ANTIBIOTICS
Initially, penicillin and other antibiotics proved to be extremely effective, saving the lives of millions of people who otherwise would have died. However, the euphoria surrounding these “miracle drugs” quickly began to fade. Streptomycin almost completely lost its effectiveness after two months of use, especially on pulmonary tuberculosis. It also left many patients deaf or permanently dizzy. However, because the life-saving benefits still clearly outweighed the drawbacks, postwar physicians continued to prescribe strong drugs like these, and they became the treatment of choice for most acute conditions.
Within several decades, they began to be used prophylactically to prevent future infection, as well as remedially to treat existing disease, and antibiotics were routinely added to livestock feed, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and other non-prescription products.
In the United States, 240 million doses of antibiotics are prescribed every year, almost one per person. One of every three hospital patients receives an antibiotic, and physicians routinely administer antibiotics for everything from the common cold to pneumonia.
Altogether, medical use accounts for 60 percent of antibiotic use. The other 40 percent is used in livestock feed to promote rapid growth. By 1980, 75 percent of all cattle in the United States received antibiotics, 90 percent of swine and veal calves, 50 percent of sheep, and nearly 100 percent of chickens and poultry. The drugs not only were used to prevent infection but to fatten up the animals and ensure maximum growth—and thus profits.
In recent years, research has shown that antibiotics can interfere with the production of red blood cells, the metabolism of vitamin B-12, and kill benign or beneficial bacteria in the intestines that synthesize Vitamin K, biotin, riboflavin, panthothenate, and pyridoxine. These nutrients are all associated with proper immune function and protection against disease. Side-effects associated with antibiotic use and misuse include diarrhea, rashes, fever, allergic reactions, hemolytic anemia, bleeding, bone marrow toxicity, and disorders of the kidneys, liver, and central nervous system. The rapid spread of candida albicans and other acute infections has been associated with chronic antibiotic use that has disrupted the normal homeostasis in the digestive system and enabled the selection of pathogenic strains of yeast, fungi, bacilli, and other microorganisms. See Drug-Resis-tance, Infectious Diseases.
• End of the Antibiotic Era? In a review of the history and therapeutic use of antibiotics, two medical researchers in Texas document how the modern science was lulled into complacency. “The scientific community grossly underestimated the remarkable genetic plasticity of these organisms and their ability, through mutations and genetic transfer, to develop resistance to antibiotics,” they explain. “Antibiotic resistance has made potential killers out of bacteria that previously posed little threat to mankind. The indiscriminate and reckless use of antibiotics has led to a fast ap-proaching crisis in which human dominance of the planet is threatened by single, elementary cells of the microbal world.”
Source: J. W. Harrison and T. A. Svec, “The Beginning of the End of the Antibiotic Era?,” Parts I and II, Quintessence International 29(3):151-62, 1998 and 29(4):223-29, 1998.
• Overprescription of Antibiotics - Abuse of antibiotics is contributing to disease, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Every year doctors write 12 million antibiotic prescriptions—one in every five—for colds, bronchitis and other viral infections for which antibiotics are useless. “Every time we use an antibiotic, we run the risk of promoting antibiotic resistance, or drug resistance, by bacteria,” said lead scientist Ralph Gonzales.
In the last 10 years, an epidemic of Streptococcus pneumoniae that is resistant to penicillin drugs has developed and is a leading cause of ear and sinus infections, meningitis, and other common illnesses.
Source: R. Gonzales et al., “Antibiotic Prescribing for Adults with Colds, Upper Respiratory Tract Infections, and Bronchitis by Ambulatory Care Physicians,” Journal of the American Medical Association 278(11)”901-4, 1997.
• Dangers of Antibiotics - In a critique of modern medicine and agriculture, a noted public health official presents evidence that the overuse of pharmaceuticals is creating an epidemic of new drug-resistant diseases.
“The sheer magnitude of this assault [the creation of new diseases by antibiotic-resistant microbes] is staggering. For four decades now, we have thrown hundreds of tons of antibiotics against our Hollywood imagination of microscopic enemies. In the process we have sown seeds for a whole new array of actual germs and diseases. . . . We favor simple technological fixes for complex disease entities, while our medical complex fosters a near-sighted one-germ, one-chemical mentality. Together, these positions contribute to a world view that encourages the proliferation of new chemotherapeutic agents, and in turn, the proliferation of new disease entitles. . . . The answer clearly does not consist of throwing more troops into a losing battle.”
Source: Marc Lappé, When Antibiotics Fail: Restoring the Ecology of the Body, (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1986).
• European Meat Tests Positive for Drug-Resistant Bacteria - In samples from a European Union-licensed meat-processing plant, German researchers found that 8 percent of minced beef and pork samples tested positive for vancomycin-resistant enteroccoi (VRE), antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria associated with human infections.
Source: G. Klein et al., “Antibiotic Resistance Patterns of Enterocci and Occurrences of Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococci in Raw Minced Beef and Pork in Germany,” Appl Environ Microbiol 64(5):1825-30, 1998.
• WHO Calls for End to Antibiotics in Livestock Feed - The World Health Organization has recommended phasing out the use of antibiotics to promote livestock growth. “Farms are factories of drug resistance,” stated Dr. Stuart Levy, director of the Center for Adaptation, Genetics, and Drug Resistance at the Tufts University School of Medicine. “The non-therapeutic misusage is just causing more multi-drug resistance in human therapy. They can transfer resistance, whether it’s something we eat or touch or waste that’s tilled into another source.”
Source: Stan Grossfeld, “Animal Waste Emerging as U.S. Problem,” Boston Globe, September 21, 1998.