Center For A Livable Future | Center for a Livable Future

New FDA Numbers Reveal Food Animals Consume Lion’s Share of Antibiotics

Antibiotics, one of the world’s greatest medical discoveries, are slowly losing their effectiveness in fighting bacterial infections and the massive use of the drugs in food animals may be the biggest culprit. The growing threat of antibiotic resistance is largely due to the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in both people and animals, which leads to an increase in “super-bacteria”. However, people use a much smaller portion of antibiotics sold in this country compared to the amount set aside for food animals. In fact, according to new data just released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), of the antibiotics sold in 2009 for both people and food animals almost 80% were reserved for livestock and poultry. A huge portion of those antibiotics were never intended to fight bacterial infections, rather producers most likely administered them in continuous low-dosages through feed or water to increase the speed at which their animals grew. And that has many public health experts and scientists troubled.

For years scientists concerned about the threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria in food animal production have been trying to figure out just how much antibiotics producers are using each year. The best they could do was come up with rough estimates. That is because the data was never publicly available, until now. Read More >

Hoop dreams: A Baltimore community farm gets winterized

as seen from Whitelock St.

On a recent crisp October weekend, Reservoir Hill community members, friends, farmers, and two bus loads of Johns Hopkins undergraduate students gathered at the Whitelock Community Farm for a modern barn raising. The various volunteer groups, totaling close to 50 people, built an inexpensive but practical hoop house using a clear plastic roof and a PVC-pipe spine to extend the newly established farm’s growing season. Construction of the 20 foot by 30 foot hoop house was managed by Thor Nelson, an architect/planner who lives a block from the farm site, and paid for by a grant from Parks and People. The Reservoir Hill Improvement Council (RHIC) chipped in Federal Stimulus money to fund materials for a shed and farm stand on the property, and coordinated the volunteer support from Johns Hopkins. Read More >

Independent advisory committee grills FDA on genetically engineered salmon

In a chilly hotel ballroom in the Washington DC suburbs, the FDA this week is considering whether to allow genetically engineered (GE) animals in the human food supply. The test case is an Atlantic salmon that has been engineered with Chinook salmon genes to express a growth hormone. The result is a fast-growing salmon that reaches market sooner than non-GE farm raised salmon.

A cast of stakeholders—industry, advocacy groups, academics, and regulators—are writing the storyline, but the climax— a pending decision by the FDA— is still a month or more away.One thing is clear, this FDA decision on GE salmon will set a precedent for other GE food animals in the US, and may influence regulations and practices in other countries already farming or considering farming salmon.

AquaBounty's AquaAdvantage Salmon (http://www.aquabounty.com/PressRoom/)

Is GE salmon a drug?

The approval mechanism for GE salmon, however convoluted it may sound, is as new animal drug. Approval of new animal drugs is under the purview of FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM). This approval process is similar to other GE animals used for pharmaceutical production (e.g. goats that produce drugs in their milk), and for research purposes (e.g. transgenic mice). Several speakers on both sides of the issue, including Bruce Chassy of the University of Illinois who is pro-GE, were confused why FDA did not instead allow its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) to take charge of regulating GE salmon as a food. One can only speculate that since CVM has been working with the drug sponsor, AquaBounty, for about a decade, certain CVM staff may feel some ownership over the issue. A clear rationale for why CVM and not CFSAN was in charge was not well articulated by FDA.

FDA carefully frames the issue.

To focus the debate, FDA’s CVM will consider just four main questions for GE salmon approval: i) are the inserted genetic elements harmful for salmon health?; (ii) are the salmon safe for humans to heath based on a “reasonable certainty of no harm”?; (iii) are the inserted genetic elements durable, heritable, and affect salmon such that it improves salmon growth rates as matching product claims?; and (iv) are there environmental risks if GE salmon escape? While striving to answer these key questions is admirable, the methods to address each issue use a reductionist view. Therefore the assessment is not designed for systems thinking about the intersection and interactions among diet, health, food production, and the environment.

What is missing from the debate?

What FDA is not considering in its decision is just as important as what it is considering. The FDA is not interested in assessing the food safety of the whole fish but rather its component parts in a non-additive way (i.e. hormones, nutrients and their separate toxicity or allergenicity). The FDA is not considering risk-benefit trade-offs in health from salmon consumption. The FDA will not consider ethical arguments against genetic modification, or biotechnology arguments for increasing food production as means of feeding the world. Animal welfare issues will also not be considered, as admitted by one FDA panelist.

An independent advisory committee was highly critical of the science.

