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.
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 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.
In the United States, Latin America, and Asia, animals being
farmed for meat and milk are being automatically given antibiotics
in their food all day – irrespective of whether they are healthy or
sick. It's like slathering your child's Cornflakes with
antibiotics, all year round. Some 80 per cent of all antibiotics in
the US go straight into farm animals. This speeds up the race
massively. It's like taking bacteria to the gym and giving them a
constant work-out – and then unleashing them on the rest of us.
You can see how this process makes bacteria stronger and tougher
– and at work on humans – in a startling study by Professor Barry
Levy in the New England Journal of Medicine. His team went to a
chicken farm where antibiotics had not been used before, and
started to put the antibiotic tetracycline into their feed. Before
the start of the experiment, there was no tetracycline-resistant
bacteria on the farm. Within two weeks, 90 per cent of the chickens
were excreting tetracycline-resistant organisms. Even more
strikingly, half of all the humans living on the farm were by then
excreting tetracycline-resistant bacteria too.
This process partially explains the evolution and spread of many
superbugs. Only a fortnight ago, a new strain of MRSA was found in
British milk that could be transmitted to human beings. To some
degree this arms race is an inevitable part of nature – but our
factory farms are massively artificially accelerating it. They are
bringing the day when antibiotics won't work much closer.
Why? Why would factory farms automatically feed antibiotics to
healthy animals, given the obvious risk? If you cram animals
together, give them little room to move, and make them grow and
produce far beyond the level they would in natural circumstances,
they will routinely get ill – and they do. It is cheaper for their
owners to simply automatically and pre-emptively drug them all,
than to try to treat their illness individually, or to create an
environment where sickness is not standard.
The animals in these factory farms can become reservoirs of
stronger superbugs. Sometimes it spreads to us through
contamination of raw meat, but more often it filters out through
workers who have contact with the animals. Dutch pig farmers are
760 times more likely to be carrying pig-MRSA than the rest of the
population. This story ends eventually with the death of
antibiotics – and routine operations becoming deadly once more.
We always knew factory farming was a scar on our conscience, but
it turns out it is also an urgent threat to our health. Of course,
factory farming is not the only source of growing antibiotic
resistance. Doctors have been overprescribing them, and patients
have too often not been taking their full course, enabling tougher
bacteria to survive and thrive. But this is the most egregious
cause.
A few years ago, it looked like the European Union had taken the
lead, by banning the routine use of some types of antibiotics
simply to promote the growth of animals. But research published
this week by the Soil Association suggests farmers are sidestepping
the real issue. The prescription of modern cephalosporins, the
antibiotics which are most widely believed to promote stronger
variants of MRSA in animals and humans – has quadrupled in the past
decade in Britain. Why? They are advertised to farmers, who are
under greater pressure than ever to get more and more out of their
herds because supermarkets have ratcheted up the pressure for quick
profit. Decent small farmers who want to resist these trends find
themselves out of business.
The former chief medical officer Liam Donaldson says this
over-prescription is so dangerous to us all it should be banned.
Yet David Cameron's Government ignored the official recommendation
from its own veterinary advisers to take even the much milder step
of banning the advertising of antibiotics to farmers.
It might seem strange that governments all over the world are
taking such a gamble with public health, in the face of the best
scientific advice. But Big Agriculture has armies of lobbyists and
open chequebooks, while the people trying to protect the public
have only the facts and reason and truth on their side. The
squandering of life-saving antibiotics is one example of a bigger
trend hijacking global politics. Small groups of rich people,
determined to maximise profits, are buying or bamboozling
politicians into serving their interests and into ignoring the
interests of the vast majority of the population. This is the trend
that is making it so hard to (say) reregulate the banks to prevent
another global crash, or prevent the unravelling of the
climate.
It doesn't have to be this way. The majority of the population
can organise and shout louder than these self-interested juntas of
profit. There are inspiring examples. In Lincolnshire, there were
plans to import the first US-style mega-farm into this country by a
group of tycoons who claimed their cows "do not belong in fields".
But public pressure forced the Environment Agency to investigate,
and the plans to be abandoned. Fighting back on issues like this
works – and we need to step it up.
Otherwise, the history books – written by people more vulnerable
to bacteria than you and I have ever been – will record something
startling. Our demand for cheap meat turned us, in turn, into cheap
meat.
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j.hari@independent.co.uk
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