Agriculture
Chair: Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
- Max Baucus (D-MT)
- Michael Bennet (D-CO)
- Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
- Bob Casey (D-PA)
- Kent Conrad (D-ND)
- Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
- Tom Harkin (D-IA)
- Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
- Pat Leahy (D-VT)
- Ben Nelson (D-NE)
- Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
- Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
- Thad Cochran (R-MS)
- John Cornyn (R-TX)
- Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
- Mike Johanns (R-NE)
- Dick Lugar (R-IN)
- Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
- Pat Roberts (R-KS)
- John R. Thune (R-SD)
Appropriations
Chair: Daniel Inouye (D-HI) Ag Sub-Committee
Chair: Herb Kohl (D-WI)
- Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
- Dick Durbin (D-IL)
- Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
- Tom Harkin (D-IA)
- Tim Johnson (D-SD)
- Ben Nelson (D-NE)
- Jack Reed (D-RI)
- Robert Bennett (R-UT)
- Christopher Bond (R-MO)
- Sam Brownback (R-KS)
- Thad Cochran (R-MS)
- Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
- Arlen Specter (R-PA)
Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions
- Chris Dodd (D-CT)
Agriculture
Chair: B Collin Peterson (D-MN)
V. Chair: B Tim Holden (D-PA)
B Joe Baca (D-CA)
- John Boccieri (D-OH)
B* Leonard Boswell (D-IA)
- Bobby Bright (D-AL)
B* Dennis Cardoza (D-CA)
- Travis Childers (D-MS)
B Jim Costa (D-CA)
- Henry Cuellar (D-TX)
- Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA)
B Brad Ellsworth (D-IN)
- Debbie Halvorson (D-IL)
B Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD)
- Steve Kagen (D-WI)
- Larry Kissell (D-NC)
B Frank Kratovil (D-MD)
- Betsy Markey (D-CO)
B Jim Marