Category Archives: Antibiotics

Antibiotic use plummets on US farms after ban on using drugs to make livestock grow faster

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Dec 19, 2018                       By 

US farmers have slashed the use of antibiotics in meat and milk by a third, new figures from the Food and Drug Administration reveal.

The amount of antibiotics sold to farmers dropped by almost three million kilograms between 2016 and 2017, according to the new data.

In 2017, the FDA banned the use of antibiotics to make animals grow quicker, a practice known as growth promotion. The new rules meant the drugs, formerly available over the counter, could only be obtained with a veterinarian’s order.

The new data is the first indication of the success of the ban in reducing antibiotic use in US agriculture, which is considered key to stemming the growing threat of superbugs which can infect humans.

The overuse of antibiotics in human medicine and in livestock has accelerated the rise of resistant bacteria, commonly known as superbugs. They can cause life-threatening infections as they are resistant to the drugs normally used to kill them. More than 153,000 people in the US died of superbug infections in 2010, a recent study found.

The European Union banned using antibiotics as growth promoters in 2001. But the practice was still legal in the US – one of the biggest producers of meat in the world – until more than a decade and a half later. READ MORE AT…

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‘Hugely Important Breakthrough for Human and Animal Health’ as EU Approves Antibiotic Restrictions for Livestock to Battle Superbugs

Common Dreams - by Jessica Corbett - Oct. 25th, 2018

The European Parliament on Thursday approved new rules for medicine use on healthy livestock in an effort to battle superbugs. (Image: Avicultura.com)

“Antibiotic resistance is a real sword of Damocles, threatening to send our health care system back to the Middle Ages.”

In a move celebrated by experts and activists who continue to raise alarm about the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance—fueled in part by rampant overuse of medicines in agriculture—the European Parliament on Thursday approved new rules for antibiotic use on healthy farm animals.

“This is a hugely important breakthrough for human and animal health and is by far the more serious attempt that Europe has ever made to achieve responsible antibiotic use in farming,” declaredCóilín Nunan, campaign manager of the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, a coalition of EU-based medical, health, agricultural, environmental, consumer, and animal welfare groups.

About 73 percent of the world’s medicines are currently used on livestock, Nunan noted, and “farming accounts for about two thirds of all antibiotic use in Europe, so if the legislation is implemented correctly, we should be seeing very large reductions in use in years to come.”

The “long-awaited” law, which is set to take effect in 2022, will limit preventative use of antibiotics on groups of animals; empower European regulators to designate certain medicines for human use only; impose restrictions on imports; and encourage new research and protections for new drugs.

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Glyphosate and Dicamba Herbicides Increase Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria

Oct 13 2018 -  by Sustainable Pulse

A new study has found that some of the world’s most widely used herbicides, Roundup (glyphosate) and Kamba (dicamba), increase the rate of antibiotic resistance development in bacteria by a factor of up to 100,000 times faster than occurs without the herbicide.

Both herbicides are used on GM crops engineered to tolerate them.

The new study adds to a growing body of evidence that herbicides used on a mass industrial scale, but not intended to be antibiotics, can have profound effects on bacteria, with potentially negative implications for medicine’s ability to treat infectious diseases caused by bacteria. University of Canterbury (New Zealand) Professor Jack Heinemann, one of the study’s authors, said, “The combination of chemicals to which bacteria are exposed in the modern environment should be addressed alongside antibiotic use if we are to preserve antibiotics in the long-term.”

An important finding of the new study was that even in cases where the herbicides increase the toxicity of antibiotics they also significantly increased the rate of antibiotic resistance, which the authors say could be contributing to the greater use of antibiotics in both agriculture and medicine.

Previously these researchers found that exposures to the herbicide products Roundup, Kamba and 2,4-D or the active ingredients alone most often increased resistance, but sometimes increased the susceptibility of potential human pathogens such as Salmonella enterica and Escherichia coli, depending on the antibiotic.

Prof Heinemann said, “We are inclined to think that when a drug or other chemical makes antibiotics more potent, that should be a good thing. But it also makes the antibiotic more effective at promoting resistance when the antibiotic is at lower concentrations, as we more often find in the environment. Such combinations can be like trying to put out the raging fire of antibiotic resistance with gasoline.”

The authors concluded that neither reducing the use of antibiotics nor the discovery of new ones may be sufficient strategies to avoid the post-antibiotic era. This is because bacteria may be exposed to other non-antibiotic chemicals that predispose them to evolve resistance to antibiotics more quickly. Herbicides are examples of some of the most common non-antibiotic chemicals in frequent global use. Thus antibiotic resistance may increase even if total antibiotic use is reduced, and new ones are invented, unless other environmental exposures are also controlled.

The new paper, “Agrichemicals and antibiotics in combination increase antibiotic resistance evolution” is published online in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ on October 12 and can be downloaded without charge from here.

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Antibiotic apocalypse: EU scraps plans to tackle drug pollution, despite fears of rising resistance

The Guardian - June 1, 2018

Leaked documents reveal discarded proposals to ward off antibiotic resistance through closer scrutiny of drug firms.

The EU has scrapped plans for a clampdown on pharmaceutical pollution that contributes to the spread of deadly superbugs.

Plans to monitor farm and pharmaceutical companies, to add environmental standards to EU medical product rules and to oblige environmental risk assessments for drugs used by humans have all been discarded, leaked documents seen by the Guardian reveal.

An estimated 700,000 people die every year from antimicrobial resistance, partly due to drug-resistant bacteria created by the overuse, misuse and dumping of antibiotics.

The UK’s chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, has warned that failing to act could lead to a post-antibiotic apocalypse, spelling “the end of modern medicine” as routine infections defy effective treatment.

Some studies predict that antimicrobial resistance could cost $100tn (£75tn) between now and 2050, with the annual death toll reaching 10 million over that period.

An EU strategy for pharmaceuticals in the environment was supposed to propose ways to avert the threat, but leaked material shows that a raft of ideas contained in an early draft have since been diluted or deleted.

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Climate Change Could Supercharge Threat of Antibiotic Resistance: Study

The ‘associations between antibiotic resistance and temperature could be increasing over time’

The World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have previously sounded alarms about the growing issue of antibiotic resistance—a problem already linked to overprescribing of antibiotics and industrial farming practices. Now, new research shows a link between warmer temperatures and antibiotic resistance, suggesting it could be a greater threat than previously thought on our ever-warming planet.

The study, led by epidemiologists from Harvard Medical School (HMS), Boston Children’s Hospital, and the University of Toronto, was published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“The effects of climate are increasingly being recognized in a variety of infectious diseases, but so far as we know this is the first time it has been implicated in the distribution of antibiotic resistance over geographies,” said Derek MacFadden, an infectious disease specialist and research fellow at Boston Children’s and study co-author.

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Video: Dr. SENEFF Lecture and Expert Panel Discussion on the effects of Glyphosate in our Food - March 27th, 2018

Dr. Stephanie Seneff Lecture on glyphosate, sulfate deficiency & degenerative diseases. Followed by an Expert Panel Discussion, Q&A: Sachin Patel, Jodi Koberinski and Brett Hawes. Hosted by Melody Byblow,
Presented March 27th, 2018 in Toronto, Canada  holisticwellnessadvantage.ca

Video Production sponsored by the Canadian Council on Food Safety and Health - CCFSH.org

1 hour lecture with slides and 50 min of panel discussion and Q & A

Video link: Dr. Stephanie Seneff Lecture and Expert Panel Discussion, Q&A

Slide show link: http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/2018/Toronto.pptx