If you regularly visiting McDonald or buying meet from Walmart and Taco Bell, you certainly are risking your health and even life, as those companies use meat from US farms, which use high-dose antibiotics in it. As a result of consuming McDonald burger, for example or meat from Walmart or Taco Bell would push to towards life hazards, as antibiotics won’t work on your body while your body would certainly lose natural immunity capacity. If brief, you are spending your hard-earned money towards buying poison that would push you towards death.
According to a report published by British newspaper The Guardian, suppliers of beef to McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Walmart are sourcing meat from US farms using antibiotics linked to the spread of dangerous superbugs, an investigation has found.
Unpublished US government records obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Guardian show farms producing beef for meat packing firms Cargill, JBS, and Green Bay are risking public health by still using antibiotics classed as the “highest priority critically important” to human health (HP-CIAs).
Such drugs are so essential to human medicine that their use in livestock farming should be stopped, the World Health Organization has warned. HP-CIAs are often the last line treatments available for serious bacterial infections in humans, it has said. The overuse of such antibiotics means they can become less effective.
The findings have prompted condemnation from public health experts and campaigners.
“The reckless overuse of medically important antibiotics on factory farms is a major contributor to this deadly public health threat”, said US senator Cory Booker, who has advocated for stricter controls on how antibiotics can be used in food production. “Giant agribusinesses have built a system that is dependent on this misuse of antibiotics to maximize their profits, with no regard to the serious harm they are causing”.
Antibiotic resistance is one of the gravest global public health threats. According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, it is responsible for more than 35,000 deaths in the US each year, and 1.3 million globally.
Despite the risks, residues of numerous HP-CIAs and other antibiotics were present in many of the US’s beef supply chains between 2017 and 2022, testing by the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), part of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), showed.
A Bureau and Guardian analysis of data relating to 10 of the biggest meat packers revealed that all had at least one HP-CIA in use on farms supplying their abattoirs. Several were found to have as many as seven separate HP-CIAs in use.
Cattle farms selling to JBS, which has sold beef to Wendy’s, Walmart and Taco Bell, were found to have used seven HP-CIAs. Farms serving Green Bay Dressed Beef, which has supplied the Kroger supermarket chain, also had seven in use.
Cattle suppliers to Cargill, which sells beef to McDonald’s, were found to have at least five HP-CIAs in use.
Besides these drugs, other types of antibiotics frequently used in human medicine were also found.
The spread of drug-resistant bacteria in the environment represents a huge public health challenge.
“It creates an unrelenting cycle of escalation”, said Dr Sameer Patel, a specialist in infectious diseases at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. “You have to use more powerful antibiotics because you don’t want a patient to become more ill and die. And then you use those more powerful antibiotics and then eventually you get resistant to those antibiotics”.
The USDA data reveals that residues of the antibiotic ceftiofur were found in beef supplied to the major fast food chains and grocery stores. Ceftiofur is a popular drug for use in cattle reared on feedlots, in part because it’s effective against a broad range of bacteria and farmers don’t have to wait too long to slaughter cattle after it has been administered.
But there are fears that its use in agriculture is driving resistance to antibiotics used to treat infections in people.
Patel recalls an unusual case decades ago of a newborn baby with a severe infection resistant to third-generation cephalosporins, the class of antibiotic to which ceftiofur belongs.
“Nowadays, I see many young children who have resistance to third-generation cephalosporins … it’s not surprising anymore”, he said.
Until 2017, antibiotics were added to animal feed to fatten up livestock. After the US Food and Drug Administration announced a ban on the practice, the sale of antibiotics for use in agriculture dropped by a third.
Yet, since that stark dip, sales have levelled off. Farmers can still routinely use antibiotics to prevent disease, so long as they have a prescription from a vet.
“For some of the drugs that they’re using, the dosages that are used for prevention are exactly the same as what they were using for growth promotion”, said Dr Gail Hansen, a veterinarian and public health consultant. “The bacteria don’t care what you call it. They are going to do what they do, which is trying to survive. And becoming resistant to antibiotics is part of how they survive”.
McDonald’s has repeatedly dodged calls for it to set targets to reduce the use of antibiotics by farmers supplying it with beef, according to Matt Wellington from US Public Interest Research Group, one of the organizations that has pressured fast food companies on antibiotics use. In 2018, McDonald’s was praised for pledging to set targets. But four years later little progress has been made.
“McDonald’s has seemingly abandoned its commitment to set concrete targets for reducing antibiotic use in its massive beef supply chain”, said Wellington. “It’s a major blow to our ability to preserve life-saving medicines, and it sets a bad example for the rest of the industry”.
