New from EWG
You know what you ate this week—but do you know how it will affect climate change and the planet? As of today, you can use the Environmental Working Group (EWG)’s newly launched website to get information on food carbon footprints.The “Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change and Health” helps users quantify the impacts of their current diets.Try adding up your meals’ impacts—you may be shocked, especially if you ate beef or cheese.
The carbon footprint of beef, for example, is 24.5 times higher than that for tomatoes. A 2008 study found that red meat and dairy comprise 48 percent of U.S. food-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).EWG’s analysis suggests that if the whole U.S. population committed to Meatless and cheeseless Monday (or otherwise gave up meat and cheese one day a week), the reduction in GHGs would be the same as that for driving 91 billion fewer miles, or taking 7.6 million cars off the road.Meatless Monday sounds to me like an easier goal, and I say that not only because CLF is affiliated with the program.Of course it is not either/or, and we need to cut all forms of GHGs. Read More >
Last week, Senators Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) took an important stand in support of America’s health by reintroducing the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (S. 1211). The bill aims to prevent the misuse of antibiotics in agriculture to ensure their continued effectiveness in the treatment of both human and animal diseases. Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are co-sponsoring, and the bill has been referred to the Senate Committee of Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) has been the major champion for PAMTA in the House and has made several attempts to push the bill forward. She reintroduced it this year, and in March it entered the House Subcommittee on Health.
In her introduction, Sen. Feinstein explained the significance of the bill, particularly its role in protecting public health. Currently, about 80% of all antibiotics sold are for livestock, mostly for nontherapeutic purposes. Approximately 74% of these antibiotics are administered through feed containing low doses. This provides imprecise and inconsistent drug dosing that can result in drug resistance amongst surviving bacteria. Unfortunately, these resistant microbes can travel to humans and cause serious illnesses that are no longer treatable with standard antibiotics. Read More >
A new technical review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “A Focus on Antimicrobial Resistance,” calls the issue a growing public health concern worldwide, stating the misuse of antimicrobial drugs in food animal production and human medicine is the main factor accelerating antimicrobial resistance.
The USDA report, in the National Agriculture Library, is a compilation of research from 63 scholarly and peer reviewed journals, including research supported by the Center for a Livable Future. It says limiting the inappropriate use of antimicrobials in animals agriculture can be achieved by:
- Understanding the risks and benefits of antimicrobial use in food animals.
- Development and implementation of principles guiding appropriate antimicrobial use in the food animal production.
- Improvement in animal husbandry and food production practices to reduce the dissemination of AMR.
- Development of regulations for prudent use of antimicrobials in food animals.
- Development of testing and reporting protocols for drug-resistant foodborne pathogens by regulatory agencies.
- Reduction in the usage of antimicrobials that are “critically important” for human medicine in food animals.
According to data released last December by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 80% (or 28.8 million pounds) of the antibiotics sold in 2009 were used to raise livestock and poultry.
In an article in last Saturday’s New York Times, “When Food Kills,” Columnist Nicholas Kristoff calls attention to the ongoing E. coli outbreak in Europe, noting 325,000 people are hospitalized from food-borne illnesses each year. “We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer,” writes Kristoff. “Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of our agricultural system….is the way antibiotics are recklessly stuffed into healthy animals to make them grow faster.”
Kristoff calls for more testing and education about E. coli adding, “a great place to start reforms would be banning the feeding of antibiotics to healthy livestock.”
The FY 2012 Agriculture appropriations bill, voted out of the House Appropriations Committee last week, includes an amendment that would severely limit the authority of FDA to regulate the use of antimicrobials, including antibiotics, in food animal production-a key concern of public health researchers. Sponsored by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), the amendment would prohibit the agency from spending any money appropriated by the bill on actions “intended to restrict the use of a substance or a compound” unless certain conditions are met. Although the amendment is broad-affecting any “substance or compound,” notably including tobacco-Rep. Rehberg has told The Washington Post that his goal was to block FDA action on the use of antimicrobials by food animal producers. Indeed, the amendment would, among other things, preempt upcoming FDA restrictions on the misuse use of cephalosporin-the antibiotic of choice for serious Salmonella infections in children. (Researchers have reported increased incidence of cephalosporin-resistant Salmonella infections [Foley and Lynne, 2008].) Joining many others in the public health community, researchers at the Center for a Livable Future recently sent a letter to Congress , urging members to strike the amendment from the legislation before final passage.
