This year, Pace University’s award-winning “Producing the Documentary” class turned its sights on sustainable shrimp farming. Production for the 15-minute film, “Linda Thornton: Seeking Sustainability One Shrimp At A Time”, was aided by NY Times climate writer Andrew Revkin, who’s also the Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at the Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies. The doc focuses on how the entrepreneurial Thorton managed to overcome devastating adversity in order to kick start some of the most successful shrimp farms in Belize. She’s now recognized as a leader in ecologically friendly shrimp farming, and continues to guide the industry into ever more sustainable waters. It’s a nice little film, and packs a hell of a wallop during its scant running time. Enjoy. For more information about the student filmmakers behind the documentary, head over to their blog at Sustainable Shrimp.
Meat in the U.S. may be widely contaminated with strains of drug-resistant bacteria, researchers reported Friday after testing 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased at grocery stores.
Nearly half of the samples — 47% — contained strains of Staphylococcus aureus, the type of bacteria that most commonly causes staph infections. Of those bacteria, 52% were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
DNA testing suggested the animals were the source of contamination. Environmental health scientist Lance Price, the study’s leader, said the animals most likely harbored these drug-resistant pathogens because antibiotics routinely are fed to livestock to promote growth and prevent disease in crowded pens on large farms.
“These findings really point to serious problems with the way food animals are raised in the U.S. today,” said Price, who directs the Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research center in Phoenix.
Last summer, the Food and Drug Administration urged the meat industry to cut back on antibiotic use out of concern that the practice breeds drug-resistant bacteria in stockyards and makes antibiotics less effective in humans.
But other scientists said it was premature to conclude that antibiotics in animal feed were to blame. About half of all humans have staph bacteria in their noses or throats, and a food handler with poor hygiene could introduce the pathogen to the food supply, said Beilei Ge, a food scientist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
The meat and poultry samples tested in the study represented 80 brands and were purchased in Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Flagstaff, Ariz., and Washington, D.C.
Scientists incubated the samples for up to 24 hours in a broth that was kept at human body temperature and used genetic tests to determine whether they contained the staph bacteria. Then they treated them with vancomycin, oxacillin, tetracycline and other antibiotics to determine whether they were resistant to the drugs.
The research was funded by the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, which opposes the routine use of antibiotics in animal feed.
About 11,000 people die every year from S. aureus infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than half of those deaths are from the hospital “superbug” methicillin-resistant S. aureus, or MRSA.
The direct risk that consumers may acquire a staph infection from meat can be reduced by cooking meat thoroughly and washing all foods and surfaces that come into contact with raw meat, whether or not it is resistant to antibiotics.
However, Caroline DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C., said the study results suggest that consumers might benefit by wearing gloves when they handle raw meat. “It’s making us rethink our advice to the public,” she said.
The American Meat Institute, which represents producers, said Friday that the country’s meat and poultry supply was safe. And data from the CDC show that cases of food-borne illness in the U.S. have declined 20% in the last decade.
William Marler, a leading food safety attorney, said it was helpful to test meat samples available in stores because the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service focused its testing on meat production facilities.
“It’s good to see more people doing retail testing because it shows us that our meat is far less sanitary than most consumers would think,” he said.
But the bigger threat to public health is that widespread antibiotic use in livestock could make the drugs increasingly ineffective in humans, Price said.
The American Medical Assn., the World Health Organization and other medical groups have warned that the misuse of antibiotics in food animal production may be creating a serious problem for human health by fostering development of drug-resistant bacteria.
Studies in Canada and Denmark show that taking antibiotics out of animal feed makes antibiotic-resistant bacteria less prevalent in both animals and people with no ill effects for animals or ranchers, Price said.
“Our lifesaving medications are being used as tools to make animals grow faster,” Price said. “We must do everything we can to protect these antibiotics that protect our health.”
A consortium of U.S. organic farmers and seed dealers filed suit against global seed giant Monsanto Co. on Tuesday, in a move to protect themselves from what they see as a growing threat in the company’s arsenal of genetically modified crops.
The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed the suit on behalf of more than 50 organizations challenging the chemical giant’s patents on its genetically modified seeds. The group is seeking a ruling that would prohibit Monsanto from suing the farmers or dealers if their organic seed becomes contaminated with Monsanto’s patented biotech seed germplasm.
Monsanto is known for its zealous defense of its patents on a range of genetically altered crops. Its patented “Roundup Ready” soybeans, corn and cotton are favorites of U.S. farmers because of their ability to withstand herbicide treatments.
