What's interesting is that a big driver for this is social media. I was at a conference once & the CEO of Perdue listed this as a top driver behind this movement. He justified it this way: imagine that it costs an extra $0.01 per pound to create chicken meat that is antibiotic free. If the profit margin was $0.05 per pound that would cut profits by 20%. Today, negative PR on Facebook or Twitter can quickly spread to erode the value of a brand far more than $0.01 per pound of cost savings. He said that the reason for the switch is driven by consumers, who are now empowered by social media.
From a nutrition tech standpoint there are a number of products including probiotics, beta glucans & others that help to protect the birds by boosting immune system activity rather than by killing bacteria. When used in combination with vaccines they can be very effective, albeit slightly more expensive. However, these ingredients add cost & come at a metabolic cost to the animal (i.e. it takes more food to produce 1 pound of meat if more of that energy is directed towards a functioning immune system & away from weight gain).
Animal nutrition science is in many ways more advanced than human nutrition due to the ability to conduct controlled studies and access to large amounts of data. However, the goals are very different.
Animals account for ~80% of antibiotic usage in the U.S. and MRSA now kills more people in the U.S. than HIV. It's an interesting topic.
So antibiotics in animal feed aren't usually for protection from infection. They promote growth and bulk via mechanisms that aren't really well understood and were discovered somewhat by accident when someone started feeding waste from antibiotic production to chickens.
Absolutely, using them on a massive scale in sub therapeutic doses is what you would do if you wanted to create an evolutionary pressure towards antibiotic resistant bacteria. I thought that would be clear to anyone who read my comment.
Obviously more study on exactly what creates the medically relevant resistant bacteria is needed but based on the trend so far I don't think the prudent thing to do is start curtailing non essential anti-biotic use.
I don't see a peer reviewed study but it does appear to be the FDAs position :
"Bacteria evolve to survive threats to their existence. In both humans and animals, even appropriate therapeutic uses of antibiotics can promote the development of drug resistant bacteria. When such bacteria enter the food supply, they can be transferred to the people who eat food from the treated animal."
I suggest reading the article to really understand what they are saying rather than dissecting the little tidbit I picked out but it sounds as if it doesn't matter if the exact same drug is used to treat both humans and animals, there is still a threat.
NPR's story yesterday indicated that Perdue had previously been including gentamycin along with vaccinations of chicken eggs, which appears to be used in humans.
Interesting! Do you know how they value the negative PR cost? My understanding is that "brand value" is notoriously hard to measure, which made me think it would be difficult to include in the type of cost/benefit comparison you refer to (the $.05 vs $.01 per pound cost).
There are some interesting techniques. Off the top of my head there is the shopping basket experiement:
Show shopping lists to the participants. Both lists are equal except one product, the one you want to measure. Ask participant what they can tell you about whoever created the list.
Example: two similar lists, one with standard coffee and one with instant coffee. Result: They found that instant coffee was associated with "lazy" etc (they hoped for "smart" and subsequently adjusted their branding to achieve this.)
(I guess it's just a special case of A/B test)
Edit:
I read about this in school many years ago but at least here's one source:
Regarding the social media outrage, it sounds like a mized blessing. They might convince the megafarms to stop using dihydrogen monoxide on their crops after they hear that it causes tsunamis.
farming at an industrial scale would upset many people, even for practices that are wholly legal. There are every day occurrences in this industry the public would not want to know and might even tune it out when presented because of the adverse reaction it would cause.
the best example is breeding chickens for egg laying, males are not wanted.
I can't find this from a reputable source, but a FB friend shared a Buzzfeed story about the advancement in egg selection. Apparently Unilever has developed a technique to sex the eggs before they hatch and therefore can prevent the males from being born. As you may know, males are killed on day 1 since they serve no financial benefit to chicken farmers. Therefore, they can stop the practice of sending the male chickens to the macerator.
Hey there, I'm intimately familiar with the poultry industry in all aspects. What you're referencing is for egg-utilizing companies, like unilever, who need eggs in their products (ice creams, etc.). Unilever is requiring their egg producers to adopt new technologies to detect male chicks in the eggs and prevent them from hatching, leading to only the female chicks growing into hens, which lay the desired eggs.
The chicken-producing industry (very different from the egg producing industry) does use males. They're differentiated for some products (Perdue's Oven Stuffer Roasters, for example), but 95% of all producers in the country now run "Straight-run" operations, meaning they dont differentiate between male and female birds (no sexing the chicks and separating them). Originally this was a problem, conforming your machines to process two different sized birds (a double-bell-curve, so to speak), but streamlining the selective breeding over the years has brought the females and males together as far as feed conversions and weight gains go.
Always happy to shed light on the poultry industry and it's many quirks :)
The Russian situation is recent, due to the Ukranian conflict. The more general observation that there are different preferences in poultry consumption globally, resulting in, literally, one bird being split and sent to opposite ends of the Earth, is what I was emphasizing.
Not knocking you in any way here, just adding my own two bits. Appreciate your insider's view, really.
Interesting to hear about the industry side. We have 20 chickens we keep as a hobby - a mix of hybrids and pedigrees. We can't tell the sex of some of these until they're weeks old, let alone at the egg stage.
