- According to the CDC, the most important source of antibiotic resistant organisms is in hospitals. Along with this, is the over prescribing of antibiotics to people by doctors.
- The use of antibiotics in animals is regulated - the administration of those drugs if limited to prevention and control of illness in the herd or flock, and that administration provides sufficient time so that there are no residues in the meat at the time of slaughter. The use of antibiotics for growth is not permitted.
- The classes of antibiotics used in animals are generally different than those used in people.
- Having antibiotic resistance does not necessarily mean an organism is a superbug - many organisms can have resistance to antibiotics and not cause illness, or in other cases, pathogens can have resistance to antibiotics that are not normally used to treat human illness.
- Many bacteria have naturally occurring antibiotic resistance, so to have raw meat or poultry with no antibiotic resistance microorganisms is impossible.
- If people properly handle and prepare / cook meat, they will eliminate all potential pathogens that may be present. Antibiotic resistance does not give organisms the ability to survive proper cooking or cleaning.
Now this is not to say that people can’t get ill from multi-antibiotic resistant pathogens. There has been the ongoing case of Foster Farms chicken in California that had been a source of severe illness. Some product was recalled – that was product that was cooked at a Costco store and then most likely mishandled leading to cross contamination. Foster Farms, the producer of the chicken, has what appears to be an on-going issue with consumers getting ill from the raw chicken parts that are purchased by consumers through retail stores. While USDA has worked with the facility to put in an action plan, it did not force the company to issue a recall.
Much of the debate is whether Salmonella should be considered an adulterant. To this point in time, it is not considered an adulterant provided the company has safe handling instructions labeled on the product, and the company is following standard accepted practices. But will consumers properly handle and cook poultry?
There is a push to make those multi-antibiotic resistant strains of Salmonella an adulterant, but this is a slippery slope. Not all multi-antibiotic strains are responsible for making people ill. In fact, the Salmonella strain in the Foster Farms case have antibiotic resistance to antibiotics that are rarely used to treat people for salmonellosis. So what can the science support? What is practical, considering that Salmonella has been associated with birds much longer than modern man has been around?
AMI
Some antibiotics can be extremely effective against certain bacteria but may not work to treat other bacteria. That’s why it is important to treat problem bacteria with the correct antibiotic.
Resistance develops in bacteria when they are challenged, but not destroyed, as they might be with the wrong antibiotic, with too low a dose or too short a course of treatment, which is why antibiotic prescription bottles often say “Finish all medications.”
Other bacteria are naturally resistant to certain antibiotics.
While antibiotics are as necessary for livestock and poultry health as they are for human health,
meat and poultry producers realize the importance of using antibiotics judiciously to ensure their continued effectiveness in animals and people.
There are four broad categories of antibiotic use:
Treatment – antibiotics are given to treat an animal with a diagnosed illness.
Control – antibiotics can be given to control the spread of an illness on a farm or ranch in the face of an outbreak.
Prevention – because livestock and poultry share water and feed troughs and seek close contact with one another by licking, laying on each other and even rubbing snouts and noses, illnesses can spread
rapidly. Sometimes, veterinarians recommend using antibiotics to prevent diseases at times when livestock are particularly at risk, like during weaning from the mother. Swift, preventive actions often mean a livestock will receive fewer antibiotics than they would have if they had not received a preventive dose.
Growth Promotion – The use of some antibiotics can destroy certain bacteria in the gut and help livestock and poultry convert feed to muscle more quickly causing more rapid growth. This class of use has been the subject of controversy and scrutiny, and in 2012, FDA4 asked livestock and poultry producers to phase out use of antibiotics for growth purposes.
Oversight
Antibiotics, whether used in humans, livestock or poultry, are overseen by physicians and veterinarians to ensure that they are used appropriately In September 2013, the CDC released a new report called Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States. According to the report, 50 percent of all the antibiotics prescribed for people are not needed or are not optimally effective. In releasing the report, CDC Director Thomas Frieden, MD, said, “Right now the most acute problem is in hospitals.
