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There are two major reasons why chickens are given antibiotics. The first is to encourage weight gain and growth promotion. The second and primary reason for antibiotic use is to keep animals healthy, or healthy enough to gain enough weight before slaughter.
Chicken antibiotics are administered in bulk because industrial chicken farms function much like bacterial soups. They are perfect incubators for disease.
The growth of antibiotic resistance is a warning sign that life as we
know it is fragile. As the World Health Organization puts it, “Antibiotic
resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security,
and development today.”
There’s no doubt that the discovery of antibiotics and their immense
capabilities to combat and destroy bacteria and infection was one of the
most significant advancements in human history. It is estimated that
antibiotics save around 200,000 lives per year in the United States, as well
as increasing life expectancy by 5-10 years at birth; in World War II alone
penicillin saved millions of lives.
Yet today humanity is blindly threatening the efficacy of one of medicine’s
great discoveries and mortally jeopardizing the health of our species. This
is due, in part, to the excessive use of chicken antibiotics and other
antibiotics in the animal agriculture industry. Producers have a bad habit
of treating the symptoms of animal agriculture, rather than changing the
conditions themselves. This means that as much as 80 percent of antibiotics
used in the U.S. are used in animal agriculture and about 50 percent of
antibiotics administered to farmed animals in the United Kingdom.
Chickens are by far the most numerous animal on the planet, with around 23.7
billion of them raised for meat and eggs in 2018, and are therefore the
heaviest consumers of antibiotics in the world.
Why Are Chickens Given Antibiotics?
There are two major reasons why chickens are given antibiotics. The first is
to encourage weight gain and growth promotion after scientists discovered
that chickens fed B12 grown from antibiotic residue grew fifty percent
faster than other chickens. Today, the use of antibiotics to encourage
growth in chickens is becoming more and more regulated and is prohibited in
the EU, the U.S., and the U.K. However, much of the world continues to
pursue these techniques.
The second and primary reason for antibiotic use is to keep animals healthy,
or healthy enough to gain enough weight before slaughter. Chicken
antibiotics are administered in bulk because industrial chicken farms
function much like bacterial soups. They are perfect incubators for disease.
Battery chickens are crammed into cages the size of an A4 sheet of paper
which creates enormous heat stress, and these putrid conditions are
excellent breeding grounds for bacteria like E. coli and salmonella which
can be deadly without the help of chickens antibiotics.
Additionally, chickens are far more susceptible to catching diseases in this
environment due to their suppressed immune systems. In nature, chicks wander
around their surroundings, pecking at feces and other sources of microbes in
the natural world, which builds up their antibodies and strengthens their
immune system. This is not possible in the confines of a bare wire cage.
Fundamentally, the administering of chicken antibiotics is done for the
profit of farmers, who desire large and bulky birds that don’t prematurely
die of disease and cause them financial loss. Antibiotics also allow farmers
to keep chickens in the enormous numbers that they do—as many as 20,000 per
building and in squalid conditions.
Antibiotics are therefore a mechanism by which low animal welfare standards
can be maintained for the benefit of cheap prices for consumers and big
revenues for farmers.
What Antibiotics Are Used on Chickens?
Some of the major antibiotics used in chicken farming are:
What Do Antibiotics Do to Chicken?
Antibiotics allow chickens to be kept in crowded and immobile conditions,
transforming the birds from dynamic, sociable, athletic explorers into
crippled blocks of protein. The growth of antibiotic resistance in chicken
farms also means that the bacteria found on store-bought chickens, like
campylobacter, salmonella, or E. coli, is more likely to be
antibiotic-resistant.
Bacteria do not pose a problem to one’s health if the chicken is thoroughly
cooked, but severe poisoning caused by undercooked chicken would become
dangerously untreatable. These bacteria can be deadly, particularly to young
and elderly people with vulnerable immune systems.
Although this is less of a problem in the U.K., the EU, and the U.S.,
elsewhere there is a chance that antibiotic residue will be consumed in the
meat of the chicken. This is a huge health concern, as it means that small
doses of chicken antibiotics will be constantly eaten by human consumers
which can lead to an increase in antibiotic resistance among human microbes.
In one study, evaluating chicken farms in Lebanon, over three-quarters of
all chicken flesh contained residues. Without strict procedures for the
elimination of residues from chicken meat, this will remain yet another
pressing contributor to the emergent health crisis of antibiotic resistance.
Are Human Antibiotics Used in Chickens for Weight Gain and Growth
Promotion?
This practice has been banned for some time in the EU and U.K. and as of
2017 has been banned in the USA as well. However, worldwide this practice is
still infrequent use. India is a leading offender in this regard, as it
still uses colistin on chickens to promote rapid growth, receiving hundreds
of tonnes of chicken antibiotics in 2018 with the government refuses to
impose regulations.
