• by Mark Sommer
• Tuesday, September 01, 2009
• Inter Press Service

We Americans like our meat. In the course of a year, on average we eat more than 220 pounds of chicken, beef, and pork. But some are starting to pause at the meat counter as they hear about incidents of contamination and compromised food safety, the breeding of drug-resistant super-bugs and the inhumane conditions endured by animals raised in extreme confinement, writes Mark Sommer, host of the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities.

In order to place pigs and poultry in such close quarters, farmers have turned to routinely feeding antibiotics to their animals not just to treat infections but to prevent bacterial disease outbreaks and promote weight gain. Up to 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. go to farm animals. But scientific researchers have been warning for decades that the use of antibiotics in meat production other than to stem an actual infection is producing a chain of unintended negative effects. Biologists say it's breeding drug-resistant strains of bacteria that are undermining the effectiveness of the antibiotics we humans vitally depend on to fight our own infections.

The routine addition of antibiotics to animal feed has enabled highly adaptive bacteria to learn how to fend off most of the medicines used to kill them. In effect, say microbiologists, by overusing antibiotics we've selected the strongest to survive, the very ones we're least prepared to defend against. Developing new antibiotics to protect against these mutating bacteria is so costly and time-consuming that researchers can't keep pace with their rapidly evolving resistance.

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities (www.aworldofpossibilities.org).

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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