Superbugs Spreading: A Damper On Your Holiday Barbecue

By JoshMogerman in Food on May 25, 2013 9:00PM

A promising Whitney Young High School pitcher loses his season and 30 pounds to a stubborn stomach ailment. And after surviving the horrific Joplin, MO tornado, kids are gripped by a mysterious infection that threatened their lives. Both frightening stories highlight the increasingly dangerous and common issue of antibiotic resistant bacteria finding ways into our bodies and wreaking havoc.

The Chicago Tribune’s excellent food writer Monica Eng puts a local face on the issue with the story of Sam Spitz. He blames a bad chicken Caesar salad for delivering a dangerous dose of antibiotic-resistant strain of campylobacter, a pathogen most commonly linked to poultry, that ravaged his body and sent him repeatedly to the emergency room. The long battle with bacteria that ensued ended his baseball career (he was a varsity team pitcher as a freshman) and so scared his family that they now raise their own chickens to avoid further problems.

Last year, the Kansas City Star highlighted a similarly chilling infection experience from an altogether different delivery source: wind. After the Joplin tornado blew farm dirt tainted with waste from infected animals into wounds suffered during the storm, doctors were stunned to find kids ravaged by antibiotic-resistant infections so severe, they almost killed the storm survivors.

The examples are entirely different, but the problem is the same. And it is getting worse. The bulk of the antibiotic drugs consumed in America are not treating disease in humans, but instead given to farm animals at low levels to offset squalor in factory farms and fatten them up for slaughter more quickly. Scientists and public health experts have long-noted that the overuse of these life-saving drugs would eventually lead to dangerous drug-resistant super bugs. Eng notes the scale of the problem in today's Trib:

About 80 percent of all antibiotics sold by weight in the U.S. in 2011 were used on livestock, according to FDA figures. That year, 7.3 million pounds of antibiotics were used to treat humans, compared with 29.9 million pounds sold for meat and poultry production.

The Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy group, analyzed government data and reported last month that 69 percent of pork chops and 81 percent of ground turkey sampled in 2011 were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Turkey raised without antibiotics — including organic turkey — carries fewer such pathogens, according to recent research by Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports.

Despite increasing incidences of dangerous infections and growing public concern, the feds have been slow to address the problem. Ag and Pharmaceutical lobbyists have been able to fend off mandatory restrictions, leading a prominent lawyer pushing for reform on the issue to note problems with the current regulations:

"The first problem is that it is voluntary. As far as we are concerned the FDA has tried a voluntary approach on this for almost 40 years, and it hasn't worked," said Avinash Kar, an attorney who works on antibiotic issues for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. "The second problem is that it leaves a giant loophole for so-called preventive uses."

There is a legal battle underway to force a fix and Congress is joining in the call for reform, but given the state of play in DC, a Frankenmeat solution might emerge before a government solution can be worked out. But hey, don't let that spoil your Memorial Day barbecue...