U.S. consumers say ‘No’ to antibiotics

June 25, 2012

By MICHELLE GROENKE | UPI | JUNE 25, 2012

A U.S. consumer group is campaigning to get local supermarkets to sell only meat that has been raised without antibiotics.

The campaign by Consumers Union, the public policy arm of Consumer Reports, coincides with the release of a study that suggests 86 percent of Americans want meat raised without antibiotics, which can be a difficult task due to misleading and unapproved labels, Consumer Reports said last week.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this year issued guidelines to cut back the use of antibiotics in animals raised for food.

The voluntary initiative requires certain antibiotics not be used for so-called “production” purposes, such as to enhance growth or improve feed efficiency in an animal. The antibiotics would still be available to prevent, control or treat illnesses under veterinary supervision, officials said.

The FDA said it is trying to ensure medicines people need remain safe and effective. A drug may no longer be as effective in treating various illnesses or infections once bacteria or other microbes develop resistance to it, the agency said.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, however, criticized the guidelines, saying they rely too heavily on the drug industry and animal producers to act voluntarily in the best interests of consumers.

“Decades of misuse have led to some common pathogens, like Salmonella, becoming more virulent and less treatable,” the CSPI said in a statement. “The FDA knows it can no longer afford to ignore antibiotic resistance.”

An estimated 70 percent of U.S. antibiotics sold are given to healthy farm animals, not to treat disease but to allow animals to live closer together and decrease the amount of time it takes to raise an animal and send it to market, the Union of Concerned Scientists said last month.

U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., last week renewed her call for the passage of legislation to regulate antibiotic use in animal feed

“The vast majority of Americans are concerned about the effect antibiotic overuse on farm animals is having on their health, and rightly so,” Slaughter said Wednesday. “Unfortunately too many of our institutions, from the federal government to big business, have ignored this issue. But they won’t be able to ignore us for much longer because, as this poll shows, more and more Americans are waking up to the dangers posed by the daily feeding of antibiotics to otherwise healthy animals.”

Slaughter, who is a microbiologist, said antibiotic-resistant infections “kill more Americans than AIDS.”

“That is a frightening figure, and to really get out in front of this problem we must eliminate the use of all classes of antibiotics in farm animals that are important to human health.”

Slaughter has been pressing since 2007 for passage of legislation that would prevent the overuse of seven classes of antibiotics.

While consumers say they want to eat meat that isn’t treated with antibiotics, finding it can be a challenge in some stores.

Consumer Reports said it sent “secret shoppers” out to 136 stores in five states, including stores operated by the 13 largest supermarket chains around the country. Shoppers found differences in the availability of meat and poultry raised without antibiotics. Whole Foods guarantees all meat and poultry sold is raised without antibiotics. Wide selections of meat and poultry raised without antibiotics was also found at Giant, Hannaford, Shaw’s and Stop & Shop, Consumer Reports said.

Shoppers at Sam’s Club, Food 4 Less, Food Lion, and Save-A-Lot said they couldn’t find any meat or poultry labeled as being raised without antibiotics.

“We are asking supermarkets to step up to the challenge and tell their suppliers to procure only meat and poultry that has been raised without antibiotics,” Jean Halloran, director of food policy Initiatives for Consumers Union, said in a statement. “Antibiotics are losing their potency in people, leading to a major national health crisis, and we need to drastically reduce their use in food animals.”

A poll conducted by the group said 86 percent of consumers want meat raised without antibiotics in their local supermarket, and more than 60 percent of respondents said they would be willing to pay at least 5 cents a pound more for meat raised without antibiotics. More than a third said they would pay $1 or more extra per pound.

Consumer Reports said 72 percent of respondents were extremely or very concerned about the overuse of antibiotics in animal feed.

Prices for antibiotic-free meat and poultry were not necessarily higher than similar meat products. Chicken raised without antibiotics was available for as little as $1.29 a pound at several stores including Trader Joe’s, Publix and Jewel-Osco.

Labeling is an issue, Consumer Reports said, with more than 20 different labels related to antibiotic use, some of which can be misleading.

Consumer Reports said it has sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture calling for a standard label and to publish the names of the companies who are approved to use it, and for what products.

