The University recently hosted a panel of experts to discuss issues related to the Center for a Livable Future. The conversation was based on an analysis published by the Pew Commission in 2008 on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which unveiled that the use of antibiotics with industrial livestock can cause serious human harm.
The panel, which issued an announcement on the School of Public Health’s website, said that the, “Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future (CLF) finds that the Administration and Congress have acted ‘regressively’ in policymaking on industrial food animal system issues.”
In the livestock industry, it has grown common to give cattle, pigs and chickens antibiotics to promote health and avoid illness. Instead of just using the antibiotics on sick animals, all of the livestock are fed antibiotics. Therefore, the drugs are widespread in daily consumption by humans.
“The one thing I would say, if people really want to change something in America, you have to organize. As individuals, you can’t do anything. The internet now provides you with a means of organizing, that you didn’t used to have. You have to educate and you must have patience,” Professor Louis Galambos of the Department of History said.
The panel made clear that positive change is a long way off in the future. Yet, as the human population becomes more immune to antibiotics, particularly through its presence in livestock, this issue will pose an increasing threat to public health.
“There will be a substantial struggle over the issue that will involve powerful interest groups, some of which are the good guys and some which are the bad guys, but it will take a long time. It will not be an easy struggle in part because these groups are very well entrenched, they’ve been fighting battles for different kinds of things for over a century,” Galambos said.
Lowering the use of antibiotics overall would involve restructuring the food supply on a national scale. In a nation with a population that reaches over 300 million people, it also calls for a major financial investment.
“I feel that the fact that antibiotics in livestock is unregulated is absolutely ridiculous, given that it effects our immune system and the effectiveness of antibiotics as a whole. Especially when many common antibiotics’ effectiveness has been decreasing due to human use,” senior Stafford Enck said.
Some of the committee’s recommendations were to “Ban the non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials in food animal production to reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance to medically important antibiotics and other antimicrobials,” and “Define non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials as any use in food animals in the absence of microbial disease or documented microbial disease exposure.”
While obesity is constantly on the national agenda, the questionable practices by which food is produced lacks much of a platform.
“As far as I can see, it is at this point not a salient issue nationally. If you’re going to get any action you need to make it that, and that doesn’t happen by accident,” Galambos said.
On an international scale, the decisions the United States makes agriculturally can have a massive influence on developing nations.
“As other countries develop, they begin to do the same thing that we do. They begin to eat more meat, since they can afford it. They begin to have more problems with diabetes and being overweight. The pattern right now, is that the developing countries are developing our problems as well as our income,” Galambos said.
