By Martha Rosenberg

It is "Get Smart About Antibiotics Week" and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is meeting with a coalition of 25 health organizations to address overuse of antibiotics. Excessive use of antibiotics in health care settings and especially in livestock on the nation's farms, creates "superbugs" which no longer succumb to the antibiotics which once killed them.

Anyone who has rented an apartment which has both an exterminator and bugs  has firsthand experience with the principle of antibiotic resistance. Organisms can become impervious to what is supposed to kill them and can even become bigger and stronger. (Mosquitoes also become resistant to insecticides--and, as the joke goes, when you slap them, they slap you back.) In fact, antibiotic resistance might be the ultimate biological demonstration of the maxim “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Antibiotics are overused by hospitals, clinics, schools, public facilities, and households, and are unnecessarily put in dish and laundry detergent, soap, and even toothpaste by the chemical industry. In fact, antibiotics are overused and misused anytime they’re used preventatively, for potential infections instead of for existing bacterial infections. Doctors and patients who “treat” colds and viruses with antibiotics also encourage antibiotic resistance because these conditions are not caused by bacteria. And people who stop taking antibiotics (when conditions are bacterial) before the medication is gone because they feel better also contribute to antibiotic resistance. The few bacteria that survive the antibiotic “bath” are stronger for the challenge and go on to cause more trouble, as in, “That which doesn’t kill you . . .”

Nor are Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections (MRSA) which kill 20,000 people a year, confined to the hospital or hog farms anymore. Researchers at the 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting reported that MRSA is plentiful on Florida swimming beaches, though they did not speculate on the sources of MRSA of which raw sewage could be one. Public health officials also worry about vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) infections, linked to livestock antibiotics like avoparcin, which Europe banned in the 1990s. Avoparcin is not used in the United States, but VRE germs have still been identified in 33 states and in commercial chicken feed, reported the Hartford Advocate a few years ago. Few people fully recover from VRE infections, said the Advocate, since “once a patient is colonized with VRE and survives he is colonized for life.”

Most health professionals agree that the use of antibiotics in livestock operations is the biggest source of resistance. The pills are used to make animals grow faster and keep infections from erupting in the crowded, "factory" conditions and they do not appear on food labels.

One of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (D-MA) last legislative fights was about the overuse of livestock antibiotics. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA) “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy.

Over 70 percent of antibiotics go to livestock, not to people, says the PAMTA bill and they are the same drugs needed for urinary tract, intestinal, respiratory, ear, and skin infections in humans. They are also crucial drugs in treating tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases. Is the cheap meat made possible by using antibiotics really worth it, many are now asking.