A major component of the FDA hearings on September 20, 2010 was peer-review and recommendations from an independent advisory committed called the Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee (VMAC). In what many considered a surprise, the VMAC committee was antagonistic of the FDA summary of the sponsor’s environment and food safety studies. On several instances the VMAC committee were concerned about the low sample size and power of the sponsor’s studies. The FDA responded that it had not performed power calculations to identify what an appropriate sample size should have been. Most VMAC committee members felt that larger and better-designed studies of food and environment safety were needed. This is a strong statement that the FDA should not ignore.

More to come from the next day of hearings, so stay tuned..

- Dave Love

Tour dem veggies: An East Baltimore bicycle garden tour

starting the ride from Duncan St Miracle Garden

Fueled by cherry tomatoes and lemonade, three-dozen bikers (this blogger included) hit the pavement last Saturday afternoon for a seven-mile tour of seven great community gardens in East Baltimore. We started the ride at the 22-year old Duncan Street Miracle Garden, a one-acre fruit and vegetable haven. Along the ride I was searching for secretes to a successful community garden, but it turns out there are no hard-and-fast rules; gardens are themselves heirloom varieties, each unique and charming.

Some community gardens had neatly arranged raised-beds, such as Montessori gardens beds built from old book shelves, or the checkerboard pattern beds of the Homestead Harvest garden. Montpelier Orchards, the newest garden on the tour, had a neatly mowed lawn between rows of trellised young raspberries plants and a small olive tree dwarfed by a tall garden gate with arbor. Others took a wild and free-form approach with natural reseeding tomatoes and sunflowers, making every step a delicious adventure.

Montessori School Garden; raised beds made from old bookcase

I had always believed Robert Frost’s line “good fences make good neighbors,” that is until I learned that many community gardens benefit from the opposite philosophy. Participation Park steward Scott Berzofsky said “the fact that there is no fence was important from the beginning… we wanted to have a commons.” Brentwood Gardens also lacks a fence, and encourages neighbors to glean on a regular basis. Cucumbers were free for the taking; just one example of the “gift economy” at work.

Several gardens gave animals a prominent role, such as the chickens and bees at the Montessori School garden. Apparently playing with chickens during recess is a favorite activity. Brentwood is preparing for chickens this summer by building a coop and purchasing permits from Baltimore City. For more on chickens in Baltimore see my previous post. Brentwood also raised goldfish in modified rain barrels to eat mosquitoes. I’ve never heard of this use, though I didn’t get a single bite while standing next to the barrel in ankle deep grass.

Our last stop was Real Food Farm, where three hoop houses sit peacefully in a grassy field in Clifton Park.Head farmer, Tyler Brown, gave an impassioned pitch for urban commercial farming that grabbed the crowds’ attention.Leaving the farm hungry and tired, the bikers headed back to the Duncan Street garden for a great spread of food donated by leading Baltimore restaurants, live music, and lively conversations with new acquaintances and old friends.

sunflowers at Participation Park Garden

Gardens in the tour:

Duncan Street Miracle Garden :: 1800 North Duncan Street
Participation Park :: 1100 Forest Street
The Montessori School Garden :: 1600 Guilford Avenue
Brentwood Garden :: 1700 N. Brentwood Avenue
Homestead Harvest :: 632 Homestead Street
Montpelier Orchard :: 918 Montpelier Road
Real Food Farm :: 2706 St Lo Drive

Congratulations Parks and People, the Community Greening Resource Network, and any other volunteers for turning a hot, muggy Saturday into a memorable event!

- Dave Love

CLF generated map of Baltimore community gardens

Response to “Math Lessons for Locavores” op-ed

Grist.org recently invited bloggers through it’s Grist Talk: Food Fight series to respond to an August 20th op-ed piece, “Math Lessons for Locavores,” by Stephen Budiansky in the New York Times. What follows is my response:

“I agree with Mr. Budiansky that freight is by some measures cheap, and that the interstate system and trains are convenient conduits from farms to distributors to markets, although this idea is not so new.

community garden in Waverly neighorhood, Baltimore, MD

A more interesting question to tackle is: what does the desire to be a locavore say about our disjointed food system, and is there room for improvement by developing regional food systems?

Mr. Budiansky’s argument runs thin when we take a hard look at what consolidated industrial farming and food animal production “return to our land,” as he puts it. It is difficult to be in favor of a farming approach that relies upon mono-cropping using genetically modified seeds and synthetic fertilizers. Likewise, food animal production facilities make for poor neighbors when their (virtually unregulated) wastes and associated land application and spray-field sites spread allergens and antibiotic-resistant bacteria throughout farming communities.

So why pick on locavores? Because when they seek local food, they may also be seeking to buy organically grown or raised foods, from small to mid-sized farms, which can impact entrenched agribusiness interests. Changing food preferences and buying habits may be changing the way food is grown, distributed, and consumed.

