Doctors’ ‘Drug of Last Resort’ Is Falling Prey to Antibiotic Resistance
A woman in Pennsylvania has been found to be the first American to carry a new strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria—one that was only discovered last November, halfway around the world in China. The news, announced last week, has once again sent public health experts sounding the alarm in an increasingly desperate attempt to get policy makers and the public at large to, well, get one simple message through our thick skulls: This is a crisis, people!
To make matters worse, an entirely separate investigation turned up a similar strain in tissue taken from a pig slaughtered in the U.S. That discovery, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, ties the worrying new resistance directly to the routine use of antibiotics in livestock production.
Both the patient in Pennsylvania and the pig were infected with a strain of E. coli resistant to multiple antibiotics, including some potent drugs considered antibiotics of last resort, suggesting that this is another tick of the clock counting down to the day when even some of our most powerful antibiotics will be powerless to treat certain infections. The scientists who broke the news, in a report published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, wrote that it “heralds the emergence of truly pan–drug resistant bacteria.”
That we’re here at all, facing the threat of bacteria that not only are immune to our antibiotics of last resort but are capable of passing on that resistance with relative ease via their genes, is largely the product of one thing: We’ve allowed the livestock industry to take what were once hailed lifesaving miracle drugs and essentially turn them into animal feed.
Somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to livestock—and the vast majority of those drugs aren’t even given to animals that are sick. Instead, they’re added to feed or water to make the animals grow bigger or to prevent disease in what are often the decidedly unhygienic conditions of your average factory farm.
Now, with resistance to colistin—the drug doctors turn to when no other antibiotic works—present in the U.S., the high stakes have been raised. “It is extremely concerning; this is potentially a sentinel event” is how Beth Bell, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, characterized the discovery to National Geographic.
CDC Director Tom Frieden hardly minced words when he told The Washington Post, “It basically shows us that the end of the road isn’t very far away for antibiotics—that we may be in a situation where we have patients in our intensive care units or patients getting urinary-tract infections for which we do not have antibiotics. I’ve been there for TB patients. I’ve cared for patients for whom there are no drugs left. It is a feeling of such horror and helplessness. This is not where we need to be.”
Yet, even as the warnings from the scientific community have become increasingly dire, the federal government—despite the CDC’s repeated warnings that we’re facing the end of antibiotics—has utterly failed to take meaningful action to rein in the livestock industry’s antibiotics free-for-all.
A blue-ribbon panel convened by President Obama to create an “action plan” to stem the growing public health threat called for reducing the overuse of antibiotics in hospitals and clinical settings but didn’t set any targets for reducing the rampant overuse of antibiotics by the livestock industry. Meanwhile, the most recent available data confirm that tepid calls by the Food and Drug Administration asking the industry to—please, pretty please—consider voluntary reductions in the use of medically important antibiotics have apparently gone unheeded. Sales of such drugs rose 23 percent between 2009 and 2014, according to the FDA’s data.
When will policy makers wake up and start to take this crisis seriously? Good question. As Lance Price, director of the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center, told The Washington Post, “If our leaders were waiting to act until they could see the cliff’s edge—I hope this opens their eyes to the abyss that lies before us.”
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Related stories on TakePart:
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• The World's Largest Fast-Food Chain Is Going Antibiotic-Free—and Not Just for Chicken
Original article from TakePart