“Consumers would benefit from one standard, meaningful, USDA-verified label that is consistent on all meat and poultry products from animals raised without antibiotics,” said Urvashi Rangan, director of consumer safety and sustainability at Consumer Reports.

The Consumers Union supermarket campaign, which has a companion Web site, www.meatwithoutdrugs.org, is starting their campaign with Trader Joe’s.

“We’re calling on Trader Joe’s to only source their meat from animals raised without antibiotics,” the group said on the Web site. “As one of the most progressive national retailers, Trader Joe’s has already demonstrated care for their customers’ health by saying no to GMOs [genetically modified organisms], artificial colors and trans fats in the products they sell. Trader Joe’s can also be a leader by helping move the livestock industry in the right direction.”

The survey of 1,000 U.S. adults was conducted in March by the Consumer Reports National Research Center. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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The Heritage of Modern Medicine: Incurable Disease

February 19, 2012

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
February 20, 2012

Nature always finds a way to evolve and to survive. What could a human be thinking when a pharmaceutical is created in order to “eradicate” a virus or a bacteria? Humans don’t know nearly enough about microorganisms, how they live or adapt to adverse environments to claim that a treatment has been found or a universal cure exists. It is not the pursuit of a solution to keep us all free from disease what is wrong, but the arrogance of the so-called experts and scientists to claim that a final solution has been found. The field of medicine has evolved for as long as it has existed; and continues to do so today. There are no ultimate treatments, no flawless cures. Humanity evolves and improves, and so do viruses and bacteria.

One of the most dangerous sins of modern medicine and those who practice it is to assume that their discoveries and the benefits they believe come with them will somehow end all pain and suffering. Nature proves them wrong again and again.

The latest example of what I call medical insanity is the rise of untreatable, incurable disease. Just as weeds have found a way to survive the attack of herbicides and created mechanisms to survive, viruses and bacteria absorbed the shock from antibiotics and evolved through generations not only to become untreatable, but in many cases incurable.

In the United Kingdom, new bacteria and viruses turn out to be resistant to traditional medicines and now pose a threat greater than that presented by AIDS or a virus that causes a flu pandemic. E. Coli bacterium is an example of the type of menace that is getting out of hand. E Coli infection is turning into a disease that is impossible to treat. According to professor Peter Hawkey, from the Government’s antibiotic-resistance working group, the slow but consistent rise of bacteria that are becoming untreatable so far resulted in the death of 25,000 people a year in the European Union alone.

But the infections and deaths due to incurable and untreatable disease is not limited to the European continent. The threat of an untreatable bacteria or a virus spreading throughout a continent or the whole globe would not be an uncommon event. In fact, the presence of E. Coli bacterium in the blood of patients went up 30 percent. According to official accounts, the number of people who were victims of bacterial infections rose from 18,000 to 25,000 in just four years. The percentage of organisms resistant to antibiotics went from 1 percent to 10 percent in only 11 years.

“Only one in 20 of infections with [resistant] E.coli is a bacteraemia, so the above data are only the tip of an iceberg of infected individuals,” reads a report produced by Professor Hawkey.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies that once saw the development of antibiotics as a great opportunity to fill their pockets with money don’t see any incentive to continue or start new research into better medicines that can help diminish the effects of what seem to be immune microorganisms. It is not commercially interesting for Big Pharma powerhouses to continue to invest time and money in drugs that are taken by patients for just a few days, and that will be made obsolete in a matter of years. It is more profitable to engineer drugs that patients will depend on for decades at a time.

Just as it happens with the Bird Flu and the Swine Flu, E. Coli often attacks the elderly and the sick, two of the most vulnerable populations out there. People in these two groups usually die not because of the bacterial or viral attack, but due to medical complications that are enhanced by the relentless attacks caused by the already antibiotic-immune microorganisms. E. Coli poses an even greater threat that MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which is caused by a strain of staph bacteria also resistant to the antibiotics.

