Post Tags: Food

Antibiotics Resistance 101

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Food

Food & Water Europe Stop Giving Antibiotics to Healthy AnimalsTetracycline. Penicillin. Amoxicillin. Antibiotics are life-saving tools in our medicine chest, but we all have good reason to worry that we’re losing them. Bacteria that make us sick are adapting to resist even our best drugs, so when we get sick it’s harder to find a medicine to help us get well. Medical authorities call it one of the most serious risks to global human health.

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It’s happening now. At least 25,000 patients in the EU each year die from multidrug-resistant bacteria at a cost of at least an extra €1.5 billion per year. In the United States, these infections make at least 2 million people sick each year, and at least 23,000 of them lose their lives.

It’s inevitable that bacteria will continue to get stronger in this way. It’s how nature works. It’s only sensible to do everything we can to make sure our medicines work as well as they can for as long as possible.

That’s where factory farms come in. Routine, low-dose misuse of antibiotics to boost profits on crowded, stressful factory farms drives the creation and spread of resistant bacteria. This means that we all may be exposed to, and pay the price for, the dangerous bacteria produced by factory farming even if we don’t eat meat or live near a farm.

You may have heard about MRSA infections in hospitals, but it’s on our farms, too. The “R” stands for RESISTANT, and that’s what makes it dangerous, so it’s bad news that it’s in our food. We even know that one strain of MRSA originated in humans, transferred to pigs where it became resistant to two drugs, and then jumped back to humans.

We can’t afford to wait.

Colistin used to be a veterinary drug, but it’s now a critically important medicine of last resort for people, used when other drugs fail. When bacteria with transferable resistance to colistin were found in meat and people in China in 2015, medical predictions said it would be three years before they reached the UK. We now know that the resistant bacteria were already in Europe since at least 2012, but weak monitoring didn’t pick them up.

Many livestock producers and fish farmers use antibiotics appropriately when their animals are sick, but it’s just crazy to keep giving these precious drugs to animals that don’t need them. Food & Water Europe is fighting to stop it.

TTIP and Genetically Engineered Foods

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Common Resources

Get the endnotes in the .pdf

In 2013, the United States and the European Union (EU) began negotiations to create the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), also known as the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). The trade relationship across the Atlantic is already the number one economic relationship in the world, making up a third of all trade in goods and services and about half of global economic output. Both the United States and EU claim that a new trade agreement with the EU would enhance job creation and competitiveness by eliminating trade barriers and harmonising regulations — but the real winners would be big biotech and food companies, at the expense of consumers and the environment.

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Corporate Control in Animal Science Research

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FoodCommon Resources

CorporateControlFoodWaterEurope

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Corporate agribusinesses depend on favourable science to gain regulatory approval or market acceptance of products such as new animal drugs, and they depend on academic journals to deliver this science. To secure favourable scientific reviews, industry groups play an enormous role in the production of scientific literature, authoring journal articles, funding academic research and also serving as editors, sponsors or directors of scientific journals where much of their research is published.

Deep-pocketed corporations often have no counterpoint in the scientific literature. No group of scientists or science funders is, for example, aggressively investigating the safety or efficacy of new animal drugs, or examining alternatives. The influence that industry now wields over every aspect of the scientific discourse has allowed companies to commercialise potentially unsafe animal drugs with virtually no independent scrutiny.

Find out what needs to be done in the report, Corporate Control in Animal Science Research.

New Report: For-Profit Animal Science Undermines Safe Food, Trade

Brussels and Washington, D.C.— A new report (.pdf) published today by Food & Water Europe exposes the enormous influence that corporate drug companies play in the peer-reviewed science surrounding risky veterinary drugs widely used in the United States but forbidden in the EU. The U.S. approach of allowing the marketplace to determine the safety of risky veterinary drugs rather than independent science—as was the case with the beef cattle growth-promoter Zilmax, which was removed from the U.S. market in 2013—makes any move toward regulatory “harmony” via an EU-U.S. trade agreement a serious threat to safety of the EU food system.

