Specifically, Sanderson chicken products tested positive for the antibiotic chloramphenical, banned in food animals, and amoxicillin, not approved for use in poultry production. Sanderson Farms products also tested positive for residues of steroids, hormones, anti-inflammatory drugs—even ketamine, a drug with hallucinogenic effects.
Many health conscious consumers are reducing their consumption of red meat in favor of chicken—especially products labeled and promoted as "100% natural"—believing they are a healthier option produced without routine antibiotics, artificial substances or other drugs.
A breakthrough in antibiotic resistance was reported last week. Scientists had re-engineered the drug vancomycin—used against extremely resistant infections including MRSA—to make it stronger and stop bugs becoming immune to it. Vancomycin has been prescribed for 60 years and is a highly effective antibiotic—yet in some countries bacteria are developing resistance.
Industrial pollution from Indian pharmaceutical companies making medicines for nearly all the world's major drug companies is fueling the creation of deadly superbugs, suggests new research. Global health authorities have no regulations in place to stop this happening.
Following a four-month battle for his life, Chris Linaman committed to sharing his story to help raise awareness about the growing threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. As executive chef at a large medical center, he is also driving change at an institutional level, harnessing his purchasing power to support the responsible use of antibiotics in food animals.
What can America's most iconic fast-food chicken chain do to fight the growing epidemic of drug-resistant infections? Set a strong antibiotics policy for its chicken supply!
Kids can die from superbugs, just as adults do. But a new study last week was among the first I'd seen to dive more deeply and specifically into how this superbug crisis threatens your kids.
The study's findings, which the author called "ominous," appeared in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Disease Society. One takeaway was that infections among hospitalized kids due to one nasty superbug, called multidrug-resistant (MDR) Enterobacteriaceae, rose a dramatic 750 percent from 2007 to 2015. One particular variety of the same menace tops a new World Health Organization priority list of global bacterial superbug threats released Monday.
Enterobacteriaceae are a particularly problematic family of gram negative bacteria that includes E. coli, Klebsiella and Salmonella. It's also among the many such superbugs that we already know are found in the U.S. food supply and on farms, as Natural Resources Defense Council's Carmen Cordova blogged Monday.
Strains of Enterobacteriaceae have been popping up in U.S. patients that are pan-resistant (resistant to every medicine), or nearly so, including to colistin and carbapenem, two drugs of last resort that doctors rely upon when all else fails. On U.S. hog farms, too, they've found super-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, some of them carrying resistance to colistin or carbapenems, even thought neither is thought to be used in U.S. hog production.
This study looked over an eight year time period at 94,000 kids discharged from children's hospitals, and who'd also had infections due to Enterobacteriaceae—mostly E. coli urinary tract infections, as it turns out. Thankfully, none of the infections were pan-resistant. But by the end of the period, in 2015, 15 of every thousand of these kids had had infections resistant to multiple antibiotics—more than seven times higher than the incidence among the kids being discharged eight years earlier. Moreover the kids with resistant Enterobacteriaceae infections had hospital stays 20 percent longer compared to kids whose infections were not resistant.
The incredibly rapid rise in MDR Enterobacteriaceae infections among kids is especially ominous. Younger patients have less developed immune systems than adults, so are less able to mount an effective defense against such infections. Much less recognized is the fact that there simply aren't as many antibiotics available to treat sick kids as there are for adults; rising resistance to existing medicines only compounds the already limited choices facing a pediatrician.
One final, worrisome note. To date, super-resistant infections caused by gram negative bacteria like the Enterobacteriaceae have mostly been a problem in hospitals. The fear, and the expectation, was that as resistance worsened, infections would begin to arise among healthier populations out in community settings, as well. But in this study, more than three-quarters of the children with multidrug-resistant infections came to the hospital already infected. That means they contracted those infections from friends, families, food or farms—somewhere else in the community—and not from other patients or staff while in the hospital.
