Agriculture's bad medicine
COMMENT | JONATHAN ANOMALY | Most of us are oblivious to the threats caused by our actions when those threats are invisible. Our use of antibiotics is a case in point. When used judiciously, antibiotics save lives and prevent the transmission of deadly diseases. But the therapeutic power of antibiotics is being squandered by their imprudent use in agriculture. “Agriculture’s bad medicine”.

Today, more than half of the antibiotics administered around the world are used in the production of food. Farmers use antimicrobials to treat infections in their livestock. The problem is that they commonly misuse antibiotics either to compensate for poor agricultural practices – such as overcrowding on factory farms, which encourages the spread of disease – or to accelerate growth and reduce production costs.

These practices may appear harmless in isolation, but their aggregate effect is dangerous. As antibiotics enter the environment through the food people eat or the waste animals produce, antimicrobial resistance intensifies. And this affects human health in troubling ways.

Every day, at hospitals and clinics around the world, patients are given antibiotics for bacterial infections like tuberculosis, gonorrhea, or pneumonia. Others receive antibiotics prophylactically, to prevent bacterial infections during surgery, or when underlying conditions or treatments (such as chemotherapy) compromise their immunity. Unfortunately, many widely used antibiotics are losing their ability to protect patients and treat disease; routine misuse of antibiotics in farming is a key reason why.

Not long after the Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming discovered a fungus that could kill bacteria, he recognised that overuse of antibiotics would encourage resistance. As he warned in 1945, “the thoughtless person playing with penicillin is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism.”

Widespread misuse of antibiotics in agriculture is one of the most egregious forms of “playing with penicillin.” In 2015, a new antibiotic-resistant bacterium was discovered in Chinese pigs, and then in Chinese patients. Since then, two more variants of the bacterium have been discovered, and the genes that enable these bacteria to resist antibiotics and jump between species – so-called “mobile genetic elements” – have been found on farms and in hospitals around the world. If the reckless use of antibiotics in agriculture continues, the impact on people will be severe...

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