Monsanto officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
But Monsanto has filed scores of lawsuits and won judgments against farmers they claimed made use of their seed without paying required royalties. Many farmers have claimed that their fields were inadvertently contaminated without their knowledge, and the issue has been a topic of concern for not only farmers, but also companies that clean and handle seed.
“This case asks whether Monsanto has the right to sue organic farmers for patent infringement if Monsanto’s genetically modified seed should land on their property,” said Dan Ravicher, executive director of PUBPAT, a nonprofit legal services organization, which filed the suit in federal court in the southern district of New York.
The suit also alleges that Monsanto’s GMO seeds do more harm than good and claims the patents on genetically modified seed are invalid because they don’t meet the “usefulness” requirement of patent law.
“Some say genetically modified seed can coexist with organic seed, but history tells us that’s not possible,” said Ravicher. “It’s actually in Monsanto’s financial interest to eliminate organic seed so that they can have a total monopoly over our food supply.”
The suit claims that if plaintiffs do not intend to use the transgenic seed and their own seed is contaminated, Monsanto is committing a “trespass.”
“As nontransgenic seed farmers and seed sellers, Plaintiffs already have to deal with the constant threat of transgenic seed contamination that could destroy their chosen livelihood. They should not also have to live with the threat of being sued for patent infringement should that travesty come to pass,” the lawsuit states.
Monsanto’s genetically altered seeds have been a market mainstay since the mid-1990s, and many of its rivals have their own brands of biotech crops that tolerate herbicide, resist insects and have other useful qualities engineered into them.
Antibiotics, one of the world’s greatest medical discoveries, are slowly losing their effectiveness in fighting bacterial infections and the massive use of the drugs in food animals may be the biggest culprit. The growing threat of antibiotic resistance is largely due to the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in both people and animals, which leads to an increase in “super-bacteria”. However, people use a much smaller portion of antibiotics sold in this country compared to the amount set aside for food animals. In fact, according to new data just released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), of the antibiotics sold in 2009 for both people and food animals almost 80% were reserved for livestock and poultry. A huge portion of those antibiotics were never intended to fight bacterial infections, rather producers most likely administered them in continuous low-dosages through feed or water to increase the speed at which their animals grew. And that has many public health experts and scientists troubled.
For years scientists concerned about the threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria in food animal production have been trying to figure out just how much antibiotics producers are using each year. The best they could do was come up with rough estimates. That is because the data was never publicly available, until now.
In accordance with a 2008 amendment to the Animal Drug User Fee Act, for the first time the FDA released last week an annual amount of antimicrobial drugs sold and distributed for use in food animals. The grand total for 2009 is 13.1 million kilograms or 28.8 million pounds. I found the stories covering this revelation interesting, but they did not convey the whole picture. It is important to understand how this amount compares to the total available for people. So, I decided to find out for myself and contacted the FDA for an estimate of the volume of antibiotics sold for human use in 2009. This is what a spokesperson told me:
“Our Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology just finished an analysis based on IMS Health data. Sales data in kilograms sold for selected antibacterial drugs were obtained as a surrogate of human antibacterial drug use in the U.S. market. Approximately 3.3 million kilograms of antibacterial drugs were sold in year 2009. OSE states that all data in this analysis have been cleared for public use by IMS Health, IMS National Sales Perspectives™.”
3.3 million kilograms is a little over 7 million pounds. As far as I can determine, this is the first time the FDA has made data on estimates of human usage public. Below is a breakdown of the FDA numbers prepared by my colleague, Dr. David Love, also from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, which compares the estimated amounts of human usage with food animal usage.
Take a look at the data for tetracycline. More than 10 million pounds of the antibiotic were sold for the use in food animals. That’s more than all of the antibiotics combined set aside for humans in 2009. Many studies suggest the high use of tetracycline in food animals, particularly in pigs, has lead to the increased rates of bacterial resistance to the antibiotic, such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA.
Despite this new information, the hog industry denies the suggestion that it is overusing antibiotics. In response to the FDA’s report, the National Pork Producers Council also pointed out to Food Safety News’ Helena Bottemiller that, “ionophores … are not used in human medicine, they don’t have anything to do with the effectiveness of antibiotics in people.” That statement is inaccurate. All uses of antibiotics have the potential to decrease the effectiveness of antibiotics in people. Ionophores are no exception. While several industry funded studies determined that ionophore use in animals is “not likely” to transfer resistance from animals to people, researchers couldn’t come to a definitive conclusion because ionophores can lead to bacterial resistance to the antibiotic bacitracin, which is commonly used to treat skin and eye infections.