Driving the development and spread of superbugs like this one are U.S. federal policies that still allow the antibiotics important to humans to be routinely given en masse to flocks and herds of food animals, at low doses and over long periods of time in the animal feed or water. Absent tighter federal controls, it's critical that states step up to the plate instead. In Maryland, the Keep Antibiotics Effective Act of 2017 is an important bill trying do just that, by ensuring antibiotics are only given to livestock when they are sick.
That's the kind of leadership that's needed to reverse the trend towards rising numbers of painful, expensive, and ever-harder-to-treat infections in children's hospitals, including at Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland and elsewhere.
David Wallinga is a physician with more than 20 years of experience in writing, policy and advocacy at the intersection of food, nutrition, sustainability and public health. Wallinga is the senior health officer at Natural Resources Defense Council.
"My doctor wants me to take another antibiotic for this cold that won't quit, but I've read antibiotics damage the gut and even can make me fat," a patient recently asked me. "I've read mixed reviews and I know you've given them the thumbs down in the past, but really, how bad are antibiotics?"
Firstly, let's not totally dismiss antibiotics. After all, they can be life saving and in certain situations, become absolutely necessary. They've saved millions of lives. Trust me, we do not want to live without antibiotics in the twenty-first century.
That being said, antibiotics today are over-prescribed and often unnecessary. Developments to prevent and treat infectious diseases—like sanitation, early vaccines and best-use of antibiotics—have dramatically reduced deaths from infectious disease. But there is a cost.
Take sanitation ... hyper-focusing on hygiene and sterilization using hand sanitizers and overusing vaccines and antibiotics has dramatically altered our gut ecosystem, spiking autoimmune and allergic diseases and contributing to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression and autism.
While western medicine has greatly advanced with acute disease, we've failed miserably addressing chronic disease.
Louis Pasteur discovered the bug or microbe causing infections and Alexander Fleming discovered antibiotics to cure them. This simple cause-effect "cure"—single bug, single disease and single drug—might work for infection, but not so much for chronic disease.
Ever since, we have been searching for "cures" for chronic diseases (including cancer and dementia), yet we can't find them! Medicine's history has become the pursuit of a holy grail—a pill for every ill. This failed approach will continue to fail because chronic disease results from the complex interaction of our genes, lifestyle and environment. A magic pill or other "miracle cure" just isn't going to cure us. We need a well rounded, permanent lifestyle approach.
So back to the original question: Antibiotics can become detrimental because they damage your gut ecosystem, what we collectively call our microbiome, which is made up of 100 trillion bugs that live inside you and outnumber your cells an astounding 10 to 1.
True, antibiotics wipe out the bad stuff that is causing the infection; but they are like napalm—they take out everything in their path—including the good bacteria.
That becomes a real problem because while your gut has trillions of bacteria, they collectively contain at least 100 times as many genes as you do. That bacterial DNA in your gut outnumbers your own DNA by a very large margin.
That's important, because among its functions, this bacterial DNA controls immunity, regulates digestion and intestinal function, protects against infections and even produces vitamins and nutrients.
Antibiotics destroy these beneficial bacteria, which creates a wide open field for the overgrowth of bad bugs, yeast and candida, leading to numerous problems including mood disorders, food allergies, fatigue, skin issues and of course, digestive issues.
Overgrowth of bad bugs can also encourage cravings for sugary, processed junk foods, leading to weight gain and other problems that eating junk foods creates. So it is clear that antibiotics can potentially make you fat.
When a patient comes to see me, I ask if they have a history of taking antibiotics. More often than not, I've learned overuse has led to their gut issues, including leaky gut.
I recently had a patient born by C-section, who was then bottle fed and as a child suffered recurrent ear infections. Conventional doctors—doing what they felt was best—overprescribed antibiotics, eventually leading to irritable bowel syndrome during the patient's teen years and then an autoimmune disease as a young adult. I hear this story repeatedly, and much of this stems from not honoring, respecting and tending to your inner garden.
