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Think further than tomorrow’s profit

“If we accept the word forever
Maybe we should live together
And not be scared to watch
The late night news …
Give… give me the good news,” sang Crocodile Harris in the early 1980s. (Watch him sing – check the lekker 80s hairstyle! The song became a hit internationally in 1984 and he went off to Paris and shared a stage with Al Jarreau and Bonnie Tyler; bet you didn’t know that).

I am so sick of bad news. I feel like we’ve had an overdose this year. (And now we have to watch as Hollande bombs Raqqah and Putin prepares, we are told, to send in ground forces – the direct opposite of Harris’ message. As if doing it the same way we’ve always done is a Good Idea. Give me strength.)

Yet here comes one more piece of bad news, settling on my laptop screen like a vision of hell: Resistance to last-resort antibiotic has now spread across the globe (New Scientist, December 7 2015):

Bacteria carrying a gene that allows them to resist polymyxins, the antibiotics of last resort for some kinds of infection, have been found in Denmark and China, prompting a global search for the gene.

The discovery means that gram-negative bacteria, which cause common gut, urinary and blood infections in humans, can now become “pan-resistant”, with genes that defeat all antibiotics now available. That will make some infections incurable, unless new kinds of antibiotics are brought to market soon.

Colistin, the most common polymyxin, is a last-resort treatment for infections with bacteria such as E coli and Klebsiella that resist all other available antibiotics.

More than 700 000 people are killed annually by resistant infections, a figure that looks likely to rise as ‘pan-resistance’ spreads.

For decades, farmers across the world have cashed in on something they discovered when they legitimately treated livestock for infections, using the drug miracle of the mid-twentieth century, antibiotics: when you give animals antibiotics, they get fatter.

They are able to use feed more efficiently, to use the industry’s style of language. By the late 20th century, something like 80% of the antibiotics sold in the USA were used in the livestock industry.

Resistance rolls ups

And then we started encountering resistance. Denmark, ironically, was not as slow as other countries in tackling the issue – it put in place a voluntary ban in 1998, which became mandatory two years later (although Sweden first did this in 1986 – those Scandinavians, huh, always so greenie).

The development of resistance is hardly surprising, given that 72% of the drugs given to animals for this growth enhancement purpose are medically important to humans – and given the huge quantities. China uses 38.5 million kg a year on its pigs and poultry. *Faint* That’s a figure from 2012, so it’s probably more now.

Antibiotics are so precious. Earlier this year, when the wound from an operation became infected, they saved me from a really nasty and lengthy medical disaster. All of us probably know people whose lives have been saved by these drugs. But oh, we humans are good at this act-first-think-later thing: so antibiotics make beef cattle fat, huh? Hey, how many can I stuff down this steer’s throat at one time?

This ‘it’s a good thing, so how can more of it be bad’ school of thinking was something I learnt about early on as a health writer. It never occurred to me that information I gave in articles about vitamins would be used in the way it was, until one day, I had contact with a reader who had developed constant diarrhoea and was seeking some advice. I asked, as one does, what medicine and supplements she was taking.

Turned out that, after reading my piece on vitamin C, she’d decided to go big on the micronutrient and was overdosing enormously. The unintended consequence was the runny tummy…

We don’t box clever. We take a tool, like antibiotics, and we use it indiscriminately. (Yes, as you know, even in humans. I am told that four out of five middle ear infections in children do not need antibiotics, for instance.) Then we wail when it stops being effective or causes some unintended consequence.

It’s time to grow up as a species. We claim the title of Sapiens – wise human. Be wise, then. Stop chasing the almighty damn dollar at the expense of human health and the Goldilocks planet we have inherited, the one that is ‘just right’ for us and all its other current inhabitants. Start valuing things differently. If we’d placed the appropriate value on antibiotics, they would have been sold to the livestock industry at an uneconomic price, a price that recognised their value to human health.

Adopt the precautionary principle.

Do you really have to strip-mine here and take out a whole ecosystem? Should you really dump tons of pesticide on this crop, or are there other ways to achieve that goal? Is ploughing up the field and leaving the soil bare half the year really the best way of doing it? Maybe you think it’s not going to matter now, but it could make a profound difference later, it could impoverish us in ten or 20 years. Change your time horizon. Think 20 years a generation, not just tomorrow’s profit.

If we don’t learn to do that, we will pay. As drug-resistant patients are doing already.

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.

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