Meat Is Murder—but It’s People Being Killed (and Not How You Think)

23,000 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?

June 06, 2014 By Richard Conniff

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.”

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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.)

http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/06/06/antibiotic-resistance-from-meat?cmpid=tpnews-eml-2014-06-07-smartkids