9 ms·

Pediatricians say farm use of antibiotics harms children

98 points by shawndumas 11y ago

diogenescynic 11y ago
80% of antibiotics are being given to livestock animals: >The proportion of antibiotics sold in the United States each year that go to animals turns out to be not 70 percent, but rather 80 percent. Here’s CLF’s Ralph Loglisci, who got the confirmatory numbers from the FDA. http://www.wired.com/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80-of-antibiotics-sold-in-us/ http://www.wired.com/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80... And they also do it because it makes the animals gain weight: >especially troubling is their use not to cure sick animals but to promote "feed efficiency," that is, to increase the animal's weight gain per unit of feed. These drugs are also regularly added to the feed and water of animals that are not sick in order to prevent diseases caused by overcrowded and unsanitary CAFO conditions. These nontherapeutic uses translate into relatively cheap meat prices at the grocery store. http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/industrial-agriculture/prescription-for-trouble.html http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-... I wish they'd save the antibiotics for humans so they'd be more effective. I also wonder if all the antibiotics are making humans gain weight.
- bsilvereagle 11y ago
  > I also wonder if all the antibiotics are making humans gain weight. I'm wondering this too. Hopefully with the new research that's been happening with regards to gut flora we'll start to quantify how the amounts and type of bacteria affect digestive efficiency.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    That's a pretty good bet. It works in cattle, and pigs (which are among the most closely related non-primates). And chickens. So maybe all vertebrates. But I wonder whether there's more to it than "feed efficiency". Gut flora arguably changes nutrient mix before absorption. And some nutrients likely favor weight gain more than others. So perhaps one can recolonize with gut flora that favor overall health vs weight gain.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Cooking meat means our immune system has fewer bacteria to kill off once the meat has entered our bloodstream, thus it's less work for the same calories. Would antibiotics have a similar impact? There was a recent study where one group of mice were fed raw meat, and another were fed cooked meat. The cooked meat group gained weight while the raw meat group lost weight.
    - dalke 11y ago
      Cooking meat has much more to do with breaking down some of the less digestible parts of the food. For example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17827047 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17827047 says "For meat, cooking compromises the structural integrity of the tissue by gelatinizing the collagen. Hence, cooked meat should take less effort to digest compared to raw meat. Likewise, less energy would be expended digesting ground meat compared to intact meat. We tested these hypotheses by assessing how the cooking and/or grinding of meat influences the energy expended on its digestion, absorption, and assimilation (i.e., specific dynamic action, SDA) using the Burmese python, Python molurus." That abstract concludes "We found cooking to decrease SDA by 12.7%, grinding to decrease SDA by 12.4%, and the combination of the two (cooking and grinding) to have an additive effect, decreasing SDA by 23.4%. These results support the hypothesis that the consumption of cooked meat provides an energetic benefit over the consumption of raw meat." For another example, see http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calori... : > Half the time the sweet potato or meat was presented raw, and half the time cooked; half the time it was also pounded and half the time unpounded. ... For both meat and sweet potato, Rachel found that when the food was cooked the mice gained more weight (or lost less weight) than when it was raw. Pounding had very little effect. > We suspect that there are two major reasons for cooked beef providing more calories than raw beef. In cooked beef, the muscle proteins, like the sugars in cooked starch, have opened up and allowed digestive enzymes to attack their amino acid chains. Cooking also does this for collagen, a protein that makes meat difficult to chew because it forms the connective tissue wrapped around muscle fibers. However, we do not know the exact mechanisms. Neither mention killing off bacteria, which makes sense as 1) meat doesn't enter the bloodstream but only its digestive products, and 2) stomach acids kill most of the bacteria. That second paper is http://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199.abstract . > The positive energetic effects of cooking were found to be superior to the effects of pounding in both meat and starch-rich tubers, a conclusion further supported by food preferences in fasted animals. Our results indicate significant contributions from cooking to both modern and ancestral human energy budgets. They also illuminate a weakness in current food labeling practices, which systematically overestimate the caloric potential of poorly processed foods.
  - windexh8er 11y ago
    I'm surprised nobody mentioned this book: "The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health" Justin and Erica Sonnenburg are Stanford researchers that address almost all of this directly in the book with research they've done. Microbiome in the gut are directly impacted by antibiotics and in sterile mice studies those fed the exact same diets gain more weight after antibiotic treatments than those that aren't. As the Ars article makes a point of this is critical in a child's gut, stating that even single rounds of antibiotics can have negative impacts to the childs microbiome for years (side effects being weight gain comparative to other children, etc). Just started to read the book as I've been interested in probiotics and gut health for a few years now and there just isn't much data out there. The researchers wrote the book from a new parent perspective which is makes the book relatable to those who have. Keep in mind this isn't a book focused on attacking antibiotics, but the study of the microbiome in general and so antibiotics come into the picture of the book early (not finished with the book yet). Very good book so far otherwise.
- jff 11y ago
  Animal antibiotics are not the same as human antibiotics. LA-200, for instance, will kill a human but is quite effective in treating sick cattle.
  - ksenzee 11y ago
    LA-200 is just an oxytetracycline injection. Oxytetracycline is approved for use in humans.
    - jff 11y ago
