Playing Chicken With Antibiotic Resistance * The FDA bans injecting chicken eggs with antibiotics as a human health threat but backs down when industry groups known collectively as 'Big Chicken' squawk.
The FDA bans injecting chicken eggs with
antibiotics as a human health threat but backs down when industry groups
known collectively as "Big Chicken" squawk.stockxpert.com
Opsteen's uncertainty about the types of drugs used on his farm seems
incongruous with his insistence that drugs were not used at the
hatchery. But Opsteen, after all, is no ordinary farmer. He's the farmer
assigned to handle reporters looking for farm tours here in Ontario,
heartland of the chicken industry in Canada, where exports to the U.S.
are booming. And today, Opsteen's been designated by professional
chicken-industry media handlers to deliver one major message: On his
farm at least, the chickens come from drug-free eggs. "I'm absolutely
certain these chicks came from eggs that were not injected with
antibiotics," he says. "In fact, I can guarantee it." From the farmer's perspective, using antibiotics as growth promoters an approach that U.S. Department of Agriculture antibiotics expert Todd Callaway estimates accounts for half of all drug use on farms is simply money in the bank. Obviously, widespread agricultural use also greatly benefits ceftiofur's manufacturer, Pfizer Inc. And money brings popularity: According to a 2004 study of 24 hatcheries in the Canadian province of Quebec, ceftiofur was injected into eggs in every hatchery studied. In the U.S., according to a summary of a 2001 FDA investigation of 27 chicken and turkey hatcheries obtained by a Chicago-based group, the Food Animal Concerns Trust, four hatcheries reported injecting eggs, while four others reported injecting already-hatched birds. The real extent of ceftiofur usage may have been greater; more than a third of the hatcheries "kept poor or no treatment records," the FDA reported. When it comes to tracking drug use on factory farms, says Toni Poole, a USDA specialist on the use of antibiotics, secrecy is a serious problem. Penetrating that secrecy has become an urgent priority for a small but influential group of scientists. Alarmed about the global spread of bacteria resistant to up to as many as 10 types of antibiotics, governments in Europe, Canada and the U.S. established national surveillance systems late in the 1990s in an attempt to track human resistance to antibiotics in relation to usage of antibiotics on farms. What they have found especially regarding links between ceftiofur use in poultry and human resistance to cephalosporins has not been welcomed by the meat and poultry industries. The scientists' opening salvo came in 2006, when a group of the most senior antibiotic-resistance experts from the FDA, the Public Health Agency of Canada, France's National Microbiology Laboratory and Belgium's Veterinary and Agricultural Research Centre warned in a comprehensive review of published data that cephalosporin-resistant bacteria "are frequently recovered from animals and food, with poultry as primary food source, suggesting that humans are often infected by these routes." A subsequent series of studies in Europe and North America has convinced researchers including Frank Aarestrup, a specialist on antibiotic resistance with the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen who helped introduce a system of comprehensive surveillance of veterinary drug use in Denmark that the link between veterinary antibiotic use and human resistance has been proven. "Taken in context with all the other knowledge we have," Aarestrup says, "anyone still opposing a link between antibiotic use in food animal production and direct human health impact does so for other reasons than science." In a recently published review of international studies on the issue, Aarestrup noted that a Canadian study found the adoption of universal use of ceftiofur in hatcheries in Quebec earlier this decade matched a rapid increase in human resistance to the drug. When this problem was brought to the attention of public health authorities, hatcheries voluntarily stopped using ceftiofur and there was a rapid decrease in resistance to cephalosporins in humans. The data cannot conclusively link drug use in poultry with human resistance, says James Johnson, an infectious disease specialist with the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Minneapolis. But like Aarestrup, Johnson thinks the data "is as good as it gets" in terms of signals about the dangers of ceftiofur use in hatcheries. Canadian veterinarians agree: Last year, the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association instructed its members not to use ceftiofur for extra-label purposes such as hatchery injections. The Canadian government also acted, last year ordering Pfizer to include a warning against extra-label use on ceftiofur packages. Rebecca Irwin, who manages the Canadian farm antibiotic surveillance system, says that strong as the data implicating ceftiofur use in hatcheries with human resistance is, it would be even stronger if the poultry industry weren't so secretive about drug use. "People can hide behind whatever," she told a gathering of scientists in early May. "We're still getting the 'hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil' from numerous sources." Although chicken farmers seldom discuss their use of drugs especially high-profile drugs such as cephalosporin the veterinarians they employ are obliged to be more open, thanks to professional codes requiring at least a degree of scientific transparency. So when it came to mounting a response to the FDA's prohibition of extra-label use of cephalosporins on farms, the industry turned to the American Veterinary Medical Association. The AVMA represents 78,000 veterinarians working in private and corporate practice, the government, industry, academia and the military. In a toughly worded, 18-page letter drafted by a panel of veterinarians employed on chicken farms across the U.S., the AVMA broke ranks with its Canadian counterpart veterinarian organization, arguing that the FDA's rule against extra-label cephalosporin use was completely unjustified. The Canadian, American and European studies cited by the FDA fail to directly demonstrate that veterinary use of ceftiofur impairs human medicine, the AVMA insists, and the FDA prohibition would put animals at risk. "Because veterinarians have a relatively limited number of FDA-approved drugs for treatment of the numerous animal species," the American veterinarians' group said, "extra-label cephalosporin use is medically necessary to relieve animal pain and suffering and allow veterinarians discretion to use drugs judiciously." Just weeks after the group filed its protest, the FDA reversed course. Late in November 2008, amid a crescendo of last-minute regulatory interventions by the outgoing Bush administration, William Flynn, acting director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, announced the restrictions on cephalosporin use were being withdrawn to allow the agency to "fully consider" comments, including the AVMA's. "We responded through the AVMA," says the National Chicken Council's Steve Pretanick. "They worked up the argument as to why the FDA should not take this action. As a result, the FDA withdrew it. And that's the last I've heard of it." In Pretanick's account, the business of getting the FDA to knuckle under sounds like a routine event. But Margaret Mellon, head of the food and environment program for the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, describes a "take no prisoners attitude" on the part of the chicken industry at a time when it knew it could count on the White House. "The past administration didn't believe in regulation," Mellon says. But she also believes the FDA itself "miscalculated the blowback" from the industry and its powerful rural political allies. The FDA now refuses to discuss the matter. But speaking to scientists in Kansas in May, Flynn suggested the FDA's retreat may not be permanent. The agency, he said, may try again to reintroduce restrictions sometime soon. Until that happens, however, poultry farmers will remain free to play chicken with some of the most important antibiotics in human medicine. Sign up for our free e-newsletter. © 2008 MillerMcCune Inc. |