Industrial farming is a controversial and heavily politicized issue. For decades, our meat industry has stuffed animals raised for human consumption with antibiotics and pesticide-laced grains, and confined our soon-to-be chicken cutlets, bacon and filet mignons to small spaces, allowing for pathogens and microbes to manifest and multiply, while creating a bigger, fatter (more profitable) animal. Industrial farming practices have made meat more affordable, but at what cost to our health? 
Common antibiotic and anti-parasitic medicines and pesticides fed to animals (or found in their feed) on industrial farms are linked to nerve damage and/or poisoning, severe allergic reactions, vascular diseases, renal failure, skin cancers and can lead to antibiotic resistance in humans. A recent audit by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Inspector General found that US beef, with high levels of pesticides, antibiotics and heavy metals, is being sold in grocery stores across our country. The agency's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) runs the program which tests meat for pathogens like salmonella and strains of E. coli, however, without further regulatory guidance from both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, which have the authority to set the legal limits for tolerance levels for human exposure to pesticides and antibiotics, this will persist.
Antibiotic use on the farm was specifically highlighted this week during a briefing on Capitol Hill hosted by Keep Antibiotics Working, Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Public Health Association, The Pew Charitable Trusts and Union of Concerned Scientists. Maryn McKenna, journalist and author of Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA discussed the evolution of the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in food animals and the resulting epidemic of "superbugs" like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), that is highly resistant to antibiotics. According to McKenna's research for her latest book, 24 percent of swine in Iowa and Illinois being raised on industrial farms are contaminated with MRSA.
According to David Wallinga, Director of the Food and Health Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy non-therapeutic antibiotic use in food animals not only affects our health, but impacts our economy. During his presentation, he cited 27 countries in the EU, New Zealand, Thailand and Korea that have banned or are in the process of banning non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed hindering the US's ability to export meat abroad.
Several bills have been introduced aimed at better regulating and monitoring the use of antibiotics in food animals. Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) is championing this issue on Capitol Hill and is the sponsor of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 (PAMTA), H.R. 1549, which would limit the use of antimicrobial medicines in food animals. The late Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) sponsored the PAMTA counterpart in the Senate, S.619. Similarly, the Strategies to Address Antimicrobial Resistance Act, H.R. 2400 sponsored by Representative Jim Matheson (D-UT), would put in place a strategic surveillance plan to better monitor antimicrobial medicine use in food animals.
From Capitol Hill to the local farm, the story behind our food system is unfolding. As the public health impact of industrial farming practices is realized, Americans may be clearing room on their dinner plates for something else.
Thanks for the nice write-up! The Iowa numbers are even larger, actually: 49% of 299 pigs sampled in the first round of research (on a "pyramid" of farms that cross the Iowa/Illinois border) were carrying MRSA ST398, the animal-adapted strain. Then in a second test, the same research group found that 24% of pigs on conventional confinement/antibiotic-using farms were carrying that strain, but zero percent of pigs on organic/non-antibiotic-using farms.
[...] Here’s Pew’s announcement, here’s the UCS version, here’s a write-up from the Washington Examiner, and here’s a longer one from the site Spectrum Science. [...]
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