      I was thinking of Micotil, my mistake.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  If you click through to the report there are lots of numbers: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/ForIndustry/UserFees/AnimalDrugUserFeeActADUFA/UCM231851.pdf http://www.fda.gov/downloads/ForIndustry/UserFees/AnimalDrug... Most of the antibiotics used for feed are ionophores and tetracyclines. Ionophones aren't used in humans but are only about 40% of the antibiotics used in feed. They are added to cattle feed because they cut down on illness caused by feeding grain (bloat is crazy, consider this a risky click: http://i.imgur.com/GfPvtBx.jpg http://i.imgur.com/GfPvtBx.jpg ). So most of the resistance concern would be with tetracyclines, where resistance is already a problem for many human infections. The use of medically useful antibiotics as a feed additive should be stopped. I think it is harder to say that about ionophores.
  - 1_player 11y ago
    What is going on in that picture?
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Research animals have "ports" inserted so researchers can see various stages of digestion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow This allows them to make sure things like "cow magnets" aren't going to be harmful
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Here's the article I got it from: https://www.animalsciencepublications.org/publications/jas/pdfs/76/1/299 https://www.animalsciencepublications.org/publications/jas/p... In the third picture, the rumen has become pressurized from bloat, a condition they get when something stops them from belching (often the wrong sort of microbial activity in their rumen).
manachar 11y ago
They touch on it in the article, but it is worth calling special attention to the use of antibiotics to add weight to the animals. It's not being used to treat disease, it's being used to "hack" the biology of the animal to increase yield. Debate on the use of antibiotics for the agricultural industry seems to conflate this indiscriminate usage with targeted therapeutic use.
- Fomite 11y ago
  The problem is there's also a third category: indiscriminate therapeutic use, or more accurately, indiscriminate prophylactic use. There's widespread use of antibiotics as a bandaid to keep the modern industrial farm from collapsing in a wave of bacterial epidemics brought on by the conditions of the farm itself.
- curun1r 11y ago
  The other half of that sentence is important too: > ... or prevent future illness The future illness that they're often protecting the animal from is the natural result of feeding the animal an unnatural diet (corn, soy, etc...stuff that's cheaper than what the animal is historically fed). The illness that's being prevented isn't just possible, it's what would be expected without the antibiotic. Any controls on using antibiotics would need to include provisions for banning them in situations where the health of the animal was knowingly compromised. Otherwise, you create a loophole that allows the industry to make the animals sick and then use antibiotics to treat the sickness they caused.
  - dinoentrails 11y ago
    Do you have any evidence that the diets fed to farm animals increase the risk of illnesses?
    - curun1r 11y ago
      Googling produces a ton of results, but here's one that looks pretty reputable (USDA, based off many other studies): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010511074623.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010511074623.ht...
geezer 11y ago
Don't mess with complex systems we don't understand. Whether it is GMOS, global climate or administering antibiotics to animals. It should be incumbent upon those tinkering with complex systems to provide proof of non-harm. Right now, its the other way around, where those who are harmed have to provide proof of harm.
- privacy101 11y ago
  They say that GMOs are safe, not because of the test that they have done, but because of how long they have been feeding it to us. And they create new varieties constantly.
  - geezer 11y ago
    Homes prices had also always been trending up, until they didn't starting in 2008.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bpodgursky 11y ago
  Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs). It drags the legitimate concerns down and makes them look like crackpot conspiracies.
  - msandford 11y ago
    > Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs). GMOs are only unscientific fearmongering until some kind of a heretofore invisible link is found. Now I'm not suggesting that one will be found, but to say that you know there isn't one is the height of arrogance. There are a great many things that science has known that have been later overturned. For example, Semmelweis beat Pasteur to the punch by a solid 10 years but he died basically in disgrace because the medical community chose to ignore him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur I'd love to provide another dozen examples but I don't have a handy list to show you. Rest assured that if science could be wrong at least once it's within the realm of possibility that it could be wrong again. There's definitely no law of the universe that prevents science from making a mistake or two along the way to knowledge.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rtl49 11y ago
The increase of antibiotic resistance is a matter of legitimate public concern. But this article abuses the same "think of the children" meme that worldly people everywhere despise in politics and journalism of every sort. Children are more susceptible to infection than healthy adults, but so are the elderly and people with compromised immune systems. We don't need to pull at the heartstrings to justify a conservative approach to the use of antibiotics.
- mirimir 11y ago
  Children are also going to live longer than the rest of us, and so will be getting old after most antibiotics become useless.
  - rtl49 11y ago
    The same could be said about every problem facing the species.
    - robomc 11y ago
      Only ones with a presumed irreversible tipping point.
      - rtl49 11y ago
        To be clear, the issue of antibiotic resistance is not such a problem. Generally, resistant bacteria are less fit than their nonresistant counterparts in the absence of the antibiotic, so we should expect that after a period of disuse antibiotics would once again become useful.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        "Period of disuse" may mean hundreds of years when people die of simple cuts and there's no point of even having a hospital. Biology has a lot of intertia.
sdrothrock 11y ago
With antiobiotics so prevalent in livestock feed, why aren't they leading to the rise of a drug-resistant strain of something in livestock? Have they?
jensen123 11y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how irrational most people are. On September 11, 2001 about 3000 people died in a very dramatic way, and the US launches the whole war on terrorism boondoggle, pretty much throws out the Constitution etc. But here 23000 people die every year, in a rather undramatic way, and not a whole lot is being done.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  there are whole businesses based on human irrationality/outright stupidity (just few random examples - short term loans, gambling, smoking tobacco). We tend to think we are better than in reality, and tend to sidetrack evidence of contrary (maybe to be more happy with ourselves, who knows)

