Here are some notes from the meeting on environmental health issues
associated with Confined Animal Feeding Operations at Hotel Fort Des Moines
Thursday and Friday, November 15 and 16 with a bit of supplementary
information from the FDA site.

In 1969 a scientific study recommended that antibiotics not be used in
poultry confinements.  Europe took action; America did not.

Thirty-two years after this study, this is still a matter of intensive,
drug-by-drug review with the FDA.  For example, in April of this year the
FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine withdrew approval of two fluoroquinolone
products manufactured by Abbott Laboratories after having shown that
fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter - a human pathogen - developed and
infected humans. Cipro, which is a fluoroquinolone, is no longer proving
effective for the healthy north western Iowa patients of a physician who
spoke at this conference.

Wherever antibiotics are used resistance develops. How the antibiotic is
used determines how and where resistance develops. One study showed that
tetracycline-resistant disease showed up in humans after it had been fed to
chickens in a neighboring facility for only five months.  Five miles away,
where it was not being used, the drug was still effective for human use.

Lagoons are cool and wet, making them ideal places to culture
bacteria.  When manure is injected into soil, which is also cool and wet,
the process of culturing continues unabated.  Because antibiotics fed these
animals can remain intact for up to a year, both lagoons and the soil they
are injected into are ideal places in which to culture antibiotic resistant
bacteria.

A story was told of a landowner who raised horses who took some of the
slurry spilled on the road in front of her farm to a laboratory to have it
tested for antibiotic resistant bacteria.  All the bacteria identified in
the sample were antibiotic resistant.

Now that experts are beginning to predict that we will soon be living in a
post-antibiotic age where people will again die from infections that have
not been lethal since the 1900s.

Peggy Murdock

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