Bad medicine?
Turkeys, like other animals, get sick. And though few dispute that they should then be treated, many scientists, medical professionals and animal experts are concerned that too much medicine is being given to too many turkeys -- and to too many food animals in general.
“The use and misuse are rampant,” says Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch in Northern California and a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.
Those concerned fear serious human health consequences -- development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria -- and that this is already beginning to happen.
Antibiotics are approved in turkeys both for therapeutic use (meaning to treat sick turkeys) and for disease prevention -- which usually means the rest of the flock will also be treated to keep the disease from spreading. Antibiotics are used in this same way in other food animals, and in some cases they’re also used for growth promotion, although that’s not supposed to be done with turkeys.
Antibiotic resistance develops when antibiotics kill off only some of the bacteria they’re supposed to -- so only the super-strong survive. If this happens enough, the susceptible bacteria are wiped out, but a strain of resistant bacteria takes over in their place, and the antibiotics that used to work don’t work any longer.
The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call antibiotic resistance one of its top concerns.
“There are bacteria that were once treatable with antibiotics that are now resistant to everything,” says microbiologist Lance Price, director of metagenomics and human health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix. Price says that part of the problem is certainly due to agricultural use.
One example is the use of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones to treat Campylobacter in chickens, says Dr. Sherwood Gorbach, distinguished professor of public health and medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.
Campylobacter is the leading cause of bacterial diarrhea in the United States and is typically treated by the fluoroquinolone Cipro. But since the mid-1990s, resistance to Cipro has risen from 2% to 20% or even higher, Gorbach says. And he believes it’s due to the use of Baytril, the form of the drug used in chickens. In 2005, the FDA banned the use of fluoroquinolones in poultry.
Breeders do need antibiotics sometimes, to treat sick birds and keep the disease from spreading to the whole flock, says Daniel Fletcher, head of the Animal Science Department at the University of Connecticut. “If we didn’t use antibiotics,” he says, “we’d have a tough time meeting the nutritional needs of people in this country.”
Gorbach says there’s a bill before Congress intended to allow more use of fluoroquinolones in chickens again and adds, “We feel very strongly that’s the wrong thing to do.”
For a more detailed story on the agriculture-antibiotic issue, go to latimes.com/health.
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