The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e86: Antibiotic Use in Poultry Production & Antibiotic Resistance

Episode Date: June 5, 2016

My guest today is Tom Philpott, Food and Agriculture Correspondant for Mother Jones. Tom joined me to talk about his recent piece on the use and abuse of antibiotics in US poultry production, and the efforts of one major poultry producer to wean itself from this practice. 

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. If you talk to public health people, they're terrified that we are entering this antibiotic, you know, this sort of post-antibiotic age, which, you know, brings us back to, you know, 1910, you know, when simple infections were deadly, which they're just not anymore. That's Tom Philpott, the food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones. Tom recently wrote a piece for Mother Jones on the prolific use of antibiotics in the production of livestock in the United States, on the connection between that antibiotic use and the problem of antibiotic resistance, and also about one of the major poultry producers in the States that has made great efforts to reduce its reliance on antibiotics in its production practices. Tom will be my guest for this episode. All right, time for the show.

Hey folks, it's Jordan. Okay, so I'm going to get right at this interview with Tom Philpott in just a moment, but I have been remiss over the last couple episodes to let you know just something really fun that happened to me a few weeks ago. I recently heard from a listener called Rachel in the west of Ireland who emailed me to let me know that she listens to the show. And I guess her family listens to the show sometimes. And that for Rachel's 40th birthday her daughter made her a cake with the ruminant logo on it and Rachel attached a photo of the cake and uh well that was just awesome so I've been meaning to put that photo up uh I guess onto the Facebook page and And I've done that.

So if you want to see the ruminant logo on Rachel from Ireland's birthday cake, head over to Facebook, look up the ruminant, and you can check it out. So Rachel, thanks for the email. Happy birthday. And yeah, I think your daughter, if she doesn't end up as a farmer herself someday, she's got a future, it appears, in baking. Okay, so as I promised last week, I was able to arrange an interview with journalist Tom Philpott. If you don't know that name, you should. Go check out Tom's writing at Mother Jones.

He's got two different podcasts you might want to check out. One's called Bite. One's called The Secret Ingredient. And he wrote this great article recently on the use of antibiotics in the livestock industry, and he joined me on the phone to talk about it. And here's our conversation. Talk to you at the end. My guest today is Tom Philpott, the food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones. Tom is also the co-host of Bite, a podcast about food politics that you can find via Mother Jones. Tom is also the co-host of Bite, a podcast about food politics that you can find via Mother Jones. And recently, Tom wrote an article for the May-June issue of

Mother Jones, which is also found on the website currently, called How Factory Farms Play Chicken with Antibiotics. And I'm really excited to have Tom on the show. Tom, thanks a lot for joining me. Thanks for having me. to have Tom on the show. Tom, thanks a lot for joining me. Thanks for having me. Tom, you've written a really good primer on the state of antibiotic use in poultry production, at least in the USA. So I thought we could start by asking you to provide a little bit of context. Why are the use of antibiotics so prevalent in livestock production? Well, I guess I'll start with that. Why are they so prevalent? Well, about 50 years ago, really not long after, scientists made some breakthroughs in antibiotics and realizing that you could isolate these compounds and put them to use in fighting pathogens that infect humans, which is a major breakthrough in medicine.

Not long after that, kind of by accident, scientists figured out that by feeding very low doses of some of these drugs to animals, it would make them grow faster. And so that's going on. This is discovered about this new sort of emerging pharmaceutical coming out that has got this growth-promoting effect on animals. And around the same time, you start to get the very, this is in the 50s, you start to get the very first stirrings of the industrialization of meat production. So you get bumper crops of corn and soybeans coming off of farms and people discovering that with these surpluses, you can kind of crab animals together and mass produce meat. mass-produced meat. And so as a result,

going through the 60s and the 70s, meat prices dropped, production expands dramatically, and prices for it drop. And so it becomes very important in meat production to save a little bit of money. And so if you can use these drugs to make animals