For example, the American Meat Institute was defensive when the Meatless Monday campaign, for which Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future serves as a scientific advisor, suggested on NPR that reducing meat consumption one day a week could be good for your health, by potentially reducing saturated fat intake. It isn’t surprising: the average American spends about $550 annually on meat. If the conventional food-animal industry improved production methods by removing growth-promoting antibiotics and recognizing animal welfare, both the quality of their products and the perceptions of their customers may increase.

Food decisions carry weight, and so the lesson here is to speak with your fork and the farms will follow!”

- Dave Love

[This post originally ran Monday, August 23 on Grist.org]

Maryland public hearing on proposed oyster policy draws a crowd

Citizens descended on the small town of Wye Mill, Maryland at Chesapeake College Thursday, August 5th to attend the final public comment period for Maryland’s sweeping new oyster policies. The overcast and muggy weather provided a sober backdrop for intense discussions on how Maryland will manage the future of the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica)— a bivalve mollusk central to the culture and livelihood of generations of watermen.

Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) staff reviewed a package of eight regulations, ranging from expanded oyster sanctuaries, changes to public shellfish fishery areas, leasing for shellfish aquaculture, to a study of power dredging. According to the Southern Maryland Online, more than a thousand people have already commented on these proposed oyster policies, which were posted on February 2010.

Tom O’Connell, Director of DNR Fisheries Service defended the plan saying “there is broad stakeholder agreement that the status quo is not acceptable” and that the policies as presented will “make it better for the oyster, the oystermen, and aquaculture.”

Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica). Image by Tony Weeg/Creative Commons

One of the main points of contention was over expanded oyster sanctuaries. Conservation groups see these sanctuaries, instead of lost resources, as preserves where oyster populations can grown and evolve natural resistance to menacing oyster diseases. An appropriate analogy is the creation of “national parks” or sanctuaries for oysters where they can flourish, in addition to “national forests” or public waters where oysters can be selectively, commercially harvested. Signs of natural disease resistance have been reported in Chesapeake Bay oysters, which highlights need for increasing oyster sanctuaries.

There is a growing sense of urgency to approve the state’s plan. Stephanie Westby, a fisheries scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation called for “ new management strategies while we still have something to protect.” A member of the Queen Anne’s Conservation Association echoed support for the new DNR plan and pointed out that rockfish and blue crabs have both rebounded from overharvesting following management the state, and oysters are next on the list of species that need saving.

Questions about the plan to increase oyster sanctuaries from 9% to 25% of remaining oyster beds and carve out private lease areas drew sharp criticism from one oystermen who asked, “why take my bottom from me?”

Marylanders have historically regarded oyster bottom— sea floor capable for growing oysters— as public property, while most other states on the East Coast, including Virginia, consider oyster bottom as privatized, leasable land. Transitioning from public oyster grounds to leasable plots in selected areas is a first step in developing oyster aquaculture in Maryland.

More than 90% of oysters consumed in the US are raised by aquaculture, so Maryland’s latest decision to promote aquaculture along with wild harvesting is consistent with, if not somewhat lagging national trends. Read More >

NPR’s Morning Edition Focuses on Meatless Monday

Some 14 million listeners tuned in this morning to hear National Public Radio’s most popular program, Morning Edition, give extensive coverage to the Meatless Monday campaign. The 8-1/2 minute segment, “Campaign Aims To Make Meatless Mondays Hip,” included an interview with Meatless Monday Founder, Sid Lerner. Reporter Allison Aubrey accompanied Lerner as he visited Dovetail, a popular New York City restaurant that has adopted Meatless Monday, and interviewed patrons sampling the offerings on the meatless menu.

The Meatless Monday Campaign was developed in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Center for a Livable Future. The goal of the campaign is to reduce saturated fat consumption by 15 percent by forgoing meat one day a week.

Book Review: The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One

screen-shot-2010-03-04-at-112358-am

By my estimation, seventy-five-year-old author Dr. Sylvia Earle has spent more than 1% of her life underwater. If her dives were connected in time, it would be as if she slipped into the ocean on New Year’s Day and did not re-emerge until some time after Labor Day.

Her book chronicles her experiences as a 1960s pioneer in underwater exploration, with stirring accounts of the inquisitive fish and mammals she met in the deep blue. Anthropomorphizing these animals would be an insult, given all the trouble humans have caused by overfishing, pollution, and acidification of the oceans. With these issues, she deftly takes an animal’s perspective in deconstructing our troubled oceans.

I once found an enterprising hermit crab with its vulnerable posterior neatly tucked into a discarded Bayer aspirin bottle, a modern, lightweight, durable substitute for a traditional snail shell. A decorator crab on a nearby reef had artfully placed a disposable fast-food ketchup envelope on its back along with bits of algae, hydroids and normal camouflaging elements. The ketchup container actually helped the crab blend in with other trash.

