The More We Use -- We Lose

Here is a news story that could determine whether you live or die. Many of the world's scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless – so a few people can get richer, for a while. If they aren't stopped soon, the World Health Organisation warns we are facing "a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics". It will be a world where transplant surgery is impossible. It will be a world where a simple appendix operation will be as routinely lethal as it was in 1927, before the discovery of penicillin. It will be a world where pneumonia and TB and gonorrhea are far harder to deal with, and claim many more of us. But it's a world that you and I don't have to see – if we act on this warning now.
~ from Cheap Meat, MRSA and Deadly Greed by Johann Hari ~

So what is it that Hari is trying to warn us about? The overuse of antibiotics!

It's bad enough that physicians tend to overprescribe them. It doesn't help that far too many patients only take a portion of what they've been prescribed (this allows some of the bacteria not killed to "learn" how to defeat the antibiotics). But the biggest problem of all, according to Hari, is feeding antibiotics to the animals that meat-eaters later consume.

As the scientists I've interviewed explain it, antibiotics do something simple. They kill, slow down or stall the growth of bacteria. They were one of the great advances of the 20th century, and they have saved millions of us. But they inherently contain a problem – one that was known about from very early on. They start an arms race. Use an antibiotic against bacteria, and it kills most of it – but it can also prompt the bacteria to evolve a tougher, stronger, meaner strain that can fight back. The bacteria is constantly mutating and dividing. The stronger the antibiotic, the stronger some bacteria will become to survive. It's Darwin dancing at super-speed.

So the more we use antibiotics, the more we lose them. It's a battle played out on human bodies and in human wounds, with sky-high stakes. In many developed countries today, MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) kills more people than Aids. The obvious conclusion, then, is that we should use antibiotics sparingly, and only when they are really needed to treat the sick. But in one crucial area we are doing the exact opposite – for the sake of a few people's profits...

The factory farming industry packs animals into close quarters to maximize profit. With so many animals crammed into feed lots, disease and illness tend to run rampant. So, to guard against a problem these factory farms have created themselves, the animals are force-fed antibiotics 24/7. It is this overuse for private gain that is threatening the health of people across the world!

One solution is to regulate better the use of antibiotics in animals to be slaughtered for human consumption. I view this as a minimal remedy simply because the agribusiness lobby is so powerful that any such regulations will contain enough loopholes to drive a cattle herd through.

In my opinion, the better option is for consumers to quit eating so much meat, in the first place, or to choose the option that a lot of people have chosen -- including me -- and that is to quit eating meat altogether! Maybe, if there was far less demand, factory farming enterprises would decrease as well.

One can always hope!