The problem of antibiotic abuse in farming and livestock breeding must be taken seriously

      "Antibiotic-laden food" raises the alarm at the dinner table. Not long ago, the Yangcheng Evening News published a front-page headline report titled "Wow! This baby is resistant to all seven antibiotics": a premature infant was found to be resistant to seven antibiotics including cephalosporin, Tienam, Maxipime and Fuxingda. According to another report, a survey by the Guangzhou Maternal and Child Health Hospital showed that among more than a dozen antibiotic sensitivity tests conducted on newborns with infections, 70% of the babies showed resistance to at least one and sometimes several antibiotics, and both the number of resistant cases and the degree of resistance had increased markedly compared with the past, so much so that in the past two years some hospital neonatology doctors have come to regard this as "nothing new". Experts point out that antibiotic resistance in newborns may be related to expectant mothers abusing antibiotics during pregnancy or before conception, and may also be related to their emphasis on prenatal nutritional supplements, as the eggs they eat daily and the chicken soup, pig trotter soup and milk they drink may contain antibiotic residues.

        Antibiotic abuse in farming and livestock breeding. In the mid-20th century, the discovery of antibiotics and the successful synthesis of chemical antibacterial substances were first put into use among humans, and were subsequently widely used as feed additives, playing an important role in animal health and livestock production. As preventive medication, their main effect is to weaken harmful microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract, inhibit and kill pathogenic bacteria, enhance disease resistance and prevent livestock and poultry epidemics; to thin the intestinal wall of animals, which facilitates the penetration and absorption of nutrients and improves feed utilization; to increase appetite, while stimulating the pituitary gland of animals to secrete hormones, promoting body growth and development, thereby accelerating the rate of weight gain. Because of the various "benefits" of additives such as antibiotics and hormones, they became indispensable "treasures" for many livestock farmers, and some breeders, in pursuit of maximizing economic returns, added human-use antibiotics to feed to varying degrees. Relevant data show that as long as an animal is raised by humans, the vast majority of animals may be fed antibiotics, including not only livestock such as pigs, cattle and sheep and poultry such as chickens, ducks and geese, but also aquatic products such as fish, shrimp and crabs.

        According to 2001 World Health Organization statistics, of the total amount of antibiotics consumed globally each year, 90% is used for food-producing animals, with about 12,000 tons and 900 tons of antibiotics used each year as feed additives and therapeutic drugs for food-producing animals respectively. In the treatment of animal diseases, antibiotic abuse is widespread; many animal farms, as soon as they find an animal sick, first use antibiotics, and if one antibiotic does not work, they immediately switch to another, often using antibiotics at super-large doses. When antibiotics are used as feed additives, the amount used is even greater; China uses 6,000 tons of antibiotics as feed additives each year, accounting for 50% of the global use of antibiotic feed additives. Antibiotic residues harm human health. One of the serious consequences of non-standard use of antibiotics is causing bacterial resistance, and the speed of resistance is far faster than the speed of new drug development; if this continues, we will fall into a situation of "no antibiotics available", and humanity will once again face the threat of many infectious diseases. Therefore, from July 1, 2004, the state stipulated that antibiotics must be purchased by prescription, and the State Food and Drug Administration has also issued a notice on carrying out publicity activities for the rational use of antibacterial drugs, calling on the public not to buy antibacterial drugs on their own and to use antibiotics rationally under the guidance of doctors.

    "At present, the problem of human antibiotic abuse has been brought under a certain degree of control, but the massive use of antibiotics in animals has become a blind spot in monitoring, and its harm to human health cannot be underestimated." During the National "Two Sessions" held in March this year, Sun Chengyi, a deputy to the National People's Congress and vice president of the Affiliated Hospital of Guiyang Medical College, said that the problem of widespread large-scale use of antibiotics by illegal manufacturers or small-scale farmers in China's breeding industry, thereby harming human health, should attract great attention from all sectors.

         A relevant person from the National Feed Quality Supervision and Inspection Center also pointed out that the long-term large-scale use of antibiotic additives in farmed animals will lead to increasingly poor disease resistance in animals and increasingly strong bacterial resistance, making it necessary to increase drug doses when treating sick livestock and poultry, and as a result, antibiotic residues also become more numerous and more concentrated.

      Under this vicious cycle, "antibiotic-laden food" turns into a "hidden killer" of national health through the dinner table, and the human body also becomes a "receptacle" for antibiotic residues, with resistance continuously increasing. In addition, long-term consumption of this kind of "antibiotic-laden food" may allow some zoonotic pathogenic microorganisms or obviously mutated pathogenic microorganisms to be transmitted directly to humans. In this way, those microorganisms that originally posed no threat to humans can also infect and cause disease in people, and if they cause human-to-human epidemics, it would be even more terrifying.