This is HUGE! It really makes you wonder what's been going on behind the scenes to allow this kind of admission.
I've been so sick of hearing IDSA point to antibiotic resistance risk being a reason to deny us long-term Lyme and co therapy, while this 800-lb gorilla has been stuffing literally TONS of antibiotics into our food supply.
For those of us that need strong antibiotics to treat and recover from persistent tick-borne bacterial infections, this has important implications for the viability of our antibiotic choices.
Now, older, and far riskier antibiotic drugs that were banned decades ago are coming into use again, because of the deadly drug-resistant strains developing from non-therapeutic-antibiotic use in the Agriculture sector. (I'll post a link to a story on that in my next post.)
"USDA Admits Link Between Antibiotic Use by Big Ag and Human Health"
"At a hearing of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday, July 14, 2010, a representative of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
finally caught up with the rest of the world -- and his peers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) -- and admitted that the use of antibiotics in farm animal feed is contributing to the growing problem of deadly antibiotic resistance in America.
Dr. John Clifford, Deputy Administrator for Veterinary Services for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) read from his previously submitted testimony that the USDA believes it is likely that U.S. use of antibiotics in animal agriculture does lead to some cases of resistance in humans and the animals.
Why is this news? Because the USDA has been continually playing the Three Wise Monkeys game -- it sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil -- when it comes to deadly consequences to humans of the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animals.
In fact, Dr. Clifford looked as if he'd been given a choice between testifying or having his eye poked out with a stick and he lost the toss.
..." (Read the rest of the article at link above.)
Posted by nenet (Member # 13174) on :
Here's the other article I mentioned in my previous post:
"New interest in a shelved `miracle' drug"
Because deadly bacteria have become resistant to new antibiotics, medical experts are trying to revive an old drug despite lethal side effects.
For those who have trouble reading the format at the link, here is a reformatted c&p:
WASHINGTON -- More than half a century ago, when antibiotics were transforming modern medicine, a now almost forgotten drug was hailed as something close to the miracle of miracles.
Doctors rushed to prescribe it for an array of medical problems -- that is, until they discovered that the drug, chloramphenicol, sometimes had lethal side effects.
Now an effort is under way to revive the use of chloramphenicol and other antibiotics that had largely been banished because of their potential danger.
Some scientists say the older antibiotics may be one way to fight sometimes deadly bacteria that have become resistant to modern drugs.
``People are going all the way back to the original antibiotics that were shelved because of toxicity. We are desperate,'' said John S. Bradley, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the UC San Diego School of Medicine.
The impulse to reexamine the older antibiotics is all the stronger because relatively few new antibiotics are in the development pipeline. And, because the old ones have not been heavily used in recent years, bacteria have not had much chance to develop resistance to them.
For example, one drug maker says in-house studies bolster evidence that chloramphenicol, a drug from the 1950s, is effective against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which killed an estimated 15,000 people in 2008.
Rifampin, a 1960s-era drug used to treat tuberculosis, is now sometimes employed in combination with other antibiotics to treat MRSA, Bradley said.
Colistin, a drug from the 1940s, is being used to treat resistant strains of acetinobacter and other pathogens collectively known as Gram-negative bacteria.
The challenge is figuring out ways to manage the possible side effects of the older medications and weigh the risks of administering them.
Philadelphia-based Lannett Co. says it will ask the Food and Drug Administration to approve chloramphenicol for use against MRSA.
``It works,'' said Arthur Bedrosian, chief executive of Lannett. ``We want to see if FDA will allow use of it as a drug of last resort.''
Chloramphenicol is still used overseas to treat meningitis and other ailments. It has been largely absent from the U.S. market for decades, although an injectable version is still available, according to federal records.
The FDA declined to comment on Lannett's plans to seek approval for a capsule version of chloramphenicol as a MRSA treatment.
But Dr. Edward Cox, head of the agency's Office of Antimicrobial Products, said that ``studying previously approved drugs for the treatment of patients with infections caused by resistant bacteria may provide useful data to assess their utility in treating these infections.''
When first introduced, chloramphenicol was a huge seller because, unlike other early antibiotics such as penicillin and streptomycin, it effectively attacked a range of pathogens.
But as it became more widely prescribed, doctors linked it to aplastic anemia, a potentially fatal illness in which the bone marrow produces insufficient quantities of new blood cells.
Chloramphenicol was overprescribed, given to patients who could have used an alternative because many physicians were smitten by the new drug's powers, said Thomas Maeder, author of a history of the drug.
Overuse continues to be a problem with antibiotics because of bacteria's ability to mutate and develop resistance in response to continued exposure to a drug.
Bedrosian said he'd be willing to market chloramphenicol with a warning about possible fatal side effects, a labeling drug makers normally resist strenuously.
``If you're going to die anyway, you may as well try it,'' Bedrosian said, referring to patients with severe MRSA infections. ``This is a second or third line of defense if nothing else is working.''