back then but the situation has got a great deal worse since and now applies equally to the NHS.
Part of the problem is due to the overprescribing of antibiotics by doctors and their availability off the shelf in some third world countries, but livestock producers consume 50 per cent of all antibiotics and the way they are used makes them even more culpable than prescription drugs.
Superbugs have arrived and they are not going to go away – they are widespread in the environment and are even present in the intestines of many of our children. As antibiotic-resistant bugs have the ability to pass resistance on to other, unrelated bacteria, this worrying problem will continue to develop in unforeseen ways.
Livestock producers have poisoned the environment at every level, even a microbiological level and we have no idea how devastating the eventual outcome will be.
Just as they have started us down a road where infections are increasingly difficult to control because of antibiotics that no longer work, we are also presented with the spectre of new pandemic diseases to which we probably have little or no resistance. The current fear is over bird flu.
Each species of animal used in intensive farming is invariably drawn from the same genetic stock. Selectively bred for quick growth and rapid weight gain they tend not to have good disease resistance. The problem is exacerbated by overcrowding and bad hygiene which leads to permanent stress, reducing the effectiveness of their immune system even further. Any disease which gains a foothold in one animal is therefore likely to rip through them all. Each new mass infection increases the likelihood of a bacteria or virus mutating into a form that can also infect humans.
It is almost certainly these conditions that turned a relatively benign bird flu virus – H5N1 – into a virulent one. Whether H5N1 bird flu will mutate again into a form that can infect humans and potentially kill us en masse remains to be seen. Whether it does or not, there will be other new bacteria and viruses emerging and as the mass of farmed animals goes on increasing and the use of antibiotics goes on increasing it is likely that so will the risk.
There are already new wasting diseases appearing specific to pigs and it is inevitable that there will be other novel diseases that infect humans also. We know what the government’s reaction is likely to be from the manner in which it handled mad cow disease (BSE) and its human equivalent, vCJD.
Despite evidence to the contrary, it insisted that this new, incurable and highly- infectious disease would not infect humans, desperately placing the survival of the meat and dairy industries above human life.
Of course they were wrong and it is only luck that comparatively few people have developed and died from vCJD and it has not become a mass epidemic – so far.
9
©Rob Hill/Viva!
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