Should we raise farm animals with antibiotics?

By Kiran Jayasinghe

I was reading the December 2016 issue of the Scientific American magazine when I came across an interesting article.

Did you know that pigs are raised with feed containing antibiotics? Antibiotics are medicines that get kill bacteria. Most pigs are raised in crowded pens and to keep pigs healthy, farmers feed them antibiotics to prevent bacterial infections. These antibiotics also help animals grow faster with less food.

But the overuse of antibiotics have begun to turn pigs into a harbor for deadly bacteria that are resistant to several classes of antibiotics.  These deadly bacteria are known as antibiotic resistant bacteria.  Bacteria also spread easily.  Bacteria can spread through pig manure, which is used as fertilizer for crops. Farm employees’ spread bacteria through contaminated hands when they handle the pigs.  Because bacteria spread easily scientist worry that antibiotic resistant bacteria from pig farms will also spread to other individuals.

The antibiotic-resistant bacteria might be harmful to patients. Many researchers worry that the overuse of antibiotics on farms is decreasing our ability to cure bacterial infections. For example, a woman in Pensylvania was not able to be treated because the bacteria in her infection was resistant to the medicine she was given.

Scientists would like to measure the extent of this problem.  They would like to track how antibiotic resistance may spread from farms to people.  But big meat companies won’t let researchers on their farms. They argue that they can’t have their pigs around outsiders, which makes it hard for scientists to carry out their research.

There are a few farms, however, who have come up with a solution. The Seven Sons Farms raises it’s hogs in woodlands and pastures without antibiotics. It relies on space to keep their pigs healthy. If a pig does get sick, they feed it antibiotics and auction it off.

Perdue Farms announced that it would not be feeding it’s chickens with antibiotics starting in February 2016. Tyson Foods also claimed that it would raise two thirds of their chickens without antibiotics, starting September 2017.

After reading the article, I think we should reduce the use of antibiotics to keep animals healthy, and instead use a different solution to keep animals from getting sick.