Food & Water Europe EU Food Policy Analyst Eve Mitchell said, “It’s clear that some favourable safety findings on the drugs widely used to produce food are effectively bought and paid for by the companies that stand to profit. The cornerstones of the scientific method, like independent replication of findings, simply aren’t being honoured, and many U.S. farmers are giving their animals questionable drugs every day because of it. This is not the kind of food production we want or need, yet a trans-Atlantic trade deal will reinforce these safety problems for everyone.”

The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a vast trade deal under negotiation between the U.S. and EU. Highly controversial topics like genetically modified (GM) food and hormone treatments in meat animals have all but stalled progress of TTIP, which was supposed to conclude negotiations later this year. “Governments on both sides insist neither regulatory system will be eroded by TTIP and that food safety will continue to be guaranteed, but today’s report shows safety isn’t even clear now,” says Mitchell.

A major problem is with the scientific journals that publish the studies. Industry groups play an enormous role in the production of scientific literature, authoring journal articles, funding academic research and also serving as editors, sponsors or directors of the same scientific journals where much of their research is published.

Mitchell said, “It’s not just a matter of EU and U.S. regulators agreeing that their counterparts consulted the science and concluded drugs are safe when that science is comprised. Now, consumers on both sides of the Atlantic are being asked to place our faith in “harmonised’ approval systems.”

“This report documents the problems in animal science research, but the same weak disclosure rules, industry influence and lack of independent research appears to pervade much of agricultural research, from GMOs to cloning to herbicides. It’s huge.”

Mitchell added, “There’s a lot of talk about ‘free trade” out there, especially when in comes to TTIP, but it’s full of holes. To function properly, genuinely free markets rely on complete information available to all, and this report shows how deep the disclosure problem goes. The EU is not immune to these problems.”

Food & Water Europe calls on scientific journals to disclose the funding sources for papers they publish and says the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) also needs to do more to ensure the research it uses to determine the safety of products in the food chain has been thoroughly and independently assessed.

Mitchell concluded, “The merits of EFSA’s ongoing project on openness and transparency will be called into question unless it does more to ensure it is not relying on for-profit science. EFSA should publish the authorship affiliations and funding sources of the science it consults. Some large portion of the science EFSA consults is likely to have been biased by industry authorship and funding, but the public can’t see where this happens. This has to change.”

Read For Profit Animal Science Undermines Safe Food Trade: http://www.foodandwatereurope.org/reports/corporate-control-in-animal-science-research/.

Contact: Eve Mitchell, Food & Water Europe (UK time), +44(0)1381 610 740, [email protected]


EU Vote Key to Keeping Clones Out of Our Food

January 16, 2015—Brussels. Next Wednesday, members of the EU Environment Committee will vote on measures that are a critical step toward keeping clones out of Europe’s food supply.

The European Commission is proposing a new regulation that clarifies and consolidates the rules governing the trade and import of breeding animals and their breeding material, like semen, ova and embryos, which are routinely used to breed farm animals.

MEPs have tabled amendments to the proposed regulation that would require the documentation that already accompanies such transactions to indicate if the animal or breeding material is the product of cloning or clone descendants.

Food & Water Europe Food Policy Analyst Eve Mitchell said, “Congratulations to our MEPs for spotting that the Commission seems to have forgotten about clones in its draft. Farmers have a right to know what they are buying, and we need to know where clones are so we can keep them out of our food.”

The EU trade in breeding material with the U.S. is a particular concern because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers clones safe to eat and does not require any labeling. In 2010 the U.S. Secretary for Agriculture admitted he didn’t know if clones are in the U.S. food supply. What’s worse, there is only a voluntary moratorium standing between EU importers and U.S. farmers or breeders. “Europe needs to protect itself with reasonable controls,” said Mitchell. “Cloning for food should be an open and shut case.”

In 2008 the European Group on Ethics in Science and Technology said cloning for food is not justified because of the suffering it causes. The Parliament voted for a full ban on all clones and their offspring in July 2010, and called for a formal moratorium until such laws could be brought forward. In 2011 the Commission, Council and Parliament all agreed that tracing clones would be needed for whatever rules on cloning are finally enacted.

