Riots, Rage, and Resistance: A Brief History of How Antibiotics Arrived on the Farm. By Maureen Ogle

Early twentieth-century farmers struggled to keep pace with demandIn 1950, American farmers rejoiced at news from a New York laboratory: A team of scientists had discovered that adding antibiotics to livestock feed accelerated animals’ growth and cost less than conventional feed supplements. The news blew “the lid clear off the realm of animal nutrition,” crowed the editors of one farm magazine. Farmers and scientists alike “gasp[ed] with amazement, almost afraid to believe what they had found.” “Never again,” vowed another writer, would farmers suffer the “severe protein shortages” of the past.Those glad tidings overshadowed contemporaneous warnings about bacterial resistance, most notably from a series of Japanese studies. Researchers had found that bacteria repeatedly exposed to antibiotics possessed an uncanny ability to thwart the very drugs designed to kill them. In 1966, the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine warned that if humanity continued to ignore the reality of bacterial “resistance,” they would “find themselves back in the preantibiotic Middle Ages.” It wasn’t until the early 1970s that some Americans began lobbying to ban antibiotics from the farm, arguing that feeding animals “sub-therapeutic” doses of antibiotics fostered bacterial resistance in meat-eating humans. Alas, science being what it is, for every critic who found evidence of links between antibiotic use in livestock production and antibiotic resistance in ...
Source: PharmaGossip - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs