Time to clean up our food supply
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Times Colonist Monitor

Last week, Lions Gate Hospital became the most recent B.C. health facility to close beds because of a superbug. The hospital was forced to shut down a ward when VRE, an antibiotic-resistant microbe that causes infections in surgical wounds, was discovered. The same micro-organism closed the renal ward at Royal Jubilee last year, while a different variety struck Children's and Women's in 2002.

Public health experts now believe superbugs like VRE are present in small quantities at almost every hospital in Canada and in many nursing homes. One result is that diseases which had been rendered largely treatable, like pneumonia or post-surgical infections, are making a come-back.

The reason for this worrying trend is not in dispute. The use of penicillin to treat infectious disease first became widespread in the 1940s. Over the following three decades, 10 new classes of antibiotics were discovered, allowing physicians to stay one step ahead in the battle with infection.

Since that time, however, the pace of discovery has slowed dramatically: In the last 30 years only two new antibiotics have been discovered. That gave bacteria time to recover -- too much time. Several are now drug-resistant, like VRE, and more are sure to follow.

What should be done is less clear. But we know the problem is exacerbated when germs are given an opportunity to come in contact with non-lethal quantities of antibiotics. Instead of being killed, the germs are immunized.

Some fear that's what happens when drug therapy is employed in rearing farm animals. Canada and the U.S. both permit the use of pharmaceutical products to accelerate growth in meat and dairy animals.

It is standard practice to feed broad-spectrum antibiotics to cattle and poultry throughout their lives. Because the idea is to prevent illness rather than cure infection, small dosages are used. This may give bacteria the chance they need to develop immunity. In the pork and beef industry, powerful hormones, like progesterone, are also used to promote weight gain.

Farmers argue drugs are safe to use in this manner, and that research shows none of the active components are passed on to humans. Many physicians are not so sure.

A study in Europe showed that when the antibiotic vancomycin was fed to pigs, bacteria in their stomachs became immune to the drug. Subsequently, the same bacteria showed up in humans and apparently took their immunity with them. Physicians were alarmed because vancomycin is a last-ditch drug used for life-threatening, drug-resistant infections.

A fair reading of the science to this point may be that the case is not proved, one way or the other. While that may be good enough for the farm industry, what happened with the BSE crisis should cause second thought.

In that instance, public health experts worried for years that feeding ground-up animal by-products to cattle was dangerous. Even after the first outbreaks of mad cow disease in England, the industry continued in denial for some time.

Eventually of course, there were massive slaughters of cattle in Britain and elsewhere, and pressure is growing on Alberta farmers to follow suit. The beef industry in Canada has been rocked to its foundations, and some producers are leaving the business.

Ironically, the threat to public health in Canada from BSE disease is minuscule. It has been estimated that virtually the entire population of Britain was exposed to contaminated products, resulting in 150 deaths out of a population of nearly 60 million.

In Canada, it's unlikely anyone has been exposed, since the disease is confined to the central nervous systems of infected animals, and those are now kept out of the human food chain in this country. Yet simply the fear of a health threat can force panic measures.

The industry should consider this a warning shot. Ours is a generation almost obsessed with health, perhaps because the lure of an expanded life-span has become reality in recent decades. The risk that one of the infectious plagues might sneak through our defences because of short-sighted husbandry practices, is a risk the industry cannot afford.

By one estimate, the price of beef might rise by 30 per cent if antibiotics were removed from cattle feed. That would certainly hurt both consumers and producers. Removing hormones, which some physicians believe are linked to autoimmune disorders like asthma, would also force costs higher.

But the day is past when we accept industrial practices that take risks with our health. The growing popularity of organic food products in stores is a signal to farmers that the time has come to clean house. Better to act now than wait for another crisis to emerge