Every time an antibiotic is used there is a risk of adding to the growing pool of antibiotic resistance. LivableFutureBlog readers might recall an October blog post in which Dr. Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, warned that, “Bacteria respond to chemical structures, not brand names, and resistance to one member of a pharmaceutical class results in cross resistance to all other members of the same class.” Silbergeld says when bacteria develop resistance to one member of that class of antibiotics it can be resistant to all.
So, what is the government doing to ensure we don’t squander the effectiveness of antibiotics for human use on the production of food animals? Since President Barack Obama took office, the FDA says it has taken several steps. Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Principal Deputy Commissioner of the FDA, took a stand last year by stating that the Administration, “supports ending the use of antibiotics for growth and feed efficiency” in food animals. However, instead of requiring industry take action, the FDA released a draft-guidance last June that essentially asks industry to voluntarily end the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in food animals and include veterinary oversight or consultation on all antibiotic use.
Lawmakers such as Congresswoman Louise Slaughter and Senator Barbara Boxer have been introducing versions of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA) for more than a decade that would mandate antibiotic use changes in food animals. Earlier this year it looked like the bill had a good chance of passing, but the bill failed to make it to the floor of the House or Senate. While not perfect, PAMTA would ban the use of medically important antibiotics as growth promoters. Passage of PAMTA would be an important step in saving the potency of antibiotics for human use. However, the current version of the bill could be stronger if it followed more closely the recommendations from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production final report, which calls for a ban on the non-therapeutic use of all antibiotics, not just those considered medically important, in food animals.
Now that we officially know that food animals use an overwhelming majority of our antibiotics, I hope it is more clear to everyone that legislation limiting the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in livestock and poultry must be passed. The next battle, which industry has already begun, is defining what non-therapeutic use will constitute. Producers are already claiming that the use of antibiotics for growth promotion has decreased, maintaining current low-dose usage is aimed at disease prevention. Regardless, all low-dose usage of antibiotics can lead to a significant increase in antibiotic resistance. As Dr. Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin warned, “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body.”
Family farms are being replaced by factory farms, and these facilities are overwhelming some regions of the country. This method of raising livestock harms rural communities and puts small family farms out of business. It takes away consumers’ choice at the grocery store, makes food safety problems happen on a larger scale, and creates more waste than the surrounding environment can adequately absorb. It keeps animals packed tightly together inside buildings, leading to stress and disease that are managed with treatments like the constant use of antibiotics that can ultimately harm public health.
By concentrating the amount of animals into one factory farm, and factory farms into one part of the country, we concentrate the effects of their waste on the environment, while sending products from unsustainable, potentially unsafe facilities far and wide before a problem is even detected, putting consumers all over the country at risk.
How did we get here?
Family farmers have been forced to get big—or get out of farming. And the ones that remain are at the mercy of unfair contracts with the big companies that control the meat system from farm to fork. Because farmers have only a few options for selling their meat to processors, they are forced to do so for low prices – sometimes even less than what their livestock cost to raise. These bad economics pressure many farmers to quit raising livestock and others to try to make up for low prices per animal by raising more animals.
For several decades, agricultural policy in the U.S. has been based on this “get big or get out” approach, which is incompatible with a sustainable food system for consumers and producers. That’s why Food & Water Watch is working with its allies to create a better farm bill in 2012: one that provides fair access to markets for farmers; busts up big food monopolies; and requires meatpackers to pay farmers a fair price for their livestock so they could actually make a living without turning their operation into a factory farm.
Is enough being done to protect us from chemicals that could harm us? Watch “Toxic America,” a special two-night investigative report with Sanjay Gupta M.D., June 2 & 3 at 8 p.m. ET on CNN.
Children exposed to higher levels of a type of pesticide found in trace amounts on commercially grown fruit and vegetables are more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than children with less exposure, a nationwide study suggests.
Researchers measured the levels of pesticide byproducts in the urine of 1,139 children from across the United States. Children with above-average levels of one common byproduct had roughly twice the odds of getting a diagnosis of ADHD, according to the study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics.
Exposure to the pesticides, known as organophosphates, has been linked to behavioral and cognitive problems in children in the past, but previous studies have focused on communities of farm workers and other high-risk populations. This study is the first to examine the effects of exposure in the population at large.
Organophosphates are “designed” to have toxic effects on the nervous system, says the lead author of the study, Maryse Bouchard, Ph.D., a researcher in the department of environmental and occupational health at the University of Montreal. “That’s how they kill pests.”
