,400 known human
pathogens are thought to have originated in animals: Scientists think
tuberculosis and the common cold probably came to us from cattle;
pertussis from pigs or sheep; leprosy from water buffalo; influenza
from
ducks.
Most of these ailments probably appeared relatively early in the
10,000-year-old history of animal domestication. Over time, some
human
populations developed immunity to these diseases; others were
eventually
controlled with vaccines.
Some continued to kill humans until the
mid-20th century discovery of
penicillin, a miracle drug that rendered
formerly life-threatening
infections relatively harmless. Other antibiotics
followed, until by
the 1960s leading researchers and public health officials
were
declaring that the war on infectious diseases had been
won.
Beginning in the mid 1970s, however, the numbers of deaths from
infectious diseases in the United States started to go back up. Some
were from old nemeses, such as tuberculosis, newly resistant to
standard
antibiotic treatments; others were wholly novel.
"In recent decades,"
writes Dr. Michael Greger, director of public
health and animal agriculture
for the Humane Society of the United
States and author of Bird Flu: A Virus
of Our Own Hatching,
"previously unknown diseases have surfaced at a pace
unheard of in
the recorded annals of medicine: more than 30 newly identified
human
pathogens in 30 years, most of them newly discovered zoonotic
viruses." (Zoonotic viruses are those that can be passed from animals
to
humans.)
Why is this happening? There are many reasons, including the
increased pace of international travel and human incursions into wild
animals' habitats. But one factor stands out: the rise of industrial
farm animal production. "Factory farms represent the most significant
change in the lives of animals in 10,000 years," Greger writes. "This
is
not how animals were supposed to live."
Chicken and pig production are
particularly bad. In 1965, the total
U.S. hog population numbered 53
million, spread over more than 1
million pig farms in the United States -
most of them small family
operations. Today, we have 65 million hogs on just
65,640 farms
nationwide. Many of these "farms" - 2,538, to be exact - have
upwards
of 5,000 hogs on the premises at any given time. Broiler chicken
production rose from 366 million in 1945 to 8,400 million in 2001,
most
of them in facilities housing tens of thousands of birds.
On a global
scale, the situation is even worse. Fifty-five billion
chickens are now
reared each year worldwide. The global pig inventory
is approaching 1
billion, an estimated half of which are raised in
confinement. In China and
Malaysia, it's not unheard of for hog
facilities to house 20,000 or even
50,000 animals.
The Mechanics of Resistance
"Concentrated animal
feeding operations are comparable to poorly run
hospitals, where everyone is
given antibiotics, patients lie in
unchanged beds, hygiene is nonexistent,
infections and re-infections
are rife, waste is thrown out the window, and
visitors enter and
leave at will," write Johns Hopkins researchers Ellen
Silbergeld, Jay
Graham and Lance Price in the 2008 Annual Review of Public
Health. By
concentrating large numbers of animals together, factory farms
are
terrific incubators for disease. The stress of factory farm
conditions weakens animals' immune systems; ammonia from accumulated
waste burns lungs and makes them more susceptible to infection; the
lack
of sunlight and fresh air - as well as the genetic uniformity of
industrial
farm animal populations - facilitates the spread of
pathogens.
The
addition of steady doses of antibiotics to this picture tips the
balance
from appalling to catastrophic. Poultry producers discovered
by accident in
the 1940s that feeding tetracycline fermentation
byproducts accelerated
chickens' growth. Since then, the use of
antibiotics as feed additives has
become standard practice across
much of the industry. The Union of Concerned
Scientists estimates
that non-therapeutic animal agriculture use (drugs
given to animals
even when they are not sick) accounts for 70 percent of
total
antibiotic consumption in the United States.
The medical
community has been cautioning for years against
irresponsible antibiotic use
among people, but in terms of sheer
numbers, livestock use is far more
significant. It's a simple
scientific fact that the more antibiotics are
used - especially
prolonged use at low doses as in factory farms - the more
antibiotic-resistant microbes will become. Bacteria and viruses are
also
notoriously promiscuous, swapping genes across species and even
across
genera, creating what the Johns Hopkins researchers call
"reservoirs of
resistance." "In some pathogens, selection for
resistance also results in
increased virulence," they note. In other
cases, otherwise harmless microbes
can transfer resistance genes to
pathogenic species.
There also are
indications that factory farm conditions make animals
more likely to excrete
pathogenic microbes - suggesting another
mechanism by which conversion to
more humane farming methods would
offer greater protection for human
health.
Routes of Transmission
Most so-called bio-containment
procedures for confinement livestock
operations are more concerned with
protecting the crowded animals
from disease outbreaks than from preventing
human pathogens from
escaping into the wider environment. As the report from
the Pew
Commission points out, every step in the industrial farm animal
production system holds the potential for disease transmission, from
transportation and manure handling, to meat processing and animal
rendering.