Over half of all humans live near the coast where impacts are felt from habitat destruction to overfishing. One report in the journal Nature found industrial fishing has removed 90% of all large fish from the ocean. As oceanic currents sweep away human litter, a convergence of garbage is amassing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To make a small dent in the trash issue, Earle tells of the Ocean Conservancy’s yearly coastal clean-up that in 2008 drew participants from 100 countries, collecting 6.8 million tons of trash with the top 10 offenders being: 1) cigarette butts; 2) plastic bags; 3) food containers; 4) caps and lids; 5) plastic bottles; 6) paper bags; 7) straws and stirrers; 8) cups, plates, eating utensils; 9) glass bottles; and 10) beverage cans. So many of these items are food related, which is a sign to me that our food system is in disrepair. Read More >

CBS Airs Follow-up Report on Antibiotic Use and Congressional Hearing

The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric aired yet another report last night detailing the risks associated with feeding antibiotics to farm animals. The report is a follow-up to a series aired in February and reported on here in the LivableFutureBlog. In last night’s report, Couric covers Wedneday’s Congressional hearing held to determine whether or not the feeding of antibiotics to healthy farm animals could pose a significant health risk to humans. This was the third, and final, Congressional hearing on antibiotic resistance. At the hearing of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, a representative of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) finally caught up with the rest of the world—and his peers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—and admitted that the use of antibiotics in farm animal feed is contributing to the growing problem of deadly antibiotic resistance in America.Dr. John Clifford, Deputy Administrator for Veterinary Services for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) read from his previously submitted testimony that the USDA believes it is likely that U.S. use of antibiotics in animal agriculture does lead to some cases of resistance in humans and the animals.

The Center for a Livable Future submitted a written statement to the House Committee. “The Food & Drug Administration recently released a draft “guidance document” that reviewed the evidence linking antimicrobial resistance to food animal production,” Dr. Robert S. Lawrence, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future wrote. ” FDA concludes, ‘Using medically important antimicrobial drugs for production purposes is not in the interest of protecting and promoting public health.’ FDA clearly supports the conclusions of public health researchers discussed here, and has begun taking action in response to antimicrobial resistance accelerated by animal agriculture. No scientific debate exists on these issues–only political questions remain.

“I commend members for their leadership on this topic, and urge further action to fully prohibit using antimicrobial drugs for growth promotion and prophylaxis. Preserving the efficacy of antimicrobials in human medicine require immediate action, and I urge Congress to move quickly in taking steps to protect the public’s health.”

As reported previously in the LivableFutureBlog, a bill to limit the use of antibiotics–H.R. 1549, Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act–is awaiting committee action.

Many other influential media outlets are giving the issue of antibiotics in animal feed significant coverage. A recent article in DesMoinesRegister.com, “Antibiotics in livestock affects humans, USDA testifies,” notes the “Agriculture Department, which livestock producers have traditionally relied on to advocated for their interests, backed the idea of a link between animal use of antibiotics and human health.”

International aquaculture course stresses natural systems thinking for fish farming

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 12^th annual International Aquaponics and Tilapia Aquaculture Course in St. Croix at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI). I was able to meet and learn from many wonderful people who traveled from about 21 U.S. states and 18 countries including Canada, Mexico, six Caribbean islands, Peru, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Singapore, and Saipan, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Course participants ranged from commercial and aspiring farmers to backyard hobbyists, non-profit and international development workers, aquaculture extension specialists, academics, entrepreneurs, and investors.

Charlie Schultz, course instructor, harvesting basil

Throughout the week, the course instructors emphasized that integratedfarming systems, such as aquaponics, can be more environmentally sustainable, resilient and potentially more profitable than monoculture of either fish or plant species. Course lectures included tilapia biology, broodstock spawning, fry cultivation and growout, plant propagation and hydroponics, integrated pest management, system design, and commercial considerations. Field work followed in-class lectures for hands-on learning activities.

Aquaponics is essentially a method for boosting profits from aquaculture (i.e., fish farming) by capturing excess nutrients inherent in fish waste to raise plants as a secondary revenue crop. In this regard aquaponics borrows heavily from hydroponics — a method for raising plants in a soil-less, nutrient-rich water, but it differs in one key respect. Hydroponics is performed with microbiologically clean water where all inputs come from fertilizers, while in aquaponics “we keep our system dirty” says the course’s lead instructor and UVI professor, Dr. Jim Rakocy, repeating the mantra this leader in the aquaponics movement has developed during his 30 years of research. Read More >

Twitter