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.