grow faster on a given amount of seed, it becomes more profitable. And so the industry, the meat industry, rushes into this. So really very quickly, starting in the 60s, antibiotics become very common on farms. And it's really not changed very much since then. As I write in my story, the poultry industry is starting to push away from it. And the pork and beef industries are way behind. And, you know, currently right now, something like four fifths of the antibiotics

consumed in the United States go to farms. And so it's, it's become just sort of accepted practice in the production of the mass production of animals. Right. So Tom, thank you for that context. But I don't think I don't think all of us understand, like how antibiotics as a growth promoter actually promote growth. And to my knowledge, it's not actually completely understood. But can I ask you that? Like, how does that work? How do antibiotics in the feed of animals help them grow faster or bigger? Well, you know, they didn't figure that out at the time.

They just sort of observed it was happening. And it's always been a little bit of a mystery. And it's always been a little bit of a mystery, but the best science seems to be that it tweaks the animal's microbiome in a way that makes them grow faster. And the exact mechanism for how that happens and why it would promote growth isn't exactly known, but, um, you know, you have to realize that when you get a bunch of animals together, crammed together in very tight conditions, um, there's a lot of bacteria floating around and they're, um, you know, they're under stress, um, and stress, um, decreases growth. It also, um, taxes the immune system. And so it's possible that some subtle change in the microbiome, some, you know, these antibiotics are killing some microbes

in the animal's guts in a way that boosts their immune system slightly, you know, something like that. Right, right. And I, man, I just found it, I find it so fascinating slightly, you know, something like that. Right, right. And I, man, I just found it, I find it so fascinating that, that, you know, we figured out a long time ago that, that these antibiotics were helping to, to promote growth. But then 40, 50 years on, all we've really done is find just one more puzzle piece, which is that we're, we're really starting to appreciate that, that the microbiome is playing a role in regulating weight in both the animals and, and ultimately ourselves. we still don't have an answer. So Tom, let's talk about antibiotic resistance now, because it seems that along with our prolific use of antibiotics in livestock production as well as just in treating humans over the last number of decades has led to antibiotic resistance,

both in animals and in humans. And so I'm just wondering, I guess, if you can briefly talk about what antibiotic resistance is and what role the livestock industry has played in contributing to it. Let's say you're trying to kill salmonella and you apply some antibiotics to, let's say it's a person that we're talking about, it's come down with a salmonella cells, most of them are going to be susceptible to the drug. And so you're going to kill most of them. But you're going to leave some behind that have some genetic ability to withstand that drug. that drug. And if you create an environment where, you know, you can do that probably without creating resistance or without creating a whole lot of resistance. If you take a complete course of the antibiotics, you kill most of them, a few will survive,

but they may not be able to pass on their genes and reproduce fast enough to create a significant resistant strain. But if you overuse antibiotics and you keep this pressure on, where you kill 99% of the cells of the organisms, but you leave this 1% and you're doing it constantly, then you're going to be selecting for those salmonella cells that can resist the antibiotic. And when you do that enough, suddenly you've got resistance to the antibiotic. And so the scientists realized that really quickly. You know, when the original scientists who won Nobel Prizes and stuff for these discoveries were talking about it, they knew and they made public how vulnerable they were to resistance and how they needed to be used very carefully. found, maybe I'm jumping ahead of your questions, but one of the things I found really surprising was that just as those scientists realized how vulnerable to resistance antibiotics were,

the people who are discovering their growth-promoting effect on animals also realize that it could be a problem down the road for resistance. And the reason is pretty simple. So if you're giving tiny doses, and so, you know, to go back to this growth promotion idea, growth promotion for antibiotics worked in animals at very low level, which was attractive to the meat industry because that meant, you know, not spending that much per animal on antibiotics. You're talking about very tiny dose. And so in the example I just gave, a person taking the course of antibiotics, you're killing almost all of the microbes. But in the case of

low daily sort of chronic doses of antibiotics, you're not killing all of them. You're leaving plenty to survive. And you're creating this sort of constant evolutionary pressure where microbes that are susceptible are under pressure of dying because they're getting constantly bombarded with this stuff. And the ones that aren't susceptible are gaining a niche and thriving. And that's exactly what happened on factory farms. You got this sort of perfect condition for generating strains of these bacteria that could withstand antibiotics. you've also mentioned that even the industry knew this early on or should have known it, but that put up resistance to any attempts at regulating them over the use of the antibiotics.