And the most resistant organisms in hospitals are emerging in those settings, because of poor antimicrobial stewardship among humans.”
FDA recently took steps to expand the role of the veterinarian in managing antibiotics given to food-producing animals. In addition, antibiotic use for growth promotion is being discontinued
Despite claims to the contrary, data show limited overlap in antibiotics given to humans and animals, which offers additional protection.
Residues
Whenever an antibiotic is given to a food animal, a strict waiting or “withdrawal” period is required before that animal can be processed into meat or poultry.
USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) conducts a monitoring program to ensure that antiibotics are effectively eliminated from animals’ systems and that no unsafe residues are detected in meat and poultry
“80 percent of antibiotics are used in animals.” [An Inappropriate Measure] - Each year, more than 30 million cattle, 100 million hogs, 200 million turkeys and eight billion chickens are processed in the U.S. The combined weight of livestock and poultry in the U.S. is more than triple the combined weight of American men and women
A 1,200 pound steer is equal to roughly six men, for example. If a steer needs treatment for pneumonia, common sense will tell you that it will require a larger dose. Similarly, it is logical that our combined U.S. livestock and poultry herds and flocks will require more antibiotics by volume than our combined human population.
“Antibiotics may become ineffective in humans if they are given to food producing livestock and poultry.” - When used judiciously, antibiotics are part of a farmer’s and veterinarian’s toolbox to maintain animal health. The vast majority of antibiotics are used either in people, or in animals, but not both.
“Antibiotic resistant infections in humans like MRSA often come from meat and poultry products.” Actually, most human antibiotic resistant infections are acquired in hospitals and other residential health care facilities. The common use of antibiotics in hospitals, by necessity, means that more antibiotic resistant bacteria are present in the environment. In the hospital setting, people are often immune-compromised making them more susceptible to bacteria in the environment.
Bacteria on meat and poultry, whether antibiotic resistant or not, are destroyed through cooking. That means that basic safe handling practices in the kitchen, like hand washing, separating raw and ready to eat foods and thorough cooking, are your best line of defense.
“Antibiotic resistant bacteria are increasing on U.S. meat and poultry products.” - USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) sampling data show that bacteria on raw meat and poultry products are decreasing across the board −not increasing.
It’s also worth noting that while bacteria may become resistant to one antibiotic, that does not mean they are resistant to all. It’s very rare in human medicine that any infection cannot be treated with an antibiotic. The rules of nature suggest that bacteria will always exist on fresh meat and poultry products at some low level and some of these bacteria will have become resistant to some antibiotics they have encountered. The most important questions to answer are 1) Are these bacteria causing illness, and 2) Can they be treated?
Some bacteria are naturally resistant to certain drugs…Describing certain bacteria that are resistant to one, or even a few, drugs as ‘superbugs’ is inappropriate. Rather, ‘superbugs’ are pathogens that can cause severe disease and are very difficult to treat.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/22/superbug-threat-climate-change_n_5373773.html
Superbug Threat Is As Grave As Climate Change, Scientists Say
Posted: Updated:
LONDON (Reuters) - Superbugs resistant to drugs pose a serious worldwide threat and demand a response on the same scale as efforts to combat climate change, infectious disease specialists said on Thursday.
Warning that a world without effective antibiotics would be "deadly", with routine surgery, treatments for cancer and diabetes and organ transplants becoming impossible, the experts said the international response had been far too weak.
"We have needed to take action against the development of antimicrobial resistance for more than 20 years. Despite repeated warnings, the international response has been feeble," said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity.
The World Health Organisation had missed opportunities to take the lead, and very little progress had been made, he said, resulting in the emergence of strains of infections, including tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia and gonorrhea, that resist all known drugs.
"We need a new independent body that will not only monitor the spread of antimicrobial resistance, but also drive and direct efforts to contain it," he told reporters at a briefing in London.
Such a body should be modeled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and work with governments and agencies who would implement its recommendations, Farrar said in a joint commentary in the journal Nature with Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University's Centre for Immunity, Infection and Evolution.
