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Addressing consumer demands for socially responsible pork
production
Pork Industry Coalition Letter to CBS
News President
After
the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric ran a piece on antibiotics in
livestock, several agricultural groups, including the National Pork
Board, submitted a letter to the president of CBS News regarding the
inaccuracies. Below is that letter.
Dear Mr. McManus:
We were extremely disappointed with CBS's recent Evening
News story on antibiotic use in the livestock industry. The story
lacked any attempt at balance and largely accepted the arguments of
opponents of conventional agriculture that drugs are overused in
livestock and are a major cause of antibiotic resistance.
In fact, antibiotics are given to livestock strategically,
when animals are sick, susceptible or exposed to illness. Modern
livestock production facilities provide animals with an environment
designed to keep them safe, healthy and comfortable. Also, there's no
proof that antibiotic use on farms significantly increases resistant
bacteria in humans. Since antibiotics have been used in livestock for
half a century, if there was going to be an epidemic of resistance
related to antibiotic use in agriculture, it would have occurred by
now. The fact that it has not means that antibiotic use in animals is
not a major risk to human health.
CBS glossed over the impact of over prescription in human
medicine and instead focused on Denmark's ban on antibiotic
"growth promoters" in hogs. Supporters of that ban used data
very selectively to suggest antibiotic use has declined under the ban,
and CBS's producers used that "fact" despite being given the
raw data that showed the contrary. Also left out of the report were the
views of a U.S. House delegation that visited Denmark recently to learn
first-hand how successful the Danish ban has been. For the record:
After Denmark put its ban in place, previously controlled swine
diseases reemerged, pig deaths went up, therapeutic antibiotics used in
pigs by veterinarians increased and pork production costs rose-all with
no measurable positive effects on human health.
Also false was CBS's statement that "no one is really
monitoring" antibiotic resistance in livestock. That statement
ignores the existence of the National Antimicrobial Resistance
Monitoring System, or NARMS, conducted jointly by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and
the Department of Agriculture. NARMS data show that resistance in
animal products has been either steady or declining in recent years.
CBS's linking of antibiotic use in pigs to the human
threat of MRSA-Methicillin Resistant Staph aureus-was particularly
irresponsible and could alarm viewers needlessly. For starters, CBS
failed to distinguish between the different categories of MRSA, some of
which can cause very serious illness and death and are most often found
in health care facilities. There is no data suggesting that antibiotic
use in pigs is responsible for the more virulent form of MRSA. The form
discovered on pig farms is much less serious than the
hospital-acquired-and even the community-acquired-human forms of MRSA.
It does not cause illness in pigs and antibiotics are not used to treat
it. Further, this strain of MRSA has not been found in human disease
surveillance by either the CDC or the University of Iowa hospitals.
Also, there is no indication that pork farmers have a higher rate of
MRSA-associated illness than the general population, and the CDC has
concluded that the vast majority of community-related MRSA infections
result from person-to-person contact. None of these points was made by
CBS, which chose instead to interview two pork farm workers who blame
antibiotic use in pigs for contracting MRSA. Since the strain of MRSA
associated with livestock, called strain 398, has not been found in
human disease surveillance, it is likely that these individuals
contracted MRSA from contact with people, not pigs.
CBS made much of a study of farms in Iowa and Illinois,
claiming that it found no MRSA infections on farms that did not use
antibiotics. The full story is much more complicated. As Scott Hurd,
former deputy undersecretary for food safety at the USDA and now
professor at Iowa State University, explains: "First, this was a
very small pilot study, which sampled fewer than 300 pigs. In it, only
six farms used antibiotic-free production methods. The implication that
this type of production is always free of MRSA is not true as there
have been organic farms in other countries that have been found to be
100 percent positive for MRSA. On the other hand, in this Iowa study,
some of the conventional farms that did use antibiotics were 100
percent free of MRSA. Secondly, there were two studies by the
University of Iowa on MRSA in swine. The study that went unreported by
CBS found conventional farms with MRSA rates in pigs of 23 percent, not
70 percent."
Also disturbing was your use of the pejorative terms
"factory farming" and "industrial farming." These
are anti-agriculture activist terms, and for CBS to embrace them gives
them credibility they do not deserve. Modern farms are bio-secure to protect
against disease and provide climate controlled environments. It's easy
to select images of pens of animals without giving the context for why
those animals are inside and in pens. Iowa in the winter can be a very
cold place. Would Ms. Couric have preferred to see these animals
standing unprotected in open fields?
There were numerous additional errors in the story that we
don't have space to correct in this letter. We encourage you, however,
to read a critique by Dr. Hurd. It is available at http://vetmed.iastate.edu/news/isu-associate-professor-and-former-usda-deputy-undersecretary-food-safety-responds-cbs-news-seg.
Conventional farmers would welcome a constructive
discussion of all their production practices, including the use of
antibiotics in livestock. But that requires a commitment to facts that
the CBS story clearly lacked. It was sad to see that CBS could be so
reckless and one-sided, and disappointing to find that it would take
such a simplistic look at such a complex issue. As anti-meat and
anti-agriculture advocates continue to push for legislation limiting
the use of antibiotics in food animals, CBS may have the opportunity to
revisit this subject. We hope future coverage will be more balanced.
Sincerely,
American Association of Bovine Practitioners
American Association of Swine Veterinarians
American Farm Bureau Federation
American Feed Industry Association
American Meat Institute
Association of Veterinary Biologics Companies
Association of Veterinarians in Turkey Production
Livestock Marketing Association
National Aquaculture Association
National Chicken Council
National Pork Board
National Pork Producers Council
National Institute for Animal Agriculture
National Renderers Association
National Turkey Federation
For more information, contact Mike Wegner, MWegner@pork.org, 515-223-2638.
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