Are Antibiotics In Livestock Feed Partly to Blame For Drug-resistant Bacteria?

 The article below brings out a very valid point. They say that the practice of lacing animals' feed with low-dose antibiotics to accelerate their growth is spreading drug-resistant bacteria to humans and rendering common antibiotics useless to treat illness. After all, isn't that why our doctors are being so careful not to treat every minor infection we have with antibiotics? 
     . . . June


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Doctors sound alarm over antibiotics in livestock feed
The Green Man:

The Canadian Medical Association is pressuring the federal government to investigate the human health impacts of feeding antibiotics to healthy beef cattle, poultry and hogs.

Doctors and scientists say the practice of lacing animals' feed with low-dose antibiotics to accelerate their growth is spreading drug-resistant bacteria to humans and rendering common antibiotics useless to treat illness.

A food chain contaminated by drug-resistant bacteria bodes ill for both public health and the cost of health care, and as drug resistance in microbes increases, the number of effective antibiotics in the doctors' arsenal has dropped.

"As doctors we are seeing that people have infections that were easily treated years ago, when all the basic antibiotics took care of most of the infections that people had," said Vancouver physician Dr. Bill Mackie, chairman of the environmental health committee of the B.C. Medical Association. "Of late there has been increasing [drug] resistance; when you put someone on an antibiotic that you expect to do its job, it doesn't work."

When a course of antibiotic treatment fails, people stay sick longer and doctors must resort to more exotic and often more expensive drugs, Mackie said.

The BC Centre for Disease Control has tracked a rise in the number of courses of antibiotics required to treat common bacterial illnesses, such as bladder infections.

Medical authorities are also grappling with a rise in multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which mainly affects hospital patients but is also found in hogs and cattle, where it can be passed to humans, according to a 2009 report by the European Food Safety Authority.

Read on . . .