As more and more antibiotic treatments become ineffective to treat E.Coli and MRSA infections, the need to use stronger drugs is more apparent. But the current line of antibiotic treatments is getting to the limit. The use of carbapenems, which are the last line available. And resistance to those is already emerging. “In the last two or three years we have seen [organisms] develop which destroy carbapenems, the highest level in antibiotic treatments is more often than not cited as the tool of last resort when dealing with viral or bacterial infections. Late in 2011, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention cited several bacteria such as the blood poisoning K.pneumoniae as resistant to carbapenems in some countries.

According to the ECDC, the number of bacteria resistant to carbapenems has risen from 7 percent to 15 percent.

Microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses have historically found ways to overcome natural as well as man-made threats in order to survive. In the case of the bacteria, though, their evolution is not measured in decades or centuries. Their reproductive and evolutionary processes occur faster than in humans and they can adapt to hostile environments in a matter of months. The evolution and adaptation of life forms such as bacteria is as simple as it is explained in any science elementary school classroom. Although many bacteria or viruses may be killed by antibiotics, a few of them will always survive and those surviving members will modify their genetic structure to create a resistance to antibiotics. The advantage bacteria have against antibiotics is that their ability to survive and adapt is almost infinite, while the number of antibiotic combinations used to combat them is limited.

Put in simple terms, modern medicine has created temporary solutions for an everlasting problem, and now, pharmaceutical companies are out of ideas and science to continue the fight. It seems microorganisms have won the latest battle. I would like to know what would have happened if humans would have dealt with infections the same way bacteria deal with antibiotics. What if instead of creating new strains of the H5N1 flu, scientists would have understood that humans are just a small part of nature, not its creator.


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Madness: Pentagon Wants to Destroy all Pathogens

November 22, 2011 1 Comment

by Katie Drummond
Wired.com
November 23, 2011

Last year, federal officials warned that Americans were on the verge of “a post-antibiotic era.” And that’s exactly what the Pentagon’s far-out research agency is after.

As long as they’ve got a replacement at the ready, of course. In the military’s latest round of small business solicitations, Darpa is making a long-shot request for an all-out replacement to antibiotics, the decades-old standard for killing or injuring bacteria to demolish a disease. In its place: the emerging field of nanomedicine would be used to fight bacterial threats. The agency’s “Rapidly Adaptable Nanotherapeutics” is after a versatile “platform capable of rapidly synthesizing therapeutic nanoparticles” to target unknown, evolving and even genetically engineered bioweapons.

It’s the latest of several Darpa programs to improve we deal with bacterial infections, viruses and bio-threats. The agency is already funding tobacco-based vaccine production, prescient viral infection detectors and insta-vaccines to inoculate against unknown pathogens.

Right now, antibiotics work by interfering with bacterial function or their spread. Some meds target a ton of different pathogens, while others are more highly specified. Both varieties, however, are increasingly vulnerable to bacterial resistance — bacteria that carry a genetically enhanced ability to thwart the medication survive, and continue to spread, rendering that medication useless. It means even if scientists develop new antibiotics, which they continue to do, the meds will be “prone to the same issues and may ultimately meet a similar fate” as their once-potent peers. Not to mention that where “engineered” bacterial threats are concerned, most conventional antibiotics would be useless from the get-go: Genetic tinkering can turn even benign gut bacteria into lethal, untreatable bioweapons.

Instead, Darpa wants researchers to use nanoparticles — tiny, autonomous drug delivery systems that can carry molecules of medication anywhere in the body, and get them right into a targeted cell. Darpa would like to see nanoparticles loaded with “small interfering RNA (siRNA)” — a class of molecules that can target and shut down specific genes. If siRNA could be reprogrammed “on-the-fly” and applied to different pathogens, then the nanoparticles could be loaded up with the right siRNA molecules and sent directly to cells responsible for the infection.

Replacing a billion dollar industry that’s been a medical mainstay since 1940? Far fetched, sure, but researchers already know how to engineer siRNA and shove it into nanoparticles. They did it last year, during a trial that saw four primates survive infection with a deadly strain of Ebola Virus after injections of Ebola-targeted siRNA nanoparticles. Doing it quickly, and with unprecedented versatility, is another question. It can take decades for a new antibiotic to be studied and approved. Darpa seems to be after a system that can do the same job, in around a week.