Do I have that right? Yeah. So, you know, like I said, by the 60s, both, you know, here and in the UK, it had become very common practice to put antibiotics in animal feed. And there was already, in the scientific community, lots of concern about it. I go into it in my piece, but those concerns in the U.S. kind of swelled throughout the 70s. You know, there were studies that came out that definitively, there's a famous study by a Tufts University researcher named Stuart Levy. It came out in 1975. He went to two different farms in his area in Pennsylvania.

And one of them, he talked him into adding antibiotics to feed. The other one didn't have them. These are small poultry farms. to feed. The other one didn't have them. These are small poultry farms. And very quickly, I think it was within days, he began finding resistant bacteria on the farm where he had added antibiotics. And quickly after that, found those bacteria in the people who were tending the farm. And back in the control farm, he found no resistance. There were no antibiotics being used. And so, you know, and that study that he did in 1975

was actually commissioned by the industry. And the industry was hoping somehow that it would show that resistance wasn't a problem on farms. But Levy's study immediately put the light of that. And so their reaction was to try to suppress the study, to publish it anyway. And that study and some other research that was coming out basically got the FDA in 1977 to produce a rule that banned basically all common human use antibiotics

from farms. And it was a proposed rule, and essentially they were on the point of finalizing it, and Congress basically crushed it. And so, you know, this is something that the FDA, based on really strong science and a scientific consensus that was also in the UK at the same time, knew more than 40 years ago and just didn't do anything about. And is just finally starting to do something about, it sounds like. starting to do something about, it sounds like. Well, you know, what they did was when they formally squashed that rule, which I believe was in 2013, what they did was they said,

okay, we're not going to impose that rule. What we're going to do is we're going to declare a voluntary rule, and we're going to ask poultry producers and all meat producers to not use human relevant antibiotics for the purpose of growth promotion. So it was voluntary and it was only for growth promotion, but there was a loophole in it. And the loophole was that they would continue to allow the use for what they call prevention. And that sounds like a reasonable decision, but the thing about it is that prevention and growth promotion end up having very similar doses. They can be used daily. And so a company can now, you know, comply with the FDA's voluntary rule and not change practices at all and say that, oh, this isn't for growth promotion, it's for prevention. And that, you know And the idea is that, okay, we're going to prevent an outbreak of some disease in chickens

by applying these antibiotics. But it's this exact same dose that they were using before to make them grow faster. And some companies are doing that. Well, let's talk about Purdue, because that was the main hook of your story. A really interesting part of your story is that you found one of the major poultry producers in the States, Purdue, has drastically reduced its use of medically important antibiotics. So can you talk about Purdue, the company, give a little bit of background and talk about why and how they accomplished this change? So Purdue is either the third or the fourth biggest poultry producer in the United

States, depending on who you ask. They've got something like 10% of the U.S. market. And in many ways, they're a very problematic company. They, you know, they, like the rest of their peers, they, you know, do this kind of troublesome contracting thing with farmers where they put all the risk off on farmers and get all the profits from poultry production. And they do a lot of things that we associate with the meat industry to sort of, you know, pushing down costs, pushing costs off on other players in the market. But, you know, sometime in the early 2000s, they looked around, saw the way that the science was going, that, you know, since 77, there's been this, you know, overwhelming amount of research documenting how problematic this practice is,

