Your Food, Your Legislature: The Personal Gets Political

One of the scariest phrases I've ever heard, and one I've tried to avoid thinking about, is "antibiotic resistant bacteria." It means that a bacteria has developed a genetic mutation that makes it resistant to an antibacterial agent like antibiotics. There are now antibiotic resistant forms of Staphilococcus aureus (also known as MRSA), E. Coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, influenza and others.

The World Health Organization (WHO) stated in a report released in 2014 that "this serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country. Antibiotic resistance—when bacteria change so antibiotics no longer work in people who need them to treat infections—is now a major threat to public health."

Why am I bringing this up in a post about the 2015 session of the Oregon legislature?

It turns out that a dear friend of mine recently died because he contracted a drug-resistant form of E. Coli while being treated for cancer.

That's very sad, you might think, but, again, what does that have to do with the legislature?

It turns out that there's a bill in the state Senate, SB920, that seeks to limit the use of antibiotics on otherwise healthy animals by Oregon's livestock industry. If national statistics are any indication, 70 percent of "medically important" antibiotics—i.e. those that are used to treat diseases in people—are used in the livestock industry on perfectly healthy animals.

The practice of administering regular doses of antibiotics in animals' water and feed developed because it was widely believed that antibiotics promoted the growth of the animals and because most of the animals we consume for food, including chickens, pigs and cattle, are raised in confinement in crowded, unsanitary and stressful conditions.

This graphic from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) might give a better idea of how feeding antibiotics to healthy animals has brought about the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria:

According to an article in the Salem Statesman-Journal, opponents of this bill say that regulation should be left up to the federal government. Unfortunately, in addressing this issue in 2012, the Food and Drug Administration only asked the industry to voluntarily refrain from using medically important antibiotics as a growth promoter while allowing the industry complete freedom to use these same drugs to "prevent" disease. Meaning it could continue its practice of using these drugs in the same way and at the same rate as before.

How has that tactic worked? In an article in Mother Jones magazine, reporter Tom Philpott quoted FDA statistics indicating that between 2012 and 2013 the use of medically important drugs on these factory farms actually grew by 3 percent.

So if this issue concerns you as much as it does me, you need to contact your state senator immediately to voice your opinion. Here are points you can mention:

• SB 920 requires that antibiotics used on livestock be used responsibly in order to prevent the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria, allowing farmers, as well as veterinarians, to use antibiotics to treat illness and infections in sick animals. 
• SB 920 prohibits giving farm animals low doses of antibiotics in feed and water for growth promotion and 'disease prevention' in perfectly healthy animals to mask unsanitary conditions in the facilities that animals are raised in.
• The bill requires the largest federally regulated concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Oregon to report annually on their use of antibiotics, which is key in tracking how much antibiotics these operations are using and whether their practices are contributing to the development and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
• New FDA rules and White House initiatives contain huge loopholes for factory farms to feed antibiotics to healthy animals under the guise of 'disease prevention.' SB 920 closes this loophole.
• Antibiotic resistant bacteria can be spread to humans through handling the meat, through airborne dust from manure, and through manure from factory farms leaching into waterways.

Read the other posts in the series: Opening Salvos, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, The Fight Takes Shape and Hanging in the Balance. Thanks to Friends of Family Farmers for the talking points mentioned above.

Top photo from FarmSanctuary.org.

Oregon's GMO Labeling Battle: One Week to Go

First of all: please vote.

Second? Vote, dammit!

Okay, now that we have that out of the way: My family voted last week, as we usually do, sitting around the dining room table after dinner with the voter's pamphlet and our ballots, pointing at the ridiculous pictures ("Look, a pirate's running for Representative. Awesome!"), decoding the screamy endorsements then dropping our ballots off at the local public library. So now I'm going to jump into the fray and tell you why I voted for Measure 92 to require labeling of products containing genetically modified ingredients.

Luckily we only watch television shows online, so aren't subjected to the overwhelming barrage of ads talking about how the earth is going to spin backwards on its axis and life as we know it will end if the measure does or does not pass. (Though the barrage of ads for pharmaceuticals, cars and cleaning products have nearly the same deadening effect.) And since I'm not going to out my family members here, I'll just talk about my own reasons.

My first reason is, of course, a selfish one. I want to know what goes into the food I buy and feed my own family. For me, labeling will help me make decisions about which products I want to buy and which I'd rather not purchase. Labels like "certified organic" and certification from the Non-GMO Project help me to know what I'm thinking about buying, but getting those certifications is voluntary and costs a lot of money. Companies that don't want to disclose that information simply don't have to, hiding behind other labels like "natural" or "sustainable."

Now, my own feelings about what I feed my family shouldn't be the standard for the rest of the world (though everyone would be so much better off if they'd just listen to me), but, as is pointed out in a Washington Post article titled "The GMO Debate: 5 Things to Stop Arguing About," there's my concern that the use of genetically modified crops in agriculture has caused an increase of tsunami-like proportions in the use of pesticides, and that "we need to start building more transparency into our agricultural system so consumers can vote with their wallets for the kind of system they want to see." Amen.

Further, an article by Tom Philpott in Mother Jones magazine said that in a just-released paper published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Sciences Europe, by Chuck Benbrook, research professor at Washington State University's Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, "GMO technology 'drove up herbicide use by 527 million pounds, or about 11 percent, between 1996 (when [Monsanto’s] Roundup Ready crops first hit farm fields) and 2011.'" The article continues: “But then weeds started to develop resistance to Roundup, pushing farmers to apply higher per-acre rates. In 2002, farmers using Roundup Ready soybeans jacked up their Roundup application rates by 21 percent, triggering a 19 million pound overall increase in Roundup use."

And “by 2011, farms using Roundup Ready seeds were using 24 percent more herbicide than non-GMO farms planting the same crops," Benbrook is quoted as saying. By that time, "'in all three crops [corn, soy, and cotton], resistant weeds had fully kicked in,' Benbrook said, and farmers were responding both by ramping up use of Roundup and resorting to older, more toxic herbicides like 2,4-D."

All those pesticides don't just disappear in a puff of non-toxic smoke. They're seeping into the soil and the groundwater, washing into our rivers and streams, being blown by the wind and carried by birds, insects and passing traffic and ending up in the oceans. Not to mention that genetically modified crops can cross-pollinate with organic crops of the same species, potentially costing organic farmers their certification, as well as a loss of income from that contaminated crop.

If I can help to stem this tide of pesticides and other damages by filling my grocery bag with products that don't contain genetically modified organisms, then I'd like to do that. But first those products would have to be labeled, wouldn't they?

More reading:

"More Money, Fewer Facts: Final Week of Oregon's GMO Labeling Race" by Hannah Wallace truth-checks some claims being bandied about in commercials and materials.

Top photo from Oregon Right to Know.