Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Antibiotic Runoff

New York Times Editorial, Sept. 18.

One of the persistent problems of industrial agriculture is the inappropriate use of antibiotics. It's one thing to give antibiotics to individual animals, case by case, the way we treat humans. But it's a common practice in the confinement hog industry to give antibiotics to the whole herd, to enhance growth and to fight off the risk of disease, which is increased by keeping so many animals in such close quarters. This is an ideal way to create organisms resistant to the drugs. That poses a risk to us all.

A recent study by the University of Illinois makes the risk even more apparent. Studying the groundwater around two confinement hog farms, scientists have identified the presence of several transferable genes that confer antibiotic resistance, specifically to tetracycline. There is the very real chance that in such a rich bacterial soup these genes might move from organism to organism, carrying the ability to resist tetracycline with them. And because the resistant genes were found in groundwater, they are already at large in the environment.

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