they saw the way that consumers were going. Consumers were starting to want to know more about how their food was produced. They're starting to ask questions about, you know, why are you using antibiotics every day? And they also, I think, very smartly looked at the science that I was talking about earlier and were finding that this sort of evidence that maybe they weren't getting as much of a pop out of using antibiotics as they were in the past. And they began to experiment in the early 2000s with pulling back antibiotics. And since they were, and I think this is kind of interesting, that since they were so far ahead of regulation, the FDA was not pressuring them to do this. They were completely doing it on their own. They were basically able to slowly experiment and,

you know, do it in a couple of farms first, see how it went, see what problems arose, adjust to the, you know, adjust to those problems, tweak their production practices. And so about over the last decade, they have essentially eliminated human relevant antibiotics completely from their production, unless there's an actual sick flock. completely from their production, unless there's an actual sick flock. Like if you actually get a bunch of infections in a flock and human-relevant antibiotics are the only remedy for it, they will use it. They say that it's down to between 4% and 6% a year of their flocks are treated that way, which is a pretty good number. And so for the rest of their flocks, there's no routine use of human based antibiotics and they've gotten it down

to the only antibiotics that are used are these, these things called ionophores, which are not used in medicine. And they're, they're used for one, one particular disease that comes up on chicken farms. And I think something like two-thirds of their farms don't even use those. And so they've gotten way, way out ahead of the industry and regulation on this topic. And I have to say i went i went in very skeptical i went in as uh as someone who you know doesn't trust what i what i hear from an industry like that

and the more i i dug into it the more i thought the more i decided on that issue they are telling the truth well let's you did go, I want to focus on one part of your sentence. You did go in, you got, it seemed like from reading your piece, you got pretty good access to some of their facilities, which I don't know, it seems like has become a rarity. I think a lot of these companies are really reluctant to let people in and will even like pursue people in court who, who take surreptitious videos or somehow get footage. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that access. Is it right that you got really good access?

And I don't know. I guess I want to just ask you how you were able to do that. I did. I think for them, I think the thing about Purdue is that their reputation as a company had not caught up with their practices in antibiotics. In other words, they had done all the stuff in antibiotics, and I think they felt no one was really paying attention. and I think that they've realized that most people associate Purdue with industrial agriculture and therefore have a bit of a lack of trust for them. And so I would say for about the past two or three years, they've been pretty open with journalists. And so for me, it was as easy as, you know, emailing their publicity person and saying, hey, I want to do a story. And they basically arranged for me to, you know, with Bruce Stewart Brown as their top vet and sort of the head of their animal production wing.

With him, I got to take a tour of a factory farm. Now, I should say that, you know, obviously, they chose the farm, they chose the time. It wasn't like I kind of randomly walked into one. But I was able to go into a farm with 20,000 chickens. And I also went in, very memorably to me, I went into a hatchery where I saw the sort of industrial production of baby chicks, which is a very interesting experience. And yeah, I mean, I certainly had never been invited into anything like that before. Well, Tom, I'm curious to ask you this next question. But it involves me making an assumption about you. I've read a lot of your writing on agriculture, and I'm going to assume that you are less likely than the average eater in the United States to go to the grocery store and buy a Purdue chicken, a mass produced industrial chicken. And I'm wondering if

what you saw makes you more likely to go and buy and eat that chicken. Well, you know, I mean, in my personal habits, I am pretty picky. And certainly the way that I spent the last 10 years digging into this stuff has only made that more so. And you're exactly right. I'm not the kind of person who goes to a grocery store and plucks meat off the shelf randomly. chicken. But here's what I would say. I would say that if I was in a situation where I really wanted some chicken and I didn't have access to a farmer's market or I was feeling tight on money, you know, for whatever reason, my only choices were sort of industrial conventional chicken. I would choose Purdue over any of its competitors. And I would probably eat it where, you know, I would be hard pressed to eat most industrial chicken. Yeah, if that answers

your question. I think I think that is a, you know, a helpful answer to the question. And I mean, just suggest that that you were, I don't know, cheered or refreshed at what you saw compared to what you expected you might see when you toured those facilities. Tom, I want to go back to the, I guess, the science of resistance really quickly. Something I really wanted to ask you, something I learned from your piece is that if I read your piece right, there are situations where, you know, because of the use of these antibiotics in livestock production, you can get, you know, an of the use of these antibiotics in livestock production, you can get, you know, an E. coli strain that becomes resistant to those antibiotics.

