The old joke about making love to a gorilla is that you don't stop when you're tired; you stop when the gorilla is tired. In modern American agriculture, one of the gorillas is McDonald's, the biggest restaurant chain on Earth. The other day it announced a change for its U.S. outlets that will force suppliers to adapt.
Over the next two years it will stop buying chickens raised with antibiotics that are "important to human medicine." This is a response to complaints from medical groups, scientists and government agencies, who say farmers are eroding the effectiveness of these drugs by overusing them. Adding them to feed as routine growth stimulants speeds the emergence of bacteria they can't kill.
...Most of the proposed remedies for this problem involve curbing the unnecessary application of these drugs. The federal Food and Drug Administration has a campaign to persuade agribusiness companies to stop using them to enhance growth and reduce feed costs. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has proposed phasing out all use of antibiotics in animals for non-therapeutic purposes.
What is overlooked is that the looming shortage of effective antibiotics, like every shortage, has not only a demand component, but a supply component. Curbing their use, though helpful, only postpones the day when existing antibiotics lose their potency.
Every antibiotic, given the ability of bacteria to evolve rapidly to survive, is bound to become ineffective sooner or later. The trick is to ensure a steady stream of new drugs that the resistant microbes have never encountered before. We need medical science to advance more rapidly than the bacteria do.
But lately, it hasn't. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist at Stanford's Hoover Institution, says one culprit is obvious. In 2002, the FDA established new rules for the clinical trials used to test new antibiotics -- doubling the number of patients required, thus making drug development harder and more expensive.
Since then, he says, many of the big pharmaceutical companies have given up research and development on antibiotics. Clinical trials have grown rare. "New antibiotic development has slowed to a standstill," says the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
The author concludes:
Bacteria can evolve. So can McDonald's. Maybe federal policymakers can as well, before it's too late.
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