The Rehberg amendment reads as follows (we have broken it into numbered and lettered points to make the language easier to follow):
None of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the Food and Drug Administration to write, prepare, develop or publish a proposed, interim, or final rule, regulation or guidance that is intended to restrict the use of a substance or a compound unless the Secretary
- bases such rule, regulation or guidance on hard science (and not on such factors as cost and consumer behavior), and
- determines that the weight of toxicological evidence, epidemiological evidence, and risk assessments clearly justifies such action,
- including a demonstration that a product containing such substance or compound
a. is more harmful to users than a product that does not contain such substance or compound, or
b. in the case of pharmaceuticals, has been demonstrated by scientific study to have none of the purported benefits. Read More >
HFHP Summit 2011
Recently, my boyfriend offered to give me a dollar for every blog I started with, “Stop what you’re doing, ’cause I’m about to ruin the image and the style that you’re used to.” I responded to his idea with a barrage of reasons why it was ridiculous and certainly not appropriate in my line of work to write blogs citing The Digital Underground’s “The Humpty Dance.” On second thought, however, those 18 words are an oddly apropos summary of the overarching goals of the Healthy Farms, Healthy People (HFHP) Summit, recently held in Arlington, VA, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and hosted by Public Health Institute. The Center for a Livable Future was a co-organizer of the Summit-along with American Farmland Trust, California Food and Justice Coalition, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and Public Health Law and Policy-which brought together interests from conventional and sustainable agriculture with public health professionals, physicians and health insurers to discuss potential shared issue-areas in food and agriculture policy. The goals of the Summit were to: Read More >
From Flikr Creative Commons:barryskeates
The FDA announced today that Pfizer Inc., will voluntarily suspend the sale of 3-Nitro (better known as the arsenical drug roxarsone) following the results of an FDA study which found elevated levels of inorganic arsenic in the livers of chicken fed roxarsone compared to a control group. The announcement of both the study results by the FDA and Pfizer’s decision to suspend the sale of roxarsone (beginning in 30 days) come after increasing pressure from both scientific and non-profit sectors calling for the FDA to ban the use of roxarsone and other arsenical-containing drugs used by the animal meat industry. Roxarsone is currently approved for use in swine, turkeys and chickens, , though roxarsone is predominately used by the broiler chicken industry.
According to the FDA press release, the inorganic arsenic levels found in broiler chickens in the study were “very low,” but nevertheless represent an unnecessary risk to public health, as inorganic arsenic is considered a known carcinogen by the FDA. Despite this, FDA representatives today said animals raised using roxarsone are still safe for consumption and there will not be a recall of roxarsone-fed animal meat. “It is curious that the FDA says chickens produced with Roxarsone are safe for consumption, while also acknowledging it poses an increased public health risk,” said Dr. Keeve Nachman of the Center for a Livable Future, who has conducted research on the public health impacts of roxarsone use. “FDA’s study does little to characterize cancer risks to people who have been eating poultry for their entire lives,” he said.
Alpharma, the maker of roxarsone (and a subsidiary company of Pfizer) was alerted by the FDA of their results and voluntarily chose to suspend roxarsone sales for the time being—as roxarsone is found in scores of other veterinary drug formulations, this suspension will impact a variety of drug compounds currently used by the animal meat industry.
As the FDA’s study only tested inorganic arsenic levels in chicken livers, it still remains to be seen if inorganic arsenic is also found in the muscle tissue of animals fed roxarsone—this may be important when the time comes for the FDA to take a formal position on whether or not to enact a complete ban of Roxarsone or other arsenical-based veterinary drugs from use by the animal meat industry.
For now, consumers should consider this removal of roxarsone from animal feed as a major victory for public health—what remains to be seen is whether or not the FDA moves to eventually ban roxarsone and other arsenical-based veterinary drugs from the market and how long Pfizer’s voluntary suspension of roxarsone is maintained.
I recently was asked in an interview to name the one thing I would change in the world if I had the power to do so. Surprising even myself, I replied quickly “the Haber-Bosch (H-B) process for industrial nitrogen fixation. Imagine – a world without synthetic N! One can imagine the blank look I got when I pulled that one out of the blue.