Then again, if anybody can design a new paradigm for medicine, and a new way to mass-produce it, our money’s on the military. After all, we’ve got them to thank for figuring out how to manufacture the medication that got us into this mess in the first place: penicillin.

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Resistant Infections Spread in Europe

November 18, 2011 1 Comment

Use and overuse of antibiotics are see as the cause.

by Jeremy Laurance
The Independent
November 18, 2011

The world is being driven towards the “unthinkable scenario of untreatable infections”, experts are warning, because of the growth of superbugs resistant to all antibiotics and the dwindling interest in developing new drugs to combat them.

Reports are increasing across Europe of patients with infections that are nearly impossible to treat. The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) said yesterday that in some countries up to 50 per cent of cases of blood poisoning caused by one bug – K. pneumoniae, a common cause of urinary and respiratory conditions – were resistant to carbapenems, the most powerful class of antibiotics.

Across Europe, the percentage of carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae has doubled from 7 per cent to 15 per cent. The ECDC said it is “particularly worrying” because carbapenems are the last-line antibiotics for treatment of multi-drug-resistant infections.

Marc Sprenger, the director, said: “The situation is critical. We need to declare a war against these bacteria.”

In 2009, carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae was established only in Greece, but by 2010, it had extended to Italy, Austria, Cyprus and Hungary. The bacterium is present in the intestinal tract and is transmitted by touch.

Resistant strains of E.coli also increased in 2010. Between 25 and 50 per cent of E.coli infections in Italy and Spain were resistant to fluoroquinolones in 2010, one of the most important antibiotics for treating the bacterium.

In the UK, 70 patients have been identified carrying NDM-1-containing bacteria, an enzyme that destroys carbapenems. Separate research has shown that more than 80 per cent of travellers returning from India to Europe carried the NDM gene in their gut.

Researchers speak of a “nightmare scenario” if the gene for NDM-1 production is spread more widely.

The UK Health Protection Agency warned doctors last month to abandon a drug usually used to treat a common sexually transmitted disease because it was no longer effective. The agency said that gonorrhoea – which caused 17,000 infections in 2009 – should be treated with two drugs instead of one and warned of a “very real threat of untreatable gonorrhoea in the future.”

Discovering new medicines to treat resistant superbugs has proved increasingly difficult and costly – they are taken only for a short period and the commercial returns are low. The European Commission yesterday launched a plan to boost research into new antibiotics, by promising accelerated approval for new drugs and funding for development through the the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a public-private collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry.

An estimated 25,000 people die each year in the European Union from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. Countries with the highest rates of resistant infections, such as Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria, also tended to be the ones with the highest use of antibiotics.

World Health Organisation scientists warned two years ago that overuse of antibiotics risked returning the world to a pre-antibiotic era in which infections did not respond to treatment. The warnings have been ignored.

Professor Laura Piddock, president of the British Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, said politicians and the public had been slow to appreciate the urgency of the situation. In The Lancet, she writes: “Antibiotics are not perceived as essential to health, despite such agents saving lives.” Global action to develop new antibiotics is required, she says.

The Department of Health published guidance aimed at curbing the overuse of antibiotics in hospitals, by avoiding long treatment and replacing broad-spectrum antibiotics with those targeted at the specific infection. Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer, said: “Many antibiotics are prescribed… when they don’t need to be.”

Case study: Holiday fever that took two months to control

In August 2010, Paolo, 55, a university professor in Rome, was on holiday on the island of Ponza, when he fell ill with a fever and shaking chills. He had a urinary tract infection and his brother-in-law, a doctor, prescribed a commonly used antibiotic called ciprofloxacin.

Three days later he was no better and still feverish but continued with the drugs for a week. He returned to the mainland where his urine was tested and found to be infected with a strain of E.coli resistant to many antibiotics including ciprofloxacin.

He was prescribed a different antibiotic, which he took for four weeks. He got better but four days after stopping the treatment, his symptoms returned and he became feverish again.

He then called a friend, an infectious disease specialist, who suggested a third antibiotic which he took for 21 days. Two months after he began treatment, that finally cured his infection.

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