98 points by shawndumas 11y ago

80% of antibiotics are being given to livestock animals: >The proportion of antibiotics sold in the United States each year that go to animals turns out to be not 70 percent, but rather 80 percent. Here’s CLF’s Ralph Loglisci, who got the confirmatory numbers from the FDA. http://www.wired.com/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80-of-antibiotics-sold-in-us/ http://www.wired.com/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80... And they also do it because it makes the animals gain weight: >especially troubling is their use not to cure sick animals but to promote "feed efficiency," that is, to increase the animal's weight gain per unit of feed. These drugs are also regularly added to the feed and water of animals that are not sick in order to prevent diseases caused by overcrowded and unsanitary CAFO conditions. These nontherapeutic uses translate into relatively cheap meat prices at the grocery store. http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/industrial-agriculture/prescription-for-trouble.html http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-... I wish they'd save the antibiotics for humans so they'd be more effective. I also wonder if all the antibiotics are making humans gain weight.

bsilvereagle 11y ago
> I also wonder if all the antibiotics are making humans gain weight. I'm wondering this too. Hopefully with the new research that's been happening with regards to gut flora we'll start to quantify how the amounts and type of bacteria affect digestive efficiency.
- mirimir 11y ago
  That's a pretty good bet. It works in cattle, and pigs (which are among the most closely related non-primates). And chickens. So maybe all vertebrates. But I wonder whether there's more to it than "feed efficiency". Gut flora arguably changes nutrient mix before absorption. And some nutrients likely favor weight gain more than others. So perhaps one can recolonize with gut flora that favor overall health vs weight gain.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Cooking meat means our immune system has fewer bacteria to kill off once the meat has entered our bloodstream, thus it's less work for the same calories. Would antibiotics have a similar impact? There was a recent study where one group of mice were fed raw meat, and another were fed cooked meat. The cooked meat group gained weight while the raw meat group lost weight.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Cooking meat has much more to do with breaking down some of the less digestible parts of the food. For example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17827047 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17827047 says "For meat, cooking compromises the structural integrity of the tissue by gelatinizing the collagen. Hence, cooked meat should take less effort to digest compared to raw meat. Likewise, less energy would be expended digesting ground meat compared to intact meat. We tested these hypotheses by assessing how the cooking and/or grinding of meat influences the energy expended on its digestion, absorption, and assimilation (i.e., specific dynamic action, SDA) using the Burmese python, Python molurus." That abstract concludes "We found cooking to decrease SDA by 12.7%, grinding to decrease SDA by 12.4%, and the combination of the two (cooking and grinding) to have an additive effect, decreasing SDA by 23.4%. These results support the hypothesis that the consumption of cooked meat provides an energetic benefit over the consumption of raw meat." For another example, see http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calori... : > Half the time the sweet potato or meat was presented raw, and half the time cooked; half the time it was also pounded and half the time unpounded. ... For both meat and sweet potato, Rachel found that when the food was cooked the mice gained more weight (or lost less weight) than when it was raw. Pounding had very little effect. > We suspect that there are two major reasons for cooked beef providing more calories than raw beef. In cooked beef, the muscle proteins, like the sugars in cooked starch, have opened up and allowed digestive enzymes to attack their amino acid chains. Cooking also does this for collagen, a protein that makes meat difficult to chew because it forms the connective