England’s Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally
Davies, said recently that resistance to antibiotics are one of our everyday
health’s greatest threats Dame Sally actually warned that death rates from
bacterial infections have a chance to return to those of the early 20th century, describing resistance to
antibiotics in her book as a "catastrophic global threat" that should
be ranked alongside terrorism, writing “We have
taken antibacterial and other antimicrobial drugs for granted for too long. We
have misused them through overuse and false prescription, and as a result the
bugs are growing in resistance and fighting back. We are also not developing
new drugs fast enough. (1)
This is not a distant
threat: already, resistant bugs are killing 25,000 people a year across Europe”. (2)
Dr. Thomas Frieden, the
director of the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a blunt warning: “If we’re not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic
era. For some patients and some microbes, we are already there. At least 2
million people per year in the U.S. get infections that are resistant to
antibiotics and 23,000 die as a result of these infections”. (3)
There is no dispute of this. Dame Sally Davies said that the reason for
this was the lack of new drugs combined with massive overuse of existing
antibiotics. Another reason for this
resistance is the situation of the overuse of antibiotics in livestock and
poultry production. (4)
UK factory farmed chickens are bred to
reach a weight of 2.2 kilo in five weeks with a stocking density of 17 to 20
birds a square metre, slightly less than an A4 sheet of paper. In these situations antibiotics are needed on
a regular basis. It is a fact that
about two thirds of chickens on sale in the UK have been found to be
contaminated with the bug campylobacter. (5)
Superbugs that
are highly resistant to the antibiotics used by doctors have been found in
British farm animals. Livestock, especially
pigs, are a reservoir of new bacteria which are a threat to human health,
suggest a new Government study. Virtually
all - 94.5 per cent - of the 13million pigs slaughtered in the UK in the past
year carried campylobacter, which can be very serious indeed, it can kill.
Nearly one
in four pigs’ carries salmonella and one in three will carry another
little-known food-poisoning bacterium, Yesinia. In fact over half the worldwide production
of anti-biotics are used on animals. The
ciwf report states “The world’s public-health experts, from the European Union,
the United States and the World Health Organization, are agreed that
drug-resistant bacteria are created in farm animals by antibiotic use and that
these resistant bacteria are transmitted to people in food and then spread by
person-to-person transmission. In addition, genes for antibiotic resistance are
known to be transferable to other bacteria of the same or a different strain or
species. (6)
Any humans infected through food or
contaminated water with these bugs - new strains of E.coli and campylobacter -
are at serious risk. For the bugs have
become immune to the medicinal antibiotics which would normally be used to
drive them out of the body. Doctors are
also worried that this immunity is being passed on to humans over time, through
food. (7)
Without
effective anti-biotics the world we know would change tomorrow. We could all be facing a
future where it is no longer possible to have an organ transplant, hip
replacement or help our bodies through cancer treatment as the risk of fatal
infection is too great. Everyone has a role to play in preserving the
antibiotics that we have now, both for ourselves and to protect future
generations.
Are
we paying the price due to the never ending consumer demand for antibiotics
whenever we have a cold or flu and our insistence on ever cheaper food? (8)
(1) http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Dont-Work-Penguin-Special-ebook/dp/B00EZEC0SM/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Posts
2 comments:
Another informative post. Thanks Peter. It's something we think a lot about as a family... for a start we try to treat illness naturally as much as possible and we're certainly glad to be vegetarian... but would always urge anyone eating meat to really consider where they source it from (for a number of reasons, one being health).
I find it quite frightening Alice that many just look at the price of say, a chicken, and buy it because it was cheap and yet would not walk into a pub and buy a pint using the same criteria... Weird or what?
Post a Comment