Typical commercial sexing methodology is by holding the wings of the chicks out and looking a the feathers on the wing-tips. There are two sets of feathers there; if the feathers are of equal length, the chick is male. If one set of feathers extends further, the chick is female.
> All chicken is “antibiotic-free” in the sense that no antibiotic residues are present in the meat due to the withdrawal periods and other precautions required by the government and observed by the chicken companies.
Yes, no antibiotics residues are present in the chicken, because of the long periods ... but nobody can guarantee, that the same is true for resistant bacteria ...
can i just say duh? how else do you get so many chicken mcnuggets and fried chicken? it's like reverse survival of the fittest, the ones that should die are saved. yay viruses!
How is this different than the nearly universal use of vaccines?
Before you compulsively knee-jerk and claim that I think vaccines are evil and cause autism, take a breath.
The most damming argument against vaccines is that the continual use of vaccines (i.e. forced antibody production) produces same set of evolutionary selectors that help create 'superbugs' that injected antibiotics are often derided for.
However this basic biological fact escapes most people that haven't taken Biology 102 and beyond (which is 99% of the population).
One of the goals of vaccination is to deprive pathogens of an environment faster than selection pressure allows the pathogen to evade the vaccine. That's how we drove smallpox to extinction in the wild.
Antibiotics are, by and large, reactive. Vaccines are, by and large, prophylactic.
I am the furthest thing from an expert in this field, but the herd immunity from vaccines provides an entirely different protection than a 'toolset' of working antibiotics.
My naive understanding is that if you have 100% vaccine coverage, it's simply way more unlikely that a virus or bacterium can catch a foothold of reproduction that would even make possible the mutations that result in resistance. And then you have viruses like influenza that are so widespread and elusive that they change annually. But we've gotten really good at responding to that rapid change as well.
Vaccines have actually caused the extinction of two specific pathogens in the wild though herd immunity. With several rappidly approaching that. Antibiotics are less effective leading to resistance.
Polio is down to 385 recorded cases in 2011 from 400,000 estimated and 52,552 recorded in 1980.
Community density and population migration is a large factor in vaccine effectiveness. What most vaccines provide is really herd immunity. That is a disease, if it spreads, will be limited to a select few who aren't able to vaccinate or have compromised immune systems, preventing an outbreak of wide proportions among an otherwise healthy population.
It's a bit more complex than the widespread and largely unnecessary antibiotic abuse happening in livestock farms. Unnecessary because more sanitary and efficient methods exist for raising them that obviate their need. Disease can be contained by quarantine and preventative measures which isn't possible among a migratory population like humans.
But isn't the main difference that a new vaccine can easily be created for any new strain of a bacteria or virus, whereas once something becomes resistant to an antibiotic then that antibiotic is now worthless to fight that infection, and antibiotics are extremely rare and difficult to create.
I wouldn't say either are "easy". A new vaccine for the flu every year is more like finding a new lock combo solution for the same lock (recombinant DNA).
Having to find a new antibiotic more like an entirely different door. Vaccines merely find a way to train our immune systems to tag the villain. Anti biotics have to actually find weaknesses and exploit a biochemical pathway that can be disrupted etc.
Antibiotics kill bacteria. Bacteria can evolve resistance.
Vaccines prevent infection. Viruses that are unable to infect new hosts are very likely to die off. They can mutate as well, but if enough people in a population are vaccinated, it's very unlikely for the virus to mutate in such a way as to avoid the mechanisms by which the vaccine works.
Viruses and bacteria are different things. Bacteria just need a food source, and they're good to go; you'll have enormous numbers of them as long as their food source can sustain them. Viruses need a host cell. Vaccines don't kill viruses, they prevent viruses from spreading.
I have never heard any scientist or public health official claim that use of vaccines will lead to super-viruses. That, I assume, is something made up by the vaccine deniers.
Don't working immune systems create the same selective pressure already?
If an infection kills me, I'm not around to pass the infection on anymore… at least, once my corpse has been dealt with. If I do survive and the same pathogen wants to infect me again, or keep the current infection going, it has to find a way to dodge my immune system.
Malaria hides in red blood cells. HIV hides in immune cells, plus it mutates like crazy. HSV and VZV also manage to take permanent residence. HCV usually does too, which is particularly nasty because it can take decades for symptoms to appear, and those symptoms are caused by gradual liver damage.
Given what happens when we have spotty natural immunity, being able to immunize most of a population in short order seems like an excellent thing.
From a nutrition tech standpoint there are a number of products including probiotics, beta glucans & others that help to protect the birds by boosting immune system activity rather than by killing bacteria. When used in combination with vaccines they can be very effective, albeit slightly more expensive. However, these ingredients add cost & come at a metabolic cost to the animal (i.e. it takes more food to produce 1 pound of meat if more of that energy is directed towards a functioning immune system & away from weight gain).
Animal nutrition science is in many ways more advanced than human nutrition due to the ability to conduct controlled studies and access to large amounts of data. However, the goals are very different.
Animals account for ~80% of antibiotic usage in the U.S. and MRSA now kills more people in the U.S. than HIV. It's an interesting topic.