Pharming animals: a global history of antibiotics in food production (1935–2017)

Abstract

Since their advent during the 1930s, antibiotics have not only had a dramatic impact on human medicine, but also on food production. On farms, whaling and fishing fleets as well as in processing plants and aquaculture operations, antibiotics were used to treat and prevent disease, increase feed conversion, and preserve food. Their rapid diffusion into nearly all areas of food production and processing was initially viewed as a story of progress on both sides of the Iron Curtain. However, from the mid-1950s onwards, agricultural antibiotic use also triggered increasing conflicts about drug residues and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Significantly, antibiotic concerns did not develop evenly but instead gave rise to an international patchwork of different regulatory approaches. During a time of growing concerns about AMR and a post-antibiotic age, this article reconstructs the origins, global proliferation, and international regulation of agricultural antibiotics. It argues that policymakers need to remember the long history of regulatory failures that has resulted in current antibiotic infrastructures. For effective international stewardship to develop, it is necessary to address the economic dependencies, deep-rooted notions of development, and fragmented cultural understandings of risk, which all contribute to drive global antibiotic consumption and AMR.

Use of Antibiotics in Animal Production and its Impact on Human Health

“…It is important to notice that there is a variation of risk perceptions both between nations and between different social groups has been studied and it is strongly impacted antibiotic use and policymaking [21,22], in which, some countries decided to target antibiotic residues in food and milk, others decided to tackle agricultural antimicrobial resistance selection, and others decided to do nothing at all [23].…”

Living Waste and the Labor of Toxic Health on American Factory Farms

“…Some 80% of all antibiotics sold in the United States in 2013 were intended for non‐human animals (Maron et al. ), much of them functioning in practice as growth promotants administered via oral doses in feed to help animals quickly and consistently add weight despite tightly‐packed living conditions (Finlay ; Kirchhelle ). In turn, these researchers believe larger particulate grades of living dust (>10 μm) are settling adjacent to animal facilities while smaller PM10 dust is being deposited into nearby fields, streams, and homes at least 3.5 km away, potentially transforming regional microbial ecologies through horizontal gene transfer.…”

“…Yet, as Landecker (N.d.)argues in a forthcoming historical analysis of the industrialization of animal metabolism and microbial biochemistry, along with the early medicated feed sciences that led to the inclusion of antibiotics in pigs’ diets, much knowledge and capital has been directed between these poles of life and death. The manipulation of feed consumption and conversion rates using additives to corn or soy—including antibiotics, but also comprised of an array of vitamins, arsenicals, amino acids like lysine, enzymes, trace metals, minerals, or taste enhancing substances—is part of what made animal confinement possible in the first place (see also Finlay ; Kirchhelle ).…”

Antimicrobial resistance: preventive approaches to the rescue? Professional expertise and business model of French “industrial” veterinarians

“…Although veterinarians have aroused the interest of certain historians and sociologists of professions, this has essentially been in relation to the analysis of this social group's process of professionalization (Berdah 2012;Mitsuba 2017), its role in animal health or food safety policies (Woods 2011b;Enticott et al 2011;Fortané 2016, 2018), the dynamics that contribute to its specialization (Gardiner 2014) or feminization (Surdez 2009), or finally to knowledge and professional practices in farm (Shortall et al 2016;Ruston et al 2016) and small animal medicine (Sanders 1994;Morris 2012). As for the regulation of veterinary drugs, there are also several studies by historians on the vaccination of animals against major zoonoses or epizootic diseases (Woods 2004;Berdah 2018), sometimes on the veterinary pharmaceutical industry (Corley and Godley 2011), and more recently on the AMR issue (Kirchhelle 2018). Yet unlike the uses of human medicines that medical anthropology has been able to theorize and document for many years (Whyte et al 2002), the uses of veterinary medicines, i.e.…”

“…Yet for several decades, this issue has been eclipsed by the belief in a permanent renewal of the therapeutic arsenal, consisting in thinking that the continuous discovery of new antibiotics would compensate for the development of increasingly resistant bacteria (Podolsky 2018). After the Swann report in 1969, a series of measures to control the use of antibiotics as growth promoters 1 was nevertheless adopted in Europe, progressively separating the molecules used in agriculture and human medicine (Kirchhelle 2018). But 20 years later, during the avoparcin crisis 2,3,4,5 these measures were considered ineffective (in the sense that they did not prevent the transmission of resistant bacteria between humans and animals) and the use of antibiotics as growth promoters was finally banned in the European Union in 2003 6 (Kahn 2016).…”