.
=====
The 50-Year Cover-Up Killing Millions
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/05/31/antibiotics-cover-up-killing-millions.aspx
Antibiotic-resistant infections affect 2 million Americans annually, leading to the death of at least 23,000.1 Even more die from complications related to the infections, and the numbers are steadily growing.
According to the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA), just one organism — methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA — kills more Americans each year than the combined total of emphysema, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson's disease, and homicide.2
[snip]
The 50-Year Cover-Up
In the U.S., use of antibiotics in food animals rose six-fold between 1960 and 1970. It didn't take long before scientists started warning that this practice had the potential to create a public health crisis.
By the end of the 1960s, British scientists found that feeding antibiotics to animals produced resistant bacteria that could be transmitted to humans. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) taskforce came to a similar conclusion in 1972.
At that time, the FDA stipulated that drug manufacturers had to prove their products did not contribute to resistance or risk losing their drug approval. So, the drug industry set out to prove antibiotics in animal feed would not pose such problems.
As reported by Mother Jones, rather than settle the question, their efforts resulted in a 50-year long cover-up of the facts:
"[T]he Animal Health Institute, a trade group of animal-pharmaceutical manufacturers, contacted Dr. Stuart Levy, a young Tufts University researcher who specialized in antibiotic resistance.
The group wanted Levy to feed tiny, daily doses of antibiotics to chickens and see if the bacteria in their guts developed resistance ... Levy found a family farm near Boston and experimented on two flocks of chickens.
One got feed with small amounts of tetracycline. The other went drug-free. Within 48 hours, strains of E. coli that were resistant to tetracycline started to show up in the manure of the birds fed drugs.
Within a week, nearly all the E. coli in those birds' manure could resist tetracycline. Within three months, the E. coli showed resistance to four additional antibiotics the birds had never been exposed to: sulfonamides, ampicillin, streptomycin, and carbenicillin.
Most striking of all, researchers found that E. coli resistant to multiple antibiotics was appearing in the feces of the farmers' family members — yet not in a control group of neighbors.
The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, were so stunningly clear that Levy thought they would prompt the industry to rethink its profligate antibiotic use, or at least inspire the FDA to rein it in. But the industry rebuffed the study it had bankrolled, questioning the validity of the data ...
In 1977, the FDA proposed new rules that would have effectively banned tetracycline and penicillin from animal feed, but the House agriculture appropriations subcommittee, led by agribusiness champion Rep. Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.), ordered the FDA to wait, 'pending the outcome of further research.'"
FDA Complicit in the Antibiotic Cover-Up
An internal FDA review on the safety of feed additives belonging to penicillin and tetracycline classes of antibiotics, which began in 2001 and ended in 2010, revealed that 26 of the 30 drugs under review did not meet the safety guidelines set in 1973, and none of them met current safety guidelines.
However, this information only came to light after the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the FDA ...
[snip to end]
Full article:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/05/31/antibiotics-cover-up-killing-millions.aspx
***************************************************************************************
