New study by CDC links antibiotic use in chickens to drug-resistance in humans

by Daryl Kulak (Subscribe to Daryl Kulak's posts)
Oct 19th 2006 8:00AM

We've talked about antibiotics in meat in this blog before. A new study by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Marshfield Clinic has made a strong link between the usage of antibiotics in chickens and the presence of "supergerms" in the humans who eat those chickens.

Antibiotics are used, quite reasonably, to help sick chickens get better. But they are also increasingly used as a growth stimulator. That is, antibiotics are fed to the all the chickens all the time on some farms.

The Marshfield researchers set out to find whether this obvious overuse of antibiotics led to the development of drug-resistant bacteria in the intestinal tract of the people who subsequently ate the meat. The connection was undeniable. They found the so-called "supergerms" much more often in the people who ate the antibiotic-laden chicken than in the vegetarians in the study or the others who ate organic chicken. This may seem obvious to a lot of us, but now that there is a government-sanctioned study pointing clearly to the link, hopefully something will change.

Until then, my own personal commitment is to buy my chicken from Whole Foods Market, where they refuse to sell any meat containing antibiotics or hormones. They also closely monitor the food the animals eat to make sure the food is free of pesticides and herbicides.

How do they do this? They actually have a relationship with each and every farm, and they visit the farms regularly to make sure the practices haven't changed for the worse. Whole Foods is expensive, that's for sure, but I find myself buying more and more of our food there.

Thanks Dvorak Uncensored!

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Comments (5)

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Martha 10-19-2006 @ 12:32PM

I read stuff like this all the time but it still makes me feel a bit ill every time. It's incredibly scary how many chemicals, hormones, etc. goes into our food without us even knowing it -- and so many people don't even care. Thanks for the info

Daryl Kulak 10-19-2006 @ 12:34PM

Martha,

Thanks for the comment. Sorry that the story made you ill!!!

Andy C 10-19-2006 @ 9:47PM

Artificial soil leads t artificial animals leads to artificial people. If somehow the Omnivore's dilemma has missed you, go devour a copy today.

Howie Jacobson, PhD 10-20-2006 @ 11:55AM

I'm not sure feeding antibiotics to sick chickens is reasonable - especially when the reason they're sick is the conditions under which they live.

Andy C's suggestion to read the Omnivore's Dilemma is a good one, and may lead you to suspect Whole Foods is not looking out for your - or the chickens' - interests as much as they are protecting their brand.

Yesterday at the NC state fair, my 9-year-old daughter was horrified at one of the midway games, a live turkey shoot. (Yes, Toto, you're not in suburbia anymore.) Between the booth where you shoot water into a clown's mouth to win an inflateable spiderman and the booth where you pop balloons with darts to win a huge stuffed plush Tar Heels basketball, there was a booth where you could point a real gun at a real turkey and send it to turkey heaven.

While I understand my daughter's horror, and share in her dismay at turning life and death into a game, it seemed to me that there was something healthier even about killing a bird for prizes than going to the supermarket and buying meat without having to witness the consequences of your actions.

Until the factory farms have glass walls and the public demands to know how our food is produced, we'll have to make do with antibiotic- and hormone-laced meat that is irradiated and rinsed with toxic chemicals just to keep it from poisoning us.

Yummm!

Daryl Kulak 10-20-2006 @ 12:08PM

Howie,

Thanks for your comment.

Yes, the book Omnivore's Dilemma is a good one, but there is more to the story.

John Mackey (CEO and founder of Whole Foods) wrote an open letter to Michael Pollan about the criticisms of Whole Foods in Omnivore's Dillema, and Pollan was forced to back down a bit. The fact that Pollan did not interview a single person at Whole Foods is slightly suspect. Being a writer myself, I don't blame Pollan for cutting corners (you can't keep writing on a book project forever), but you can see in John Mackey's letter and Pollan's response that the book does not exactly reflect reality at Whole Foods.

Here are the letters back and forth between Mackey and Pollan:

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blogs/jm/

What was really impressive is that neither person dove down to name-calling or personal attacks in these letters. It says a lot about Mackey the CEO and Pollan the journalist.

Let me know what you think once you read the letters.

BTW, what you say about glass walls at the factory farms and your daughter's experience at the fair are probably some of the most lucid and poignant comments I've ever heard on this issue. Thanks for that.