The pesticides act on a set of brain chemicals closely related to those involved in ADHD, Bouchard explains, “so it seems plausible that exposure to organophosphates could be associated with ADHD-like symptoms.”
Environmental Protection Agency regulations have eliminated most residential uses for the pesticides (including lawn care and termite extermination), so the largest source of exposure for children is believed to be food, especially commercially grown produce. Adults are exposed to the pesticides as well, but young children appear to be especially sensitive to them, the researchers say.
Detectable levels of pesticides are present in a large number of fruits and vegetables sold in the U.S., according to a 2008 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited in the study. In a representative sample of produce tested by the agency, 28 percent of frozen blueberries, 20 percent of celery, and 25 percent of strawberries contained traces of one type of organophosphate. Other types of organophosphates were found in 27 percent of green beans, 17 percent of peaches, and 8 percent of broccoli.
Although kids should not stop eating fruits and vegetables, buying organic or local produce whenever possible is a good idea, says Bouchard.
“Organic fruits and vegetables contain much less pesticides, so I would certainly advise getting those for children,” she says. “National surveys have also shown that fruits and vegetables from farmers’ markets contain less pesticides even if they’re not organic. If you can buy local and from farmers’ markets, that’s a good way to go.”
A direct cause-and-effect link between pesticides and ADHD “is really hard to establish,” says Dana Boyd Barr, Ph.D., a professor of environmental and occupational health at Emory University. However, she says, “There appears to be some relation between organophosphate pesticide exposure and the development of ADHD.”
This is the largest study of its kind to date, according to Barr, who researched pesticides for more than 20 years in her previous job with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but was not involved in the study.
Bouchard and her colleagues analyzed urine samples from children ages 8 to 15. The samples were collected during an annual, nationwide survey conducted by the CDC, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The researchers tested the samples for six chemical byproducts (known as metabolites) that result when the body breaks down more than 28 different pesticides. Nearly 95 percent of the children had at least one byproduct detected in their urine.
Just over 10 percent of the children in the study were diagnosed with ADHD. The kids were judged to have ADHD if their symptoms (as reported by parents) met established criteria for the disorder, or if they had taken ADHD medication regularly in the previous year.
One group of pesticide byproducts was associated with a substantially increased risk of ADHD. Compared with kids who had the lowest levels, the kids whose levels were 10 times higher were 55 percent more likely to have ADHD. (Another group of byproducts did not appear to be linked to the disorder.)
In addition, children with higher-than-average levels of the most commonly detected byproduct — found in roughly 6 in 10 kids — were nearly twice as likely to have ADHD.
“It’s not a small effect,” says Bouchard. “This is 100 percent more risk.”
To isolate the effect of the pesticide exposure on ADHD symptoms, the researchers controlled for a variety of health and demographic factors that could have skewed the results.
Still, the study had some limitations and is not definitive, Bouchard says. Most notably, she and her colleagues measured only one urine sample for each child, and therefore weren’t able to track whether the levels of pesticide byproducts were constant, or whether the association between exposure and ADHD changed over time.
Long-term studies including multiple urine samples from the same children are needed, Bouchard says. She suspects such studies would show an even stronger link between pesticide byproducts and ADHD.
EPA spokesman Dale Kemery said in a statement that the agency routinely reviews the safety of all pesticides, including organophosphates. “We are currently developing a framework to incorporate data from studies similar to this one into our risk assessment,” Kemery said. “We will look at this study and use the framework to decide how it fits into our overall risk assessment.”
Kemery recommended that parents try other pest-control tactics before resorting to pesticide use in the home or garden. Washing and peeling fruits and vegetables and eating “a varied diet” will also help reduce potential exposure to pesticides, he said.
“I would hope that this study raises awareness as to the risk associated with pesticide exposure,” Bouchard says. “There’s really only a handful of studies on this subject out there, so there’s room for more awareness.”
Chile’s loss is Norway’s gain. After a virus that causes salmon anemia devastated Chile’s salmon harvest, prices have spiked worldwide and Norway’s salmon exporters are taking advantage. Chile had been the second biggest producer of salmon in the world, but is predicted to sell only about 90,000 tons this year, compared to 403,000 tons in 2008.
BusinessWeek has a recent story and so does the Financial Times. The Financial Times includes a single line speculating as to the cause of the virus outbreak:
Environmental groups accuse Chile’s salmon industry of over-crowding its cages for salmon and using too many chemicals.