tissue wrapped around muscle fibers. However, we do not know the exact mechanisms. Neither mention killing off bacteria, which makes sense as 1) meat doesn't enter the bloodstream but only its digestive products, and 2) stomach acids kill most of the bacteria. That second paper is http://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199.abstract . > The positive energetic effects of cooking were found to be superior to the effects of pounding in both meat and starch-rich tubers, a conclusion further supported by food preferences in fasted animals. Our results indicate significant contributions from cooking to both modern and ancestral human energy budgets. They also illuminate a weakness in current food labeling practices, which systematically overestimate the caloric potential of poorly processed foods.
- windexh8er 11y ago
  I'm surprised nobody mentioned this book: "The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health" Justin and Erica Sonnenburg are Stanford researchers that address almost all of this directly in the book with research they've done. Microbiome in the gut are directly impacted by antibiotics and in sterile mice studies those fed the exact same diets gain more weight after antibiotic treatments than those that aren't. As the Ars article makes a point of this is critical in a child's gut, stating that even single rounds of antibiotics can have negative impacts to the childs microbiome for years (side effects being weight gain comparative to other children, etc). Just started to read the book as I've been interested in probiotics and gut health for a few years now and there just isn't much data out there. The researchers wrote the book from a new parent perspective which is makes the book relatable to those who have. Keep in mind this isn't a book focused on attacking antibiotics, but the study of the microbiome in general and so antibiotics come into the picture of the book early (not finished with the book yet). Very good book so far otherwise.
jff 11y ago
Animal antibiotics are not the same as human antibiotics. LA-200, for instance, will kill a human but is quite effective in treating sick cattle.
- ksenzee 11y ago
  LA-200 is just an oxytetracycline injection. Oxytetracycline is approved for use in humans.
  - jff 11y ago
    I was thinking of Micotil, my mistake.
maxerickson 11y ago
If you click through to the report there are lots of numbers: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/ForIndustry/UserFees/AnimalDrugUserFeeActADUFA/UCM231851.pdf http://www.fda.gov/downloads/ForIndustry/UserFees/AnimalDrug... Most of the antibiotics used for feed are ionophores and tetracyclines. Ionophones aren't used in humans but are only about 40% of the antibiotics used in feed. They are added to cattle feed because they cut down on illness caused by feeding grain (bloat is crazy, consider this a risky click: http://i.imgur.com/GfPvtBx.jpg http://i.imgur.com/GfPvtBx.jpg ). So most of the resistance concern would be with tetracyclines, where resistance is already a problem for many human infections. The use of medically useful antibiotics as a feed additive should be stopped. I think it is harder to say that about ionophores.
- 1_player 11y ago
  What is going on in that picture?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Research animals have "ports" inserted so researchers can see various stages of digestion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannulated_cow This allows them to make sure things like "cow magnets" aren't going to be harmful
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Here's the article I got it from: https://www.animalsciencepublications.org/publications/jas/pdfs/76/1/299 https://www.animalsciencepublications.org/publications/jas/p... In the third picture, the rumen has become pressurized from bloat, a condition they get when something stops them from belching (often the wrong sort of microbial activity in their rumen).

manachar 11y ago

They touch on it in the article, but it is worth calling special attention to the use of antibiotics to add weight to the animals. It's not being used to treat disease, it's being used to "hack" the biology of the animal to increase yield. Debate on the use of antibiotics for the agricultural industry seems to conflate this indiscriminate usage with targeted therapeutic use.