More often than not, the antibiotics children receive for viral infections, colds, sore throats and other ailments, for which they likely would have gotten better on their own, have damaged their delicate gut flora starting at an early age.
One Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study found 71 percent of children who suffered C. diffinfections (inflammation of the colon caused by a specific bacteria called clostridium difficile) received numerous courses of antibiotics for respiratory, ear and nose illnesses 12 weeks before infection.
Another study published in the American Society for Microbiology found a one-week course of antibiotics could negatively affect your microbiome for long periods of time, potentially even for a whole year.
Other studies link long-term antibiotic use to diverse problems including depressed immunity, higher stress levels, behavior problems and obesity.
While antibiotics can sometimes be absolutely necessary, I highly recommend conferring with a Functional Medicine practitioner to discuss alternatives (including allowing infections to heal on their own).
If you must use antibiotics, I recommend a few things before and after using them.
Unlike regular starch, your small intestine doesn't absorb potato starch. Instead, your gut bacteria process it, creating molecules that help balance blood sugar and healthy gut flora. In other words, when you consume resistant starch, it "resists" digestion and does not spike blood sugar or insulin.
I like to supplement with my favorite resistant starch found in Bob's Red Mill Unmodified Potato Starch. I suggest adding about 1 teaspoon to a glass of water.
Then, focus on gut repair—especially after you're finished using antibiotics. Utilize gut-healing nutrients including L-glutamine, omega-3 fats, vitamin A and zinc to repair your gut lining so it can resume its normal, natural functions. The use of digestive enzymes can help you digest your food better.
That's it … pretty simple but with amazing results.
Scientists and regulators have sounded the alarm linking the overuse of antibiotics in livestock production with helping to increase the creation and spread of antibiotic resistant infections. Three years ago, as a result, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched a voluntary program seeking to curb some livestock drug uses. But the widespread use of these antibiotics seems to continue as before.
On Thursday, the latest FDA figures on antibiotics sold for use in meat and poultry production came out. The news is not good. Sales just keep rising. Against the backdrop of a crisis in now untreatable or nearly untreatable infections, this report further underscores how urgently we need more and stronger government action to address the ongoing overuse of the drugs in livestock.
Sales of medically important antibiotics—including penicillins, cephalosporins, tetracyclines and erythromycins, to name a few—for livestock were up 2 percent over 2014, and up 26 percent overall from 2009 through 2015. An overwhelming 95 percent of human antibiotics were sold as additives to animal feed and drinking water—routes of delivery that are typical of growth promotion or disease prevention.
More than 21.3 million pounds of medically-important drugs were sold for use in livestock last year. By comparison, the FDA reports that in 2011 (the last year for which it has such data, apparently) a bit more than 7.2 million pounds of antibiotics were sold for use in human medicine. In other words, just under 70 percent of all medically important antibiotics in the U.S. are sold for use in animals, not people. In 2015, 97 percent of all medically important antibiotic sales for livestock or poultry were over-the-counter, meaning they were sold without a prescription and typically without any oversight by a veterinarian.
It remains unclear how effective FDA's current voluntary efforts will be to reduce the routine use of antibiotics in livestock and poultry production. While livestock antibiotics will no longer carry a label that says they can be used for growth promotion, many of these same products will continue to be approved for routine use in the same manner and similar dosages for the purpose of disease prevention. The pharmaceutical industry has consistently claimed that "growth promotion" constitutes no more than 10 percent of antibiotic use in livestock and poultry. The Natural Resources Defense Council believes that the use of antibiotics in animal feed or water under a "disease prevention" claim constitutes the vast majority of all antibiotic use.
Two million Americans already suffer from drug-resistant infections every year and more than 23,000 die as a result, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. My New Year's resolution would be for antibiotics to be used differently in the future, especially in livestock production. One might have thought sales figures would already be dropping, since every food animal sector claims they're using fewer antibiotics and only when medically justified. But the FDA's actual data suggest otherwise.
