Food activists and concerned scientists have warned for decades that feeding antibiotics to healthy livestock is leading to an emerging human health crisis.
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Fully 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States are given to livestock, and the vast majority are administered to promote growth and stave off potential infections, not to treat illness.
As the number of infectious diseases is on the rise, more antibiotics are administered to livestock than ever before, from 17.8 million pounds per year in 1999 to 29.8 million pounds in 2009.
In a 2013 report issued earlier this week by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency provides a never-before-seen glimpse of antibiotic resistant threats with the most severe impact on human health.
The CDC claims each year in the United States, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections.
Others argue the death rate is far higher. Infectious-disease specialist Brad Spellberg, and author of the book “Rising Plague,” claims there are roughly 100,000 deaths a year from antibiotic-resistant infections in the United States alone.
Moreover, many more people die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection. Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, stresses that in organism after organism, there is a steady increase in resistance rates.
Even more troubling is very few new drugs are being manufactured to combat resistant bacteria. Only a handful of new antibiotics have been developed in recent years, and only a few companies are working on drugs to replace them.The Daily Beast writer Jeneen Interlandi notes that researchers best equipped to develop new antibiotics have long since abandoned any new projects. According to the Infectious Disease Society of America, only five of the 13 biggest pharmaceutical companies are still looking for new antibiotics.
“That’s because a single course of the most expensive antibiotics runs just seven days and sells for $1,000 to $2,000, while a single course of, say, any given cancer treatment runs for weeks to months and costs from 10 to 20 times as much. Chronic-disease medications, which a patient typically takes for the rest of his or her life, yield even higher returns.”
“We don’t have new drugs about to come out of the pipeline,” said Dr. Frieden. “If and when we get new drugs, unless we do a better job of protecting them, we’ll lose those, also.”
Without antibiotics to defend against microorganisms and deadly bacterial infections such as streptococcus, commonly known as strep throat, emergency medical care would, in effect, revert to The Middle Ages.
The CDC report ranks the threat of drug-resistant superbugs into three categories – urgent, severe and concerning.
Reuters summarized the top three urgent threats below:
1) CRE
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Among the top three threats deemed “urgent” is CRE, which Frieden last March called a “nightmare bacteria” because even the strongest antibiotics are not effective against it.
According to the report, CRE accounts for 9,300 healthcare-associated infections. The two most common types of CRE – carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella spp. and carbapenem-resistant E. coli – account for some 600 deaths each year. “For CRE, we’re seeing increases from 1 state to 38 states in the last decade,” Frieden said.
2) C. Difficile
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C. difficile, the most common hospital-based infection in the United States, made the list of urgent threats both because it has begun to resist antibiotics and because it preys on the overuse of antibiotics. C. difficile, which causes life-threatening diarrhea, spreads from person to person on contaminated equipment and on the hands of healthcare workers and visitors.
It is especially stubborn in hospitals because of the widespread use of antibiotics, which kill protective bacteria in the gut for months, allowing invaders such as C. difficile to flourish. According to the report, C. difficile causes 250,000 infections and kills 14,000 people in the United States each year, adding $1 billion annually in excess medical costs. Deaths from C. difficile rose 400 percent from 2000 to 2007 due to the emergence of a drug-resistant strain of the bacteria.
3) Gonorrhea
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The third “urgent” threat in the report is drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhea, which causes 246,000 U.S. cases of the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea each year. Gonorrhea is increasingly becoming resistant to tetracycline, cefixime, ceftriaxone and azithromycin – formerly the most successful treatments for the disease.
Gonorrhea is especially troublesome because it is easily spread, and infections are easily missed. In the United States, there are approximately 300,000 reported cases, but because infected people often have no symptoms the CDC estimates the actual number of cases is closer to 820,000. If left untreated, gonorrhea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirths, severe eye infections in babies and infertility in men and women.
Herbal Antibiotics
Natural News Editor Mike Adams points out that the use of antibiotics needs to be sharply limited and suggests the risks of antibiotic use should be more comprehensively taught to doctors and explained to patients so that the hazards of antibiotic use is more widely understood and avoided.
Although the targeted use of antibiotics does indeed save lives, Adams argues the widespread abuse of antibiotics is what has contributed to the superbug crises we face today.
Adams recommends reading Herbal Antibiotics, 2nd Edition: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-resistant Bacteria.
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“In this indispensable reference, herbal expert Stephen Harrod Buhner explains the roots of antibiotic resistance, explores the value of herbal treatments, and provides in-depth profiles of 30 valuable herbs, noting for each one its antibiotic properties, methods for collection and preparation, dosages, and potential side effects.”
The only way to prevent unwanted antibiotics and hormones from entering your body is to stop, or at least limit, factory farm raised beef, pork and poultry from being included in your diet.
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