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Tag: antibiotic resistance
Quick & Healthy: Welcome To The Machine

Quick & Healthy: Welcome To The Machine

“Quick & Healthy” offers some highlights from the world of health and wellness that you may have missed this week:

  • IBM announced that it would be putting its state-of-the-art Watson supercomputer to use in the battle against cancer. The advantage and innovation of Watson, made famous when it bested two human competitors at Jeopardy, is its ability to process mountains of raw data to arrive at specific solutions to particular problems. In this case, it means Watson will analyze reams of genomic data from patients fighting cancer to find the best treatments.
  • An unprecedented outbreak of avian flu is ravaging turkey farms in the American Midwest. The virulent H5N2 virus has spread to poultry farms in 14 states, leading to mass culling and euthanasia of the affected stock.
  • We’ve got smartphones, smartcars, smartwatches — soon you could have smart dishware that can tell you when you’re consuming too many calories. (Americans clearly need someone to tell them.) The SmartPlate is a wi-fi-enabled piece of crockery that scans and weighs the food placed on it — identifying the amount and nutritional value (or lack thereof) of its contents.
  • A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) finds that only one-fourth of 133 countries surveyed have a comprehensive plan to combat antibiotic-resistant pathogens, otherwise known as “superbugs.” Among the disquieting report’s key findings is that countries are less than diligent at monitoring for these novel strains and that rampant overprescription of antibiotics has continued, despite public warnings that this contributes to emergence of bacteria that cannot be killed with available drugs. A previous WHO report stated that the “post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — is a very real possibility for the 21st century.”

Photo: Clockready via Wikicommons

Breeding Antibiotic Resistance Through Our Food

Breeding Antibiotic Resistance Through Our Food

According to a new report released by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) the meat industry is using more medical-grade antibiotics than ever in its livestock feed and water. And it’s not due to increased production since beef, chicken, and pork production did not rise during the period under review (2009-2012).

What this means for consumers and the healthcare industry is that because we’re consuming medical antibiotics with our food, the antibiotics we need when we get sick will become resistant and lose their efficacy in treating disease. Just 6% of the drugs used by the meat industry are actually used to treat disease in their livestock.

For decades the FDA has been dragging on addressing the subject of antibiotic use in our meat supply. Even with the dire picture indicated by this report, their actions show they are still in thrall to the very industry they are supposed to regulate – the guidelines issued to the meat industry are, wait for it, purely voluntary.

According to Mother Jones “sales of cephalosporins, a drug used to treat respiratory-tract infections, skin infections, and urinary-tract infections in people, rose about 4 percent between 2011 and 2012, even though the FDA had moved to scale back their use on January 4, 2012. That doesn’t exactly boost confidence.”

“The heavy use of antibiotics that are really not used in human medicine can cause harm through cross-resistance—that is, bacteria strains that develop resistance to one antibiotic can quickly become resistant to others.”

“Cross-resistance is a well-established phenomenon. Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria evolve to survive contact with a chemical intended to kill them. Factory farms are now incubating resistant bacteria strains that threaten people.”

Photo: Wikipedia