My response came from a professional lifetime studying the good and bad of fertilizers, especially nitrogen. And it comes from much reading of the literature on food production and the ills of our advanced society. So, bear with me as I look into a reverse crystal ball for what-if, realizing all the while that there is no way of going back, but examining whether the reverse crystal ball could help us move forward.
Carl Bosch
Much of my background material comes from Vaclav Smil’s book, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and The Transformation of World Food Production (2001), sprinkled in with Smil’s Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (2000) and L.T. Evans’s Feeding the Ten Billion: Plants and Population Growth (1998). There are many other books and papers I could cite, but most are repeating much of the same material.
So, what is the H-B process anyway, and how did it come about? A bit of history:
The world, especially Europe and China, had gained population in bursts, but around 1500 farming moved from subsistence to commercial. Farmers owned their land and developed cropping rotations centered on increasing carrying capacity for animals with fertility supplied through manures and nitrogen coming from clover. Soon, high-yielding cereals were introduced and population headed toward the first billion. Read More >
Researchers at Cambridge University say they have found a new strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in milk from England, Scotland and Denmark, which they are calling LGA251.
The findings – published online by The Lancet Infectious Diseases – can be seen as a further signal that the routine use of antibiotics in industrial food animal production is producing novel public health risks, and diminishing the effectiveness of antibiotics in human medicine.
Center for a Livable Future Director Robert Lawrence said the new findings “underscore the urgent need to protect the effectiveness of a critical medical and public health resource – and this unambiguously translates to the obvious step of eliminating the irresponsible administration of antibiotics to food animals.”
In December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration confirmed that 80% of the antibiotics used in the United States are used in food animals.
The authors of the Lancet study stressed that current testing protocols would fail to identify this new strain as MRSA, and that “new diagnostic guidelines for the detection of MRSA should consider the inclusion of tests for [LGA251].”
When moms talk you can bet lawmakers listen, not to mention food retailers. That is exactly what the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming is counting on following the release of a nationwide poll of 804 American moms, which found that 80 percent are concerned that food animals produced on industrial farms are being given large amounts of antibiotics. Each of these moms is a registered voter and has kids aged 16 or younger. Not only were most of the moms polled concerned about antibiotic use, more than three-quarters said they would support federal regulations to limit its use in food animals.
No doubt this news has the animal agriculture industry concerned. Despite the warnings from scientists and public health experts of the risks of the low-dose use of antibiotics in livestock and poultry, food animal producers have for years fought proposed federal regulations claiming there is little proof the practice poses a risk to humans. Top leaders of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration disagree with animal producers. Former FDA Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein testified in front of Congress stating the links are undeniable and in a letter to the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) the director of the CDC, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, confirmed that the CDC, “feels there is strong scientific evidence of a link between antibiotic use in food animals and antibiotic resistance in humans.”
More and more research continues to pour in, almost on a daily basis, linking antibiotic-use in intensive food animal production facilities to the growing threat of antibiotic resistant infections in people. Earlier this month, a Pew funded nationwide study of grocery store meats revealed nearly 50 percent of the meat and poultry we buy carries antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and that DNA tests indicate the animals themselves were the primary sources. Read More >
Staphylococcus aureus, Image Courtesy: CDC
According to a recently published nationwide study of grocery store meats, the next time you handle a piece of meat or poultry bought at your local supermarket there is nearly a 50 percent chance that it will be carrying drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (Staph). The Translational Genomics Research Institute study determined that the majority of those bacteria are likely resistant to several classes of antibiotics. Antibiotic-resistant strains of Staph are to blame for a host of illnesses, ranging from simple skin infections to life-threatening diseases, such as pneumonia and sepsis. Staph infects an estimated 500,000 patients in U.S. hospitals annually and more deathsdeaths are blamed on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)infections every year than HIV/AIDS. Infectious disease experts warn the consequences of rendering antibiotics useless would be disastrous to modern medicine, which depends on antibiotics for everything from organ transplant surgeries and cancer therapies to the care of patients with trauma or battlefield injuries.
The frequency of detection of resistant bacteria on meat purchased in grocery stores is alarming. Despite this, most of the news coverage we’ve seen this week misses a key message that can be gleaned from the conclusions of the study. The study does not point directly to new or heightened food-safety risks to the consumer, rather, it serves as verification that one of human medicine’s strongest safeguards against disease is quickly losing its efficacy, in part due to inappropriate use of antibiotics in the industrial food animal production system. Read More >