"In many ways, antimicrobial resistance is similar to climate change. Both are processes operating on a global scale for which humans are largely responsible," Farrar and Woolhouse wrote.
Asked at the briefing if he saw the threats as of a similar magnitude, Woolhouse said "Yes."
Drug resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them. It has been a feature of medicine since Alexander Fleming's discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin, in 1928.
RACE AGAINST TIME
Only a handful of new antibiotics have been developed and brought to market in the past few decades, and it is a race against time to find more as bacterial infections increasingly evolve into superbugs resistant to even the most powerful last-resort medicines reserved for extreme cases.
One of the best known superbugs, MRSA, is alone estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States - far more than HIV and AIDS - and a similar number in Europe.
The WHO issued a report last month in which it said the spread of deadly superbugs was no longer a prediction but was happening right now across the world.
Woolhouse said the time had come "to stop re-stating the problems ... and start taking action".
"We need independent, international leadership on this issue before the massive health gains that have been made since Alexander Fleming's discovery ... are lost forever," he said.
The IPCC is a United Nations body set up in 1988 to provide a clear scientific view of the current state of climate change and its potential environmental and social impacts.
Woolhouse and Farrar said their vision of a similar body on antimicrobial resistance - which they dubbed the IPAMR or Intergovernmental Panel on Antimicrobial Resistance - would involve a broad range of experts, from specialists in clinical and veterinary medicine, to epidemiologists, microbiologists, pharmacologists, health economists and international lawyers.
"Creating an effective IPAMR will be a huge undertaking, but the successful global campaign to eradicate smallpox, led by the WHO, demonstrates that a coordinated international response to a public health threat can work," they wrote in the Nature commentary.
Reuters / Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/28/salmonella-outbreak-foster-farms-chicken_n_5401298.html
Salmonella Outbreak Linked To Foster Farms Chicken Widens
Posted: 05/28/2014 10:27 am EDT
WASHINGTON, May 27 (Reuters) - Another 50 people have suffered salmonella poisoning linked to Foster Farms chicken, bringing the total to 574 cases in the United States since March 2013, health officials said on Tuesday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an update that the new cases were reported at an average of eight a week since an April report on new infections caused by strains of drug-resistant Salmonella Heidelberg.
Thirty-seven percent of those with the foodborne bacteria have been hospitalized in the outbreak that began in March 2013.
About 13 percent have developed blood infections, about three times the number in typical salmonella infections, the CDC said. No deaths have been reported.
Foster Farms, which is based in the U.S. west coast, said in a statement that it had developed a multiple step approach to reduce or wipe out salmonella at each stage of production.
"The company continues to make steady progress that has effectively reduced Salmonella at the parts level to less than 10 percent - well below the 2011/2012 USDA-measured industry benchmark of 25 percent," the company said. USDA stands for U.S. Department of Agriculture.
It added that salmonella incidence increased with warm weather.
Reuters / Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/28/salmonella-outbreak-foster-farms-chicken_n_5401298.html
Salmonella Outbreak Linked To Foster Farms Chicken Widens
Posted: 05/28/2014 10:27 am EDT
WASHINGTON, May 27 (Reuters) - Another 50 people have suffered salmonella poisoning linked to Foster Farms chicken, bringing the total to 574 cases in the United States since March 2013, health officials said on Tuesday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an update that the new cases were reported at an average of eight a week since an April report on new infections caused by strains of drug-resistant Salmonella Heidelberg.
Thirty-seven percent of those with the foodborne bacteria have been hospitalized in the outbreak that began in March 2013.
About 13 percent have developed blood infections, about three times the number in typical salmonella infections, the CDC said. No deaths have been reported.
Foster Farms, which is based in the U.S. west coast, said in a statement that it had developed a multiple step approach to reduce or wipe out salmonella at each stage of production.
"The company continues to make steady progress that has effectively reduced Salmonella at the parts level to less than 10 percent - well below the 2011/2012 USDA-measured industry benchmark of 25 percent," the company said. USDA stands for U.S. Department of Agriculture.
It added that salmonella incidence increased with warm weather.
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