But what neither report tells us is that 20 years ago, Chile had no salmon industry at all. Salmon are not indigenous to South America. Chile’s entire production was farmed, and for years, a hefty proportion of the harvest went directly to Wal-Mart. As Wal-Mart expanded its grocery offerings, so did Chile’s salmon farms burgeon.
In 2006, Salon excerpted a chapter from Charles Fishman’s excellent “The Wal-Mart Effect” that told the story of Chilean salmon. After learning of the Chilean salmon disaster from the International Political Economy Zone blog, I went back to review that chapter, and the following paragraph jumped out at me.
Salmon farming is starting to transform the ecology and environment of southern Chile too, with tens of millions of salmon living in vast ocean corrals, their excess food and feces settling to the ocean floor beneath the pens, and dozens of salmon processing plants dumping untreated salmon entrails directly into the ocean.
Who could have predicted that the mass forced farming of an exotic fish to please the Wal-Mart low-price palate would result in a horrific virus-borne plague of anemia?
Back to Fishman:
“Have you ever seen a hog farm?” asks Gerry Leape, vice president of marine conservation for the National Environmental Trust, a Washington-based environmental nonprofit group. “These fish are the hogs of the sea. They live in the same sort of conditions, it’s just in water. They pack them really closely together, they use a lot of prophylactic antibiotics, not to treat disease, but to prevent it. There’s lots of concentrated fish waste, it creates dead zones in the ocean around the pens.”
(Wal-Mart, incidentally, stopped buying Chilean salmon in July.) The Chilean government is now working on new laws to govern salmon farming designed to ensure healthier fish, but in the meantime the whole sorry saga offers a potent metaphor for the dangers inherent in any kind of industrial production of animals.
Researchers in Flagstaff are looking at what happens when farmers routinely feed antibiotics to the beef, chicken, pork, turkey, shrimp and salmon you might find at the local grocery store.
They’re buying meat and seafood from grocery stores here and in Los Angeles, Florida, Chicago, and the District of Columbia, to investigate what kinds of bacteria live on it.
If past testing for different bacteria is any indication, they could find some ugly stuff: Antibiotic-resistant bacteria capable of infecting you by kitchen cross-contamination, even if you’re a vegetarian living with omnivores.
“We think that it is contributing significantly to the antibiotic resistance problem in people,” said Lance B. Price, a biologist and director of a Translational Genomics (TGen) North unit that does research bearing on human health and the organisms living on us.
Animals in many commercial feeding operations in the United States — Europe, including the world’s top pork producer, Denmark, has banned the practice — feed their animals antibiotics routinely when they are well, sometimes mixed with food, to help them grow faster and remain healthy in crowded conditions.
“In industrial food animal production, one of their standard tools is to use antibiotics,” Price said.
Target has announced that all their stores will stop selling farmed salmon products. This move towards greater ocean conservation is a first by a major seafood retailer. Salmon consumption in the United States is a huge market for retailers. Salmon is second only to shrimp in seafood purchases in the United States. This announcement is sure to have a ripple affect across the entire seafood industry and will improve the health of oceans throughout the world.
Target will replace farmed salmon with wild Alaskan salmon, a relatively healthy and sustainable product. This transition affects all sections of the store – frozen, fresh, smoked, and shelf-stable farmed salmon products have all been replaced by more environmentally sound alternatives. Greenpeace applauds Target’s decision to address ocean conservation and provide leadership to other seafood retailers who want to follow in their footsteps.
Next Stop: Trader Joes
Visit Greenpeace’s Trader Joes SUstainable Fisheries Campaign at www.traitorjoe.com
Dutch scientists have been successful in creating pork meat in a lab from the stem cells of pigs.
Reports state that the lab grown meat does not yet resemble or taste much like pork (it has the consistency of a scallop), the results could prove to be a major landmark in the world’s food supply.
“If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need one million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat,” said Mark Post, a biologist at Maastricht University involved in the project.
Slaughterhouses could be a thing of the past
This could mean that slaughterhouses in the future will no longer be needed. Global warming could be lowered by up to 95%, world hunger tackled - a green alternative may be possible.
Concerns
Although there seem to be positive future aspects, there are also concerns regarding meat grown in a lab. Some health experts are concerned about dangers to human health. Also, less dependency in livestock could affect the agricultural ecosystems.
“Part of our enjoyment of eating meat depends on the very complicated muscle and fat structure… whether that can be replicated is still a question,” - biochemist Peter Ellis.
However, the researchers who are involved in the project believe that the benefits of the technology surpass the risks.