The increasingly globalized nature of the farm animal
production
system means that live animals, as well as fresh and frozen meat,
are
constantly crossing international borders, ensuring that diseases
present in one location will soon spread elsewhere. But the biggest
transmission route is waste: Confined livestock operations in the
United
States produce three times as much waste each year as our
country's entire
human population - and yet all that manure is much
more loosely regulated
and handled than human waste.
Antibiotic-resistant microbes, as well as the
antibiotics themselves,
are now widely present as environmental
contaminants, with unknown
consequences for everything from soil
microorganisms to people.
Canada's largest waterborne disease outbreak,
which infected 1,346
people and killed six, was traced to runoff from
livestock farms into
a town's water supply. The U.S. Geological Survey found
antimicrobial
residues in 48 percent of 139 streams tested nationwide from
1999 to
2000. Other studies have detected resistant bacteria in the air up
to
30 meters upwind and 150 meters downwind of industrial hog
facilities.
A wealth of evidence links industrial meat and poultry
directly with
foodborne illness. When dioxin-contaminated chicken feed led
to the
removal from the market of all chicken and eggs in Belgium for
several weeks in June of 1999, doctors there noted a 40 percent
decline
in the number of human Campylobacter infections. Repeated
studies have
concluded that as much as 80 percent of retail
supermarket chicken in the
United States is contaminated with
Campylobacter. Similarly, the Centers for
Disease Control and
Prevention estimates that Salmonella-contaminated eggs
caused 180,000
cases of sickness in the United States in 2000. E. coli
O157:H7 is
blamed for 73,000 illnesses in this country each year, including
about 2,000 hospitalizations and 60 deaths.
Although thorough cooking
and careful handling can minimize your
risks, antibiotic resistance raises
the stakes when someone gets ill:
"One in two human cases of Campylobacter,
and one in five cases of
Salmonella are now antibiotic-resistant," says
Steve Roach, public
health program director for the Food Animal Concerns
Trust and a
member of the executive committee for the Keep Antibiotics
Working
coalition. "And when you have antibiotic resistance, you have more
complications, more blood infections, more mortality."
In fact,
public health experts are beginning to suspect that a whole
host of
infections not previously thought of as food-related may
ultimately be
linked to the overuse of antibiotics in animal
agriculture. Researchers at
the University of California-Berkeley,
for example, traced a multi-state
outbreak of urinary tract
infections among women in 1999 and 2000 to
contamination with a
single strain of drug-resistant E. coli found in cows.
Dr. Lee Riley,
lead author of a paper on the findings published in Clinical
Infectious Diseases, cautioned that the findings indicated that "the
problem of foodborne disease is much greater in scope than we had
ever
previously thought."
And then there's methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus, or
MRSA. Previously confined largely to hospitals,
MRSA is now killing
more people in the United States each year than
HIV/AIDS. A series of
recent studies in Europe have demonstrated a strong
causal link
between MRSA and intensive pig farming in the Netherlands,
Germany
and France. Little or no data are available on MRSA in animals in
the
United States, but the bacterium is widely present on pig farms in
Canada, which sells millions of live pigs to the United States
annually,
so it seems pretty likely it's in U.S. pig factories, too.
All in all,
the CDC reports that 2 million people in the United
States now contract an
infection each year while in the hospital. Of
those, a staggering 90,000 die
- a toll higher than that from
diabetes. Numbers such as that are prompting
some medical
investigators to suggest that we may be entering a
"post-antibiotic
era," one in which (as a paper published in Environmental
Health
Perspectives in 2007 put it) "there would be no effective antibiotics
available for treating many life-threatening infections in
humans."
Connections such as these aren't always easy to prove, however,
especially for drugs that have already been in widespread use for
decades, which is one reason why regulations to reign in the
non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials have so far been largely
lacking
in the United States. The pending approval of an antibiotic
called
cefquinome to treat respiratory diseases in cattle offered a
recent test
case. Cefquinome is similar to cefepime, a last-resort
antibiotic used to
treat serious infections in people. (Both are
fourth-generation
cephalosporins, one of the small number of new
antibiotics developed in
recent years.) The FDA's Veterinary Medicine
Advisory Committee, along with
the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the American Medical
Association, recommended against
approval, warning that using cefquinome for
animals would almost
certainly render cefepime less effective for humans.
But the FDA has
apparently caved to industry pressure, claiming it lacks the
authority to deny the drug companies' request.
The Way
Forward
Fortunately, there is a better way. No one wants high-quality
food to
be unaffordable, but increasingly it appears that as a human species
we need to strike a better balance between cheap food and safe food.
Sweden and Denmark have led the way over the past two decades in the
development of commercial farming methods that minimize antibiotic
use.
Alternative management strategies include improving animals'
diets, changing
weaning practices for pigs, cleaning facilities
thoroughly in between groups
and being more careful about mixing
animals coming from different
locations.
