M6.6: Use of Antibiotics

ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE 101: HOW ANTIBIOTIC MISUSE ON FACTORY FARMS CAN MAKE YOU SICK: This article, like most of the others, is not really news to me, but it is something that I don’t know much about.  What I do know is that overprescribing of antibiotics in healthcare is a massive problem throughout our country, and it is leading to not only superbugs but incurable infections due to antibiotic resistance in patients.  That, however, is something that is easily preventable and controllable by limiting antibiotic prescriptions that are unnecessary from healthcare providers.   What we have less control over is the use of antibiotics on farms, and more particularly, factory farms.  This article points out that agriculture uses vastly more antibiotics than human medicine does, and the scary part is we don’t know if what we eat has been medicated with antibiotics in many cases.  Beyond simply knowing if the animals were medicated, we don’t know with what, how much, or anything else about it, which is absolutely scary, because we’re eating those animals or products from those animals.  I do think more and more now we see products listed as “antibiotic free” and so on, but I wonder if that is true 100% of the time.

NEARBY LIVESTOCK MAY RAISE 'SUPERBUG' RISK: MSSA and MRSA have long been issues within hospitals and healthcare settings, but now, even the general public has at least some level of awareness about these superbugs that are resistant to many common, and even many more aggressive, antibiotics.  This article citing the Dutch study about transmission of these infections from livestock to people who never came into direct contact with the livestock is both interesting and scary.  It’s bad enough getting a disease or infection from actually coming into contact with something, but nobody really expects to get sick from simply living near a farm with livestock.  This article is also interesting because it talks about the density of livestock on the farm, which lends itself to the other topic we’ve discussed which is factory farming.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER THAT ANTIMICROBIAL WIPES AND SOAPS MAY BE MAKING YOU (AND SOCIETY) SICK: I think this is interesting because there is such a huge market now for antibacterial products.  Not that long ago, the only antibacterial products you really bought were for cleaning up kitchen or bathroom messes.  Now, you can walk into any store, gas station or almost any other place, and at least find a bottle of antibacterial hand gel at the checkout counter.  Beyond the little stores and gas stations, a larger store like a supermarket or Target will have hundreds of antibacterial options from wipes, to hand gels, hand soaps, and now, even antibacterial body wash which I just realized was actually a thing.  We focus so much on antibacterial cleansing without realizes that most of these things our bodies deal with in their own way. In most cases, we don’t need to strip our hands of these bacteria because our body can handle them.  Obviously for those working in healthcare where they’re coming into direct contact with body fluids and things like that, it’s another issue all together, but for everyday people, we’re simply harming ourselves by not allowing our body to be exposed to these things and handle them the way it’s meant to.

A REPORT ABOUT THE NEW PRACTICE OF INCORPORATING ANTIMICROBIALS INTO THE MANUFACTURE OF HOSPITAL FURNISHINGS: I am not sure how I feel about this to be honest.  Obviously, there is a place for antimicrobial technologies in hospitals, but this might be a step too far.  Beyond the associated monetary costs, I think each individual hospital would need to perform a real risk/benefit analysis to see if this makes sense for them.  All hospitals have infectious disease programs and councils that handle this type of thing.  If a particular hospital is having issues with disease or infection control, perhaps they should look into their own internal processes and procedures getting to the root cause of the problem, because it may be a much easier fix than fitting an entire hospital with antimicrobial furnishings.