I recently read a couple of articles on the development of antibiotic resistance of water-borne pathogenic bacteria, an unsettling reality in the modern world. One article was about antibiotic resistance in China’s waterways primarily due to practices in the pork industry. The other article was about a typhoid epidemic in Africa being traced to drug-resistant bacteria.
An environmental scientist in China estimates that the country uses 150,000 to 200,000 tons of antibiotics annually (about 10 times the U.S. usage), with half going to humans and the other half to livestock, primarily pigs. The consequences are not surprising: a recent study found antibiotic resistance genes in very large quantities in pig manure from several large pig farms. And another study about to be published in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology shows that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are proliferating in the Jiulong River. Other rivers in China have similar problems.
The other story may be even more worrisome. Typhoid, which has been pretty much eliminated in the developed world, still is a major health threat in Africa and Asia, affecting 22 million people worldwide annually. Doctors and researchers have noted an increasing number of both infections and resistance to older antibiotics, including penicillin. In one case, in Malawi, there were 782 cases of typhoid last year (compared to 14 per year from1998 to 2010), and in 97% of the cases there was resistance to antibiotics.
Bacteria mutate rapidly, and they will naturally develop resistance to antibiotics. But we are accelerating the process by our overuse of antibiotics, especially by putting them in livestock feed. In 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a policy to phase out over a 3 year period the “indiscriminate use” of antibiotics for livestock raised for meat. It’s a voluntary policy, so we’ll have to wait and see how effective it is.
