Antibiotics

Almost all of the animals raised for food in the United States today are given antibiotics to stimulate growth and to keep them alive in filthy, disease-ridden conditions that would otherwise kill them. Roughly 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. each year go to animals raised for food.³¹

Leading health organizations—including the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association—have warned that by giving powerful drugs (via animal products) to human beings who are not sick, the farmed-animal industry is creating possible long-term risks to human health and will spread antibiotic-resistant super-germs.^32,33,34

When a human being eats meat from an animal who has been dosed with antibiotics, as most chickens, pigs, cows, and other farmed animals have been, they are ingesting low-level doses of these drugs with unknown long-term consequences. Understandably, doctors, who have to prescribe antibiotics, are incensed that factory farmers are, without a medical degree, effectively putting the entire meat-eating country on powerful drugs with no knowledge of all the consequences.

Eating Meat Means Eating Poison—Literally!

We do know the effect of one of these antibiotics because it includes a known poison. Roxarsone, an antibiotic commonly used on factory farms, contains arsenic, which helps to kill off parasites in the animals’ feed.³⁵ The problem is that some of the arsenic stays in the animals’ flesh, so every time we eat meat, we’re getting a dose of this poison as well. According to a study published by the USDA, most meat contains toxic arsenic, and chicken flesh contains four times more arsenic than other meats. This report found that “[e]ating 2 ounces of chicken per day—the equivalent of a third to a half of a boneless breast—exposes a consumer to 3 to 5 micrograms of inorganic arsenic, the element’s most toxic form.”³⁶ The report warns that people who regularly consume chicken may ingest 10 times that amount. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have disputed these startling findings, saying that the USDA estimates are too low and that the arsenic in chicken flesh poses a serious threat to human health.³⁷ Arsenic causes a wide range of problems in humans, and daily exposure to low doses of arsenic can cause cancer in humans.³⁸

The Meat Industry: Creating Superbugs

Another effect of dosing animals with powerful drugs is the creation of super-bugs that are not susceptible to human antibiotics. So when you eat drugged animals and then get sick, the antibiotics prescribed for you are unlikely work, either because you’ve built up a tolerance for the drug by consuming it in your chicken dinner or because the bacteria has mutated and “figured out” how to beat the drug. Either way, your illness could last longer, and if you’re very young or old or have compromised immunity, you could die.

A recent report by the U.S. General Accounting Office ominously warns that “[a]ntibiotic-resistant bacteria have been transferred from animals to humans, and many of the studies we reviewed found that this transference poses significant risks for human health.”³⁹ Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and an expert on antibiotics, cuts through the scientific understatement, calling the use of antibiotics in farmed animals and the resultant super-germs “an international public health nightmare.”⁴⁰

Indeed, new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria have quickly made their way off of the farm and into your grocery store’s meat cooler. Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently reported that 96 percent of the Tyson chicken flesh sample they tested was contaminated with dangerous antibiotic-resistant campylobacter bacteria.⁴¹ In a USDA study, researchers found that 66 percent of beef samples were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Because pigs and turkeys are also dosed with antibiotics, their flesh is also likely to be tainted with antibiotic-resistant supergerms.

And scientists at Birmingham Medical School have discovered that antibiotic-resistant bacteria from contaminated meat can cause the normal bacteria in our intestines to mutate into harmful bacteria and survive in our gut—causing illness many years later.⁴²

Although other countries have taken action against the abuse of antibiotics by the farmed-animal industry, the Food and Drug Administration still refuses to crack down on the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms. So it’s up to us to protect our families by refusing to support an industry that abuses our most powerful medical resources for its own profit. The use of antibiotics to promote growth in animals raised for food is a serious threat to human health, and the best way to cut down on the use of antibiotics in animals is to stop eating meat.

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