But that, if I read your piece right, that E. coli can then transfer the resistance to some salmonella that wasn't directly being treated by those antibiotics. And I'm just wondering if you can explain if, well, I guess, do I have that right? And if so, how does that happen? Yes, you do have that right. And I've got to say that my science is probably, it's the part that I have to work hardest on understanding and writing about, because I don't have a big background in science. But what i learned from reporting the piece is that um bacteria are very good at swapping genes they are like a dog and a person can be in the same room we're not going to swap genes um but you get two bacteria together and they're very prolific and prodigious in just moving genes back and forth. And so if a Salmonella strain gets exposed to antibiotics and develops resistance and then

moves away somehow and gets mixed up with the nucleolus strain, then that resistant gene can be swapped and brought over. And so suddenly you've got, you know, two resistant bacteria for the price of one. And that is one of the things that freaks scientists, that's one of the things about this animal farming stuff that freaks scientists out the most. And they, your question may be building to this, that they found in China. So in China, they use a very powerful antibiotic called calistin in meat production.

And the thing about that, even in here in the U S where we have these pretty liberal laws about what antibiotics you can use in meat production. And the thing about that, even here in the U.S. where we have these pretty liberal laws about what antibiotics you can use in meat production, colicin is not allowed. And the reason it's not allowed is that it's emerged as a last resort antibiotic for a lot of pathogens that affect people. It's a very old antibiotic. It was basically phased out because it has really harsh side effects. And it's been in the past decade or so revived because there are times when it's the only thing that will kill whatever bacteria it is that's making people sick. And so it's a nurse is just incredibly important last resort antibiotic. And it's widely used in China in meat production and also in

seafood production in farmed fish. And researchers in China last year found colostrum-resistant E. coli strain. And what freaked them out so much was that the gene was in this part of the DNA that is really easily swapped. It's called plasmids. And it created this kind of global freakout in the sort of public health sector. And since then, it's found in Europe, found in South America, and just about a week and a half ago, it was found in a woman in the United States. She had not traveled in the six weeks before her test, meaning that she didn't pick it up from somewhere else. And so the idea is that once you create an antibiotic-resistant strain and it gets out into the world, and we can talk about how these strains get off of the farm

and into the community. Once you do that, there's really no limit to how it can spread, how it can move around the globe, and how it can jump from one bacteria species to another. And, you know, that's one of the points of my story is that this problem started in the United States. You know, we sort of innovated this practice. It went global. And now we're finally starting to rein it in a little bit. We're finally starting to sort of move the ship away from it. But it's still very widely used around the world. And it's become this sort of global problem that is a little bit like climate change. It isn't enough for one country to cut back on carbon emissions. And we're kind of like that now, where it doesn't really matter that much what the U.S. does if

other countries are continuing the practice. So we need a global, you know, because of this, So we need a global, you know, because of this, the way that antibiotic resistant genes swap around among bacteria and move around the globe, we certainly need a global pact on that antibiotic-resistant bugs are ending up on meat on store shelves. And I think you say we're just one sloppy cutting board wipe-up away from people getting infected with this stuff and not being able to treat them. Right, and that actually happens. right and that actually happens um that that kind of happens all the time that you get uh in the past four or five years we've had antibiotic resistant salmonella outbreaks that have come from from meat we've had antibiotic resistant eco outbreaks that have come from meat and you know it's like uh when this what that's going on you almost have to see your meat as a sort of biohazardous substance. You know, you can't just slice up some chicken.