Fomite 11y ago
The problem is there's also a third category: indiscriminate therapeutic use, or more accurately, indiscriminate prophylactic use. There's widespread use of antibiotics as a bandaid to keep the modern industrial farm from collapsing in a wave of bacterial epidemics brought on by the conditions of the farm itself.
curun1r 11y ago
The other half of that sentence is important too: > ... or prevent future illness The future illness that they're often protecting the animal from is the natural result of feeding the animal an unnatural diet (corn, soy, etc...stuff that's cheaper than what the animal is historically fed). The illness that's being prevented isn't just possible, it's what would be expected without the antibiotic. Any controls on using antibiotics would need to include provisions for banning them in situations where the health of the animal was knowingly compromised. Otherwise, you create a loophole that allows the industry to make the animals sick and then use antibiotics to treat the sickness they caused.
- dinoentrails 11y ago
  Do you have any evidence that the diets fed to farm animals increase the risk of illnesses?
  - curun1r 11y ago
    Googling produces a ton of results, but here's one that looks pretty reputable (USDA, based off many other studies): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010511074623.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010511074623.ht...

geezer 11y ago

Don't mess with complex systems we don't understand. Whether it is GMOS, global climate or administering antibiotics to animals. It should be incumbent upon those tinkering with complex systems to provide proof of non-harm. Right now, its the other way around, where those who are harmed have to provide proof of harm.

privacy101 11y ago
They say that GMOs are safe, not because of the test that they have done, but because of how long they have been feeding it to us. And they create new varieties constantly.
- geezer 11y ago
  Homes prices had also always been trending up, until they didn't starting in 2008.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bpodgursky 11y ago
Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs). It drags the legitimate concerns down and makes them look like crackpot conspiracies.
- msandford 11y ago
  > Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs). GMOs are only unscientific fearmongering until some kind of a heretofore invisible link is found. Now I'm not suggesting that one will be found, but to say that you know there isn't one is the height of arrogance. There are a great many things that science has known that have been later overturned. For example, Semmelweis beat Pasteur to the punch by a solid 10 years but he died basically in disgrace because the medical community chose to ignore him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur I'd love to provide another dozen examples but I don't have a handy list to show you. Rest assured that if science could be wrong at least once it's within the realm of possibility that it could be wrong again. There's definitely no law of the universe that prevents science from making a mistake or two along the way to knowledge.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rtl49 11y ago

The increase of antibiotic resistance is a matter of legitimate public concern. But this article abuses the same "think of the children" meme that worldly people everywhere despise in politics and journalism of every sort. Children are more susceptible to infection than healthy adults, but so are the elderly and people with compromised immune systems. We don't need to pull at the heartstrings to justify a conservative approach to the use of antibiotics.

mirimir 11y ago
Children are also going to live longer than the rest of us, and so will be getting old after most antibiotics become useless.
- rtl49 11y ago
  The same could be said about every problem facing the species.
  - robomc 11y ago
    Only ones with a presumed irreversible tipping point.
    - rtl49 11y ago
      To be clear, the issue of antibiotic resistance is not such a problem. Generally, resistant bacteria are less fit than their nonresistant counterparts in the absence of the antibiotic, so we should expect that after a period of disuse antibiotics would once again become useful.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        "Period of disuse" may mean hundreds of years when people die of simple cuts and there's no point of even having a hospital. Biology has a lot of intertia.

sdrothrock 11y ago

With antiobiotics so prevalent in livestock feed, why aren't they leading to the rise of a drug-resistant strain of something in livestock? Have they?

jensen123 11y ago

It never ceases to amaze me how irrational most people are. On September 11, 2001 about 3000 people died in a very dramatic way, and the US launches the whole war on terrorism boondoggle, pretty much throws out the Constitution etc. But here 23000 people die every year, in a rather undramatic way, and not a whole lot is being done.

saiya-jin 11y ago
there are whole businesses based on human irrationality/outright stupidity (just few random examples - short term loans, gambling, smoking tobacco). We tend to think we are better than in reality, and tend to sidetrack evidence of contrary (maybe to be more happy with ourselves, who knows)