Scandinavian producers weren't necessarily happy when their
countries' ban on non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics was put in
place,
but they've come to realize that they can still run profitable
operations
without them. Researchers in this country have shown that
the same is true
here: In 2006, a team at Johns Hopkins used data
from poultry giant Perdue
to show that the small advantage in weight
gain associated with
non-therapeutic antibiotic use was canceled out
by the cost of the drugs.
Organic farmers in many parts of the world
have also shown that livestock
can be raised profitably and humanely
without the use of
antibiotics.
"This is not a necessary problem," says Lance Price,
scientific
advisor for Johns Hopkins' Center for a Livable Future. "If you
look
at all the stakeholders in this equation - you and me, the doctors
and hospitals, the producers - everyone but the drug companies can
entertain alternatives. The only group that stands to lose from a
more
responsible use of antibiotics is the drug companies."
A bill introduced
in Congress in 2007, the Preservation of
Antibiotics for Medical Treatment
Act, was one attempt to address
these issues. Sponsored by Rep. Louise
Slaughter, D-N.Y., the only
microbiologist in Congress, and Senate Health
Committee Chairman
Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., the bill would have withdrawn
approvals for
feed-additive use of seven classes of antibiotics of value to
human
medicine and required producers of agricultural antibiotics to
provide data to public health officials on the usage of the drugs
they
sell.
The costs associated with continuing industrial farm animal
production are enormous. If it's allowed to continue, industrial
production as currently practiced could eventually eliminate a lot of
other farming options (in addition to making a lot of us sick). As
one
Midwestern organic farmer explained to me, it's simply not
possible to raise
pigs organically if you live too close to a
confinement facility: The
pathogen pressure is too intense. "Iowa has
become a sink for pig diseases,"
he said. They're just in the air,
and you can't avoid them.
5 Nasty
Microbes Linked to Factory Farming
Campylobacter: This is the most common
cause of foodborne diarrheal
illness in the United States, causing an
estimated 2 million cases
each year. Most don't require medical treatment,
but a small number
(approximately 50 per year) end in death. Chicken and
turkey are the
usual sources: Studies have shown that most conventional
chicken is
contaminated when it leaves the processing plant. Rising numbers
of
Campylobacter infections resistant to a class of antibiotics called
fluoroquinolones led the FDA, in 2000, to seek to ban fluoroquinolone
use in U.S. poultry production. The ban was held up in court by drug
maker Bayer, but was finally put in place in 2005.
MRSA:
Staphylococcus aureus is a bacteria widely present in our
environment and
usually harmless, but in susceptible individuals it
can cause
life-threatening infections. Methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus, or
MRSA (pronounced "mir-sah"), used to be
primarily a problem in hospitals,
but these days, cases of MRSA are
increasingly likely to be
"community-acquired," and evidence suggests
that factory farms are a source.
MRSA can be spread by human or
animal carriers with no signs of illness; a
recent study found that
nearly half of Dutch pig farmers, and 39 percent of
pigs in Dutch
slaughterhouses, were carriers of MRSA.
Salmonella:
This is another bacteria causing frequent and sometimes
serious foodborne
illness, with an estimated 1.4 million U.S. cases
each year, including
18,000 hospitalizations and 600 deaths.
Salmonella can contaminate beef,
poultry, eggs and even vegetables.
Antibiotic-resistant Salmonella is on the
rise: One strain, known as
DT104, is resistant to five major antibiotics
used in humans.
E. coli O157:H7: Most Escherichia coli bacteria are
harmless, but a
few strains, including the notorious O157:H7, can be deadly.
Ground
beef is the most common contaminated food source for people, but as
the spinach scare of 2006 showed, other foods can also be affected.
The
toxic strains are linked to conditions in beef feedlots.
Enterococcus:
Enterococci are a widespread group of intestinal
bacteria that can cause
serious infections in other parts of the
body. Antibiotic resistance is a
major concern with Enterococcus
faecium, the strain most commonly associated
with illness in people.
In Europe, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE)
is a widespread
environmental contaminant, where its emergence has been
linked to
agricultural use of avoparcin, an antibiotic closely related to
vancomycin. In the United States, VRE is more often found in
hospitals,
and doctors are running out of treatment options: About 4
percent of VRE
patients no longer respond to the antibiotic Synercid,
a last-defense drug
which is unfortunately related to virginiamycin,
widely used in U.S. animal
agriculture.
What You Can Do
Reduce the amount of meat in your
diet. Industrial farm animal
production is driven by rising global demand
for meat. Healthy
protein alternatives include whole grains, beans, nuts and
dairy
products. Think of meat more as a seasoning (as in soups and stews),
not an essential, three-meals-a-day main course.
When you do eat
meat, buy from local farmers practicing humane,
sustainable methods. Seek
out meat and dairy products labeled as
"raised without antibiotics," and
tell your local market manager
you'd like to see more such products on store
shelves.
Contact your Congressional delegation or Member of Parliament
and ask
them to support legislation to limit antibiotics in livestock feed,
such as the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act,
introduced to Congress in 2007.
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