China is the world’s largest consumer of antibiotics, and its chicken
farming industry has not banned the use of growth-promoting chicken
antibiotics. Additionally, a recent study suggests that, although the
Chinese government has banned medically important antibiotics for use in
agriculture, the majority of chicken farms continue to use these banned
variants.
Who Regulates the Administration Of Chicken Antibiotics in the U.S.?
The Food and Drug Administration regulates the administration of chicken
antibiotics in the U.S. The most recent significant change in their
regulations was made in 2017, where the use of growth-promoting antibiotics
was banned and voluntary guidance regarding the judicious administering of
chicken antibiotics was implemented.
Another crucial change was the requirement of medically important
antibiotics to be prescribed to animals by a vet rather than being bought
over the counter. This does represent some significant progress, yet there
are question marks about whether or not these measures go far enough.
The guidance regarding phasing medically important drugs out of animal feed
is emphatically non-binding and voluntary. The regulations also contained
exploitable loopholes, which have allowed large amounts of medically
important antibiotics to remain in agricultural use. This suggests that as
long as the use of chicken antibiotics and other antibiotics remains
profitable in animal farming, then ways will be found to use them, even if
they are attained by chicanery and lead to irresponsible outcomes.
What Is Antibiotic Resistance?
Antibiotic resistance is when bacteria subjected to antibiotics mutates in
response to the treatment, developing resistance to the medicine instead of
being killed by it. A process of natural selection sets in; because the
non-resistant strains are killed by antibiotics, only the
antibiotic-resistant forms of bacteria are left to proliferate. These types
of resistant bacteria are immune to treatment, making them far more
dangerous when infecting the human body. When such germs develop in animal
agriculture they can spread to humans through meat, dairy, and eggs or out
of farms through the air, soil, or waterways.
Are Antibiotics in Chickens Bad for You?
It is not the chicken antibiotics or the meat that is the concern, but the
antibiotic-resistant bugs which are generated in factory farms and can
spread to human populations through pollution, in packaging, or on
farmworkers. This could result in humans catching potentially severe
infections untreatable by antibiotics.
A large-scale outbreak of an antibiotic-resistant “superbug” would be
catastrophic, catapulting us back into the pre-antibiotic age of medicine
where death from microbes was commonplace. Research from the WHO suggests
that at the current rate antibiotic resistance is developing this would
manifest itself globally into 10 million yearly deaths from infection and
disease, surpassing cancer as the number one global killer, and the economic
devastation wrought by ensuing health conditions would force 24 million
people into extreme poverty.
To provide a concrete example of how the relationship between the animal
farming industry and chicken antibiotics could have disastrous results for
human health, take a look at campylobacter. Campylobacter is a type of
bacteria and is the leading cause of gastroenteritis and diarrhea, normally
experienced as food poisoning, accounting for a quarter of global cases.
American chicken farmers feed fluoroquinolones to chickens via their
drinking water targeted at killing the more potent bacteria E. coli. Yet
this treatment does not kill all the campylobacter, which developed
resistance, and now 21 percent of campylobacter infections in the U.S. come
from antibiotic-resistant strains.
Campylobacter infection can be deadly amongst infants, the elderly, and the
immunosuppressant. This same process of antibiotic resistance could develop
in more deadly bacteria and resistance can form against more crucial
antibiotics, a process which could make every broken bone, tooth removal,
surgery, or paper cut pose a mortal risk of untreatable infection.
Indeed, thousands of tonnes of antibiotics critical for human medicine like
colistin, which is used to treat pneumonia, are shipped overseas to
unregulated farming industries in India, Vietnam, Russia, Mexico, Colombia,
and Bolivia. If such vital antibiotics as this were to be rendered
ineffective by microbial resistance, the resulting deaths would be severe.
What Does the CDC Say About Antibiotics Resistance?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that it “is
concerned about rising resistant infections in the community, which can put
more people at risk, make spread more difficult to identify and contain, and
threaten the progress made to protect patients in healthcare.”
The CDC explains that it is investing in testing and laboratory
infrastructure to detect the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and
promotes vigilant surveillance of such threats as well as judicious
antibiotic use in human and animal settings. However, as a consumer, there
are only one sure-fire means of withdrawing support for use of antibiotics
in animal agriculture. Refraining from purchasing animal products is a
start.
The Road Ahead
In 1950, when it was first unearthed that feeding chickens with B12 and
antibiotics would increase their growth by 50 percent, a reporter for
Science News Letter claimed that the discovery “cast the antibiotic in a
spectacular new role” for the “survival of the human race in a world of
dwindling resources and expanding populations.”
Antibiotics remain essential to the survival of human beings and, as such,
their mass-use in animal agriculture must end. The more humanity splurges
its antibiotics on chicken farming, and other forms of animal agriculture,
the quicker we charge towards a post-antibiotic world where going to the
hospital for a simple procedure could be deadly.
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