And everyone knows this, but you slice up some chicken, you get a phone call, get distracted, you come back to that knife, cut up some salad, and you could be exposing yourself or your family to a bacteria that can't be treated. And, you know, the other thing is when resistance happens, it doesn't just destroy antibiotics as a antidote to food poisoning. It also destroys antibiotics as an antidote to anything. And we're already seeing that.

You know, there's a, I didn't write about it in this piece, but it's worth thinking about that urinary tract infections in the United States are very, very common. And there's a lot of research showing that genetically the, uh, the E.coli that triggers them is identical to the E.coli that you find in poultry houses, like in facilities. And a growing proportion of it is antibiotic resistant. Um, and so, you know, then you can get really nasty, you know, stuff like that has nothing to do with food poisoning, you know then you can get really nasty you know stuff like that has nothing to do with

food poisoning you know associate it with the chicken you had last night but we're starting to see infections like that crop up that don't seem like food poisoning well okay so my last main question for you tom was going to be i kind of have a feeling I have the answer, but I've been reading articles about the coming threat of antibiotic resistance for a number of years now. And I have to admit that as the average reader, sometimes it can seem like the risks are overblown because I keep reading articles about antibiotic resistant Armageddon. And of course, it hasn't happened yet. I just want to get your sense, because I know you focus a lot on this. Is this a major, major problem that's coming at us? Like, how big, how big, like, what are we facing coming up?

I think it's a huge problem. Because the thing about it is that we sort of take for granted antibiotics, I think. And they're really kind of the basis of modern medicine. Like if you get into a car accident or something like childbirth that gets complicated, these things are completely reliant on antibiotics. And when you're in those situations, the sort of extreme situation, your immune system goes down and the medical system completely relies on these things to keep sort of infections at bay. And if you were to take those off the table, if, you know, bacteria become so universally resistant to these things that they're no longer effective, then things we take for granted, like I know that if I get into a car accident,

I'm not going to, you know, I'm going to have all sorts of problems, but one of my problems is not going to be I'm going to go into sepsis from some infection because they have, you know, basically flooded me with antibiotics to stop that from happening. If that tool is taken off the table, it's just going to change everything. You know, basically things that we take for granted as not being deadly are going to become deadly again. And, you know, we are, if you talk to public health people, they're terrified that we are entering this antibiotic, you know, this sort of post-antibiotic age, which, you know, brings us

back to, you know, 1910, you know, when simple infections were deadly, which they're just not anymore. Tom Philpott, that was a really interesting conversation. I thank you so much for your time. And I hope listeners will go to Mother Jones and check out your other writing, of which there are reams, as well as this article, How Factory Farms Play Chicken with Antibiotics, and your podcast called Bite, which I've been enjoying myself. So thanks very much. And your podcast called Bite, which I've been enjoying myself.

So thanks very much. And let me just put a plug in for my other podcast, which is called The Secret Ingredient, which you can also find on iTunes and Stitcher and whatnot. And that is with my colleagues Raj Patel and Rebecca McEnroy. So I've got two podcasts. I didn't even know about that one. So I'll be checking that out when i get back out in the garden this afternoon uh thanks very much all right well thanks a lot for having me on

okay folks there you go i hope you enjoyed that and a quick note i'm going to take next week off as far as publishing a an episode goes so you can expect to hear another episode of the rumen in about two weeks and i will talk to you then happy farming and gardening take care we're no closer we never have laundry we'll own nothing to this world of thieves live life like it was meant to be i don't fret honey i've got a plan to make our final escape All we'll need is each other a hundred dollars And maybe a roll of duct tape And we'll run right outside of the city's reaches We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches

We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands i've been doing a lot of thinking some real soul searching and here's my final resolve i don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong.

So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be. And live life like it was meant to be. I was recording there. Sorry. So there you go, folks. I hope you enjoyed that. uh a quick note hey stop laughing please can i just get 40 seconds of silence oh there's your bare bum