"The Human Health Effects of Cultivated Meat: Antibiotic Resistance"
Cultivating muscle meat straight from cells instead of carving it from animals
would reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses, now due to fecal contamination
during slaughtering and the evisceration of carcasses,
because there would be no feces, would be no slaughter,
and no carcasses to eviscerate.
In addition, it would also reduce the threat from antibiotic resistance.
To compensate for the overcrowded, stressful, unhygienic conditions on
factory farms, the animals are dosed 'en masse' with antibiotics,
lots of antibiotics. We're talking 20 million pounds a year
of medically important antibiotics. So we give farm animals
in the United States like 2 million pounds of penicillin drugs,
15 million pounds of tetracyclines. This is madness.
It gets laced right into their feed and water. We're talking antibiotics
important to human medicine being fed to cows, pigs, and chickens
by the ton, by the thousands of tons, laced into their feed and water.
And that's all without a prescription; 97% of the tens of millions of pounds
of antibiotics given to farm animals in the United States are bought over
the counter, as in without a prescription or order from a veterinarian. To even
get a few milligrams of penicillin, you need a doctor's prescription,
because these are miracle wonder drugs that can't be squandered.
But meanwhile, farmers can just back their trucks right up to the feed store.
And now, half the Salmonella in retail meat—chicken, turkey, beef, pork—
is resistant to tetracycline. About a quarter of the bugs are
now resistant to three or more entire classes of antibiotics,
including some resistant to ceftriaxone, which is a critically important drug
we use to treat severe Salmonella infections, especially in children.
Such agricultural applications for antimicrobials are now considered
an urgent threat to human health, with the link between antibiotic use
in animals and antibiotic resistance in humans considered unequivocal.
It all starts in the poop. Antibiotic- resistant bugs are selected for,
and then can spread via the meat or produce contaminated
by the poop, or in the wind, the air, the water, carried by insects.
Lots of pathways by which resistant superbugs can escape.
So even if you don't eat meat, you can be put at risk by the pathogens
released from stressed, immune- compromised, contaminant-filled
livestock pumped with antibiotics.
That's one of the reasons the American Public Health Association
has called for a moratorium on factory farms:
all the pollution of the surrounding communities.
More than 5 tons of animal manure are produced for
every man, woman, and child in the United States every year.
It all starts with the poop.
But cultivated meat means no guts, no poop, no fecal infections,
no antibiotics necessary. And no fecal or antibiotic residues left in the meat,
which can potentially cause a variety of side effects beyond
just the transfer of antibiotic- resistant bacteria to humans.
And things are getting worse, not better.
U.S. animal agriculture is using more antibiotics now than ever before.
And it's not just because we're raising more animals.
Antibiotic sales in the U.S. are outpacing meat production.
Yes, meat production is going up, but check out the rise in antibiotic sales
for meat production. With the combined might of big ag and big pharma—
who profit from selling all the drugs—
it's hard to imagine anything changing on the political side.
Maybe the only hope is the change on the production side.
The unstoppable rise of super-resistant strains of bacteria is a serious
worldwide problem, resulting in 700,000 deaths every year.
And the projections for global antibiotic use in food-animal production
are ominous, perhaps exceeding 100,000 tons of antibiotics
pumped into animals for food by 2030.
Quite simply, we may be on the path to untreatable infections
by using even some of our last resort antibiotics, like carbapenems,
just to shave a few cents off a pound of meat.
And it's not just foodborne bacteria. There's mad cow, swine flu,
bird flu with the potential to kill millions of people.
Skeptical? I've got a book for you to read, whose author's
superb story-telling ability evidently makes it a must read.
Given the threat of the chickens coming home to roost,
an editorial in the "American Journal of Public Health" thought it curious
that ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting
the quantity of them that are eaten,
is largely off the radar as a significant preventative measure
to prevent the next influenza pandemic.
Yet, humanity does not even seem to consider this option.
But humanity need not consider that option because you could
make all the chicken you want, without guts or lungs.