Antibiotics Are Not Food

A week or so ago I read a story about a newly introduced bill in Congress that would prohibit using antibiotics on healthy animals raised for food. Animals could still be given the drugs if they were sick, but the bill would end the prophylactic use of antibiotics in Controlled Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

Cows and pigs that are raised or "finished" in CAFOs are much more likely to get sick because they are confined in small amounts of space, exposed to more of their own waste, and given foods that don't completely agree with them (i.e., cows' stomachs aren't meant to digest corn, they're meant to digest grass). When given routine antibiotics, they gain weight faster and bring in more money at slaughter.

How common is the practice? The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used on healthy livestock.

Unfortunately, there's lots of evidence that indicates this type of antibiotic use is leading to the resistant bacteria that are killing people in hospitals (and sometimes outside of hospitals) every day. The bill, introduced in the House by Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and in the Senate by Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), is facing heavy lobbying already from meat-producing groups, who claim it will raise prices and threaten the safety of the U.S. food supply -- a bit of logic that I have trouble following.

Then a day or two later I stumbled across this story on Minnesota Public Radio's website, telling about another aspect of the antibiotics puzzle, and also tying into another pet peeve of mine, corn-based ethanol.

Basically, when ethanol is created from corn, the producers use antibiotics as part of the process, to prevent bacteria from competing with the enzymes and yeast that convert the corn sugars to alcohol. When the ethanol is ready, the leftovers from the process are called "distillers grain," and up until now that distillers grain has been sold to farmers as a cheap food for cows and pigs.

But the distillers grain still contains a hefty dose of -- you guessed it -- antibiotics!

Sometimes a bad use of technology just can't win for losing.