I'll Take Mine Without Penicillin, Please

Readers of this blog know that one of my pet peeves is the lack of safety in our food supply chain. A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer confirms that I am not the only one with this beef (pun intended). According to the piece, Temple University Hospital's Chief of Infectious Disease, Thomas Fekete, believes that antibiotics, being routinely added to animal feed, "speed up the process by which disease-causing microbes become resistant to these drugs."

In fact, there is a new bill floating around Congress, the preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, that would do just what its name implies: limit the use of antibiotics on farms to therapeutic treatment.

What a concept--remarkably similar to the one human doctors have been advised to follow: only prescribe antibiotics when they are truly needed. And yet, farmers are deeply opposed to the bill, believing that the animals on their farms would get sicker without prophylactic antibiotics and then end up needing even more drugs in higher doses.

Of course there is a logical cure for all of this: abolish factory farming in which animals are kept so closely together that disease spreads like wildfire, but that would mean less profit for the farmers. It also might mean slower development of antibiotic resistant infections, like MRSA.

While the farmers are arguing with the doctors, I might point out that we are the ones who are reaping the benefits of their standoff: namely the rise of antibiotic resistant infections in people. In the Philadelphia are alone, the "number of hospitalized patients with drug resistant infections of all kinds quadrupled over the last decade, from 1,673 in 1998 to 7.012 in 2007" according to the Inquirer's analysis.

This bill has been introduced in Congress three times since 2003, and never once made it to a vote. Meanwhile, some food suppliers and restaurant chains, including McDonalds and Chipolte, have voluntarily placed a ban on non-therapeutic antibiotic use, but it is only the proverbial drop in the bucket.

Shelley Hearne, managing Director of the Pew Health Group puts it this way: "Government action is really needed to protect public health."

In the meantime, please buy and eat local and/or organic so you know what you are putting into your body.