Study: Livestock antibiotics hurt human treatments

A new study provides the clearest evidence to date that the heavy use of antibiotics in livestock is undermining the use of antibiotics to treat sick humans, based on the way government scientists are touting their report. CDC officials don’t typically make declarative or bold political statements about the meaning of their research. However, Robert Tauxe, deputy director of CDC’s foodborne, waterborne and environmental disease division, said the study, recently completed by a team of 12 researchers from the CDC, Agriculture Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Ontario Veterinary College and a public health consultant from Atlanta, “shows how the resistance to an important antibiotic can flow from the agricultural sector through food and it’s not theoretical at all.”  The meat and poultry industry remains unimpressed. “The study was not designed nor does it directly link animal or human antibiotic use to a specific foodborne illness,” Betsy Booren, chief scientist for the American Meat Institute Foundation, observes in an email to POLITICO. To complete their study, the government and university researchers say they collected thousands of bacteria samples from cattle, swine, turkeys, processed meat and people in the U.S. and Canada over a five-year period. They tracked the same antibiotic-resistant genes in animals directly to the meat sold in grocery stores and to the people who ate the meat. The gene allows several types of the Salmonella bacteria to be resistant to treatment by cephalosporins, a key class of antibiotics used to fight infections in children. The results showed that 5 percent of the samples taken from people, 16 percent from retail meat and 11 percent from livestock were resistant to cephalosporins. The study was released quietly and with little fanfare in June but CDC officials began highlighting it this month when they published a separate, 114-page report on the overall dangers of antibiotic resistance. Expect to hear more about the study soon as certain lawmakers look to resume their argument for legislation that would limit the use of antibiotic drugs in livestock. One such lawmaker you can expect to hear from is Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), who commented to POLITICO that she has “carried legislation that would preserve eight classes of antibiotics for human health — while allowing for the treatment of sick animals — for the last four terms, and it has been ignored.”...more