by Emma Hierholzer ‘15

We all know you take antibiotics when you get sick in order to fight a bacterial infection; but do we all know that a person takes antibiotics when eating most meat products? That’s right – family favorites like your grocery store rotisserie chicken, chicken nuggets and juicy steaks all hold antibiotics.

Take major companies like Perdue and Tyson; they both want to raise the biggest chickens on the market. To achieve this goal, they need to make sure that their chickens stay healthy and strong; a feat most possible with the help of the medical world’s very own superpower – the antibiotic.

When put into the chicken’s feed, the chickens remain guarded from common bacterium, which in turn causes less illness and death. Antibiotics also help promote better growth and development among the animals. Antibiotic usage in agriculture is so common that in 2011, 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the states were used in the farming of poultry and meat.

But with all these antibiotics in animal meats, the sinister problem of antibiotic resistance, an issue that has once again been put in the spotlight after recent FDA regulations, remains a growing worry among scientists and consumers alike. Their concern is the possibility that although animals are fed antibiotics to keep them healthy and strong, they are also exposed to a dangerous cycle.

Once an animal is given a certain antibiotic over a period of time, the animal will develop antibiotic resistance.  As the infection mutates, the bacteria living in the animal becomes resilient to the effects of antibiotics, making it increasingly difficult to treat.

Unfortunately, this problem in turn affects consumers when they ingest undercooked meat products and become ill. There’s no guarantee that a person would respond to antibiotic treatment if he/she should become ill from the meat. The bacteria infection could have developed a resistance to the available antibiotic, making it extremely difficult to heal and possibly detrimental to a person’s health. Even more threatening on a global scale is the transfer of these antibiotic resistant bacteria into the environment. As livestock feces carrying resistant bacteria travels into sewers, streams and other areas in which human populations live, the chance of contracting a potentially deadly infection increases dramatically.

In an effort to curtail this problem, the FDA has enforced two new policies. One requires licensed veterinarians to approve human antibiotics before putting them in animal feed and the other asks the companies who manufacture the antibiotic medicines to voluntarily revise their labels so that farmers will no longer be able to use the drugs to simply increase livestock size.

With these new regulations and rising consumer awareness on the issue, the problem of antibiotics in everyday meat products can be on its way to becoming avoidable. Buying organic meats with no antibiotics is another option for  those who want to completely steer clear of any possible exposures to risky antibiotic resistant infections.