Yet the Commission isn’t keeping up. It tabled “provisional” rules in 2013 that ban food from clones but not food from clone offspring. Those rules also controversially rejected the Parliament’s call for clear labels on such foods, offered as a compromise after years of wrangling over a ban, saying the work needed to secure labels would be “disproportionate” and therefore “cannot be justified” because it would require “meticulous investigation into the accompanying documentation”. This is exactly the kind of documentation discussed in this new regulation, so ensuring those papers note where cloning is used is essential for labeling if clone offspring are sold as food.

Mitchell added, “We are assured that our meat if fully traceable, and that this will be reinforced after the EU-wide contamination of meat supplies with horsemeat last year, so checking documentation cannot possibly be considered too onerous. Labels on meat from clone offspring are perfectly possible and the very least we should expect.”

Food & Water Europe believes the Commission approach to cloning in food is hypocritical and ethically indefensible. Since you can’t have clone offspring without clones, and since cloning is clearly cruel and unnecessary, all food from clones and their offspring should be banned. Anything short of a full ban makes clear labels non-negotiable.

Mitchell said, “The revelation in August 2010 that clones were in the UK food supply clearly demonstrated the need for regulation and enforcement. We must ensure that any new laws are future proofed to enable the full ban on clones and their offspring in our food that the Parliament, the public and common sense demand.”

Contacts:
Eve Mitchell, Food & Water Europe (UK time), +44(0)1381 610 740, [email protected]


GM Crops: Science Is About Questions, Not “Consensus”

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Food

Brussels — Food & Water Europe’s damning critique of the so-called scientific “consensus” surrounding GM food and crops, published today, exposes the biotech industry’s role in massaging facts to support its products. The report is published while the EU Parliament and Council are locked in negotiations trying to overcome deep disagreement on so-called “opt-outs” (national or regional bans) for GM crops.

Food & Water Europe Executive Director Wenonah Hauter said, “The fact that such a vigorous debate continues over the so-called ‘consensus’ on GMO safety is evidence enough that no consensus exists. Rather than chasing ‘consensus’, the real conversation that scientists and the public should be having — in academic journals, in the media and in Parliaments — is whether or not GMOs are safe.”

The So-Called Scientific “Consensus”: Why the debate on GMOs is not over (available at the link below), shows how pro-GM vested interests cherry pick information and manipulate quotes from scientific bodies like the World Health Organisation and the Royal Society of London to promote their alleged consensus. The briefing also points out that neither scientific institutions, the scientific literature nor independent scientists support the “consensus” claim.

Food & Water Europe’s EU Food Policy Advisor Eve Mitchell said, “GMO boosters are working so hard to distract the public from the real questions hanging over GM food and crops – that’s par for the course. The biotech industry has long used its financial might and political power to distort the public discourse — and even the science — surrounding GMOs.

“We want to ensure the public has access to all the facts so we can make the best decisions. For starters there are zero peer-reviewed studies of the epidemiology of GMO consumption, so any claims GMOs are safe to eat in the long-term are based in hope, not science. People need to know that.”

The organisation also points to the hundreds of scientists who called the “consensus” bogus, citing:

  • Limited animal feeding trials have been conducted on GMOs; several show or suggest toxic effects.
  • The biotechnology industry is  responsible for most of the available feeding trials showing that genetically engineered crops are safe and nutritious; an equal number of research groups working on feeding trials have expressed “serious concerns” over safety.
  • There is evidence of environmental safety issues, including adverse, unintended impacts on non-target organisms and the promotion of resistant weeds.
  • There is evidence of possible adverse human and animal health effects from exposure to Roundup, the herbicide used on the majority of GMO crops.
  • Several international agreements acknowledge safety issues with GMOs.

Mitchell added, “There are many grave risks here, but there is no liability regime to hold the biotech industry responsible if anything goes wrong with their GMOs. At the very least we need to heed what the evidence is telling us and take more care. Given what we know already, there has never been a better case for saying ‘better safe than sorry’.”

Contact: Eve Mitchell, EU Food Policy Advisor, Food & Water Europe +44 (0)1381 610 740 or emitchell(at)fweurope(dot)org

Food & Water Europe’s briefing The So-Called Scientific “Consensus”: Why the debate on GMOs is not over is available in English and in Spanish.