While finishing drafting a series of posts on how Tamiflu resistant virus might spread as a result of intense use for influenza control, Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway posted this to remind us that drug resistant organisms spread for reasons much less useful than trying to stop people from dying. Like treating cows so they can be killed later and we can eat them and make money for agribusiness:
The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.
The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.
Echoing those concerns, the FDA's advisory board last fall voted to reject the request by InterVet Inc. of Millsboro, Del., to market the drug for cattle.
Yet by all indications, the FDA will approve cefquinome this spring. That outcome is all but required, officials said, by a recently implemented "guidance document" that codifies how to weigh the threats to human health posed by proposed new animal drugs. (WaPo)
Let me get the FDA argument straight. Yes, this is a bad idea, but the FDA has no choice? It is "all but required" (does that mean it isn't really required?) because of a guidance document? A guidance document?
You probably think that guidance documents are for guidance, right? In actual fact, they are statements that "explain how an existing regulation will be interpreted, implemented and enforced" and Bush has been issuing Executive Orders that allow the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review regulations -- and now guidance documents -- before they reach the public, rewriting them if they wish. The clear implication here is that OMB has construed, if not rewritten, the FDA guidance document that tells the agency how to weigh threats to people from drugs given to animals.
Who do you think has the most pull with OMB, agribusiness lobbyists or public health specialists and doctors? I'll give you a nanosecond to consider your answer.
Time's up. (Take that any way you wish.)
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So why is there an FDA of it has no power of decision? Let's save the money and shut it down, just let the president or the OMB decide everything.
It's sad, but the best way to fight back is to avoid eating beef. Of course, unless you can get genuine organically raised beef. Though round here, at least, it's pretty expensive, prohibitively so for some families.
I have to ask, why is Congress sitting on its hands while these public health (or any other) atrocities continue?
We're not supposed to eat a lot of beef. Our ancestors ate meat much more sporadically, and it was lean meat. Eating red meat at every meal makes us fat and dieased; it's not what our bodies evolved to live on.
Meat is supposed to be expensive. Right now the price of meat is artificially low because cattle are "finished" in feedlots where they are fed lots of government subsidized corn. Cattle are supposed to eat grass, not grain, so they need to be fed antibiotics to combat the effects of this unnatural diet. Synthetic hormones make the animals put on weight faster, bettering the feed conversion ratio and making the meat cheaper.
What is the real cost of that cheap burger? Is it worth giving up a "magic bullet" medicine of the future?
I'm not sure what's going to happen now that we're making plans to use a large chunk of the nation's corn crop to make ethanol instead of beef. Maybe we'll go back to feeding cows on grass and they won't need antibiotics? (I have a vision of burning that cheap gas to drive along scanning the sides of the road for weeds to eat.)
Here is a link to everything you really didn't want to know about how beef is raised.
Shooting ourselves in te foot again. We never learn from history, do we?
Marissa. This is just one more example of a solution chasing a problem.
The problem is not with farmers or farm animal veterinarians...but with the intensively cultivated, close relationship between regulators and pharmaceutical companies.
Don't blame the agriculture industry that in the end is a victim.
Beware of conflating agricorps with family farms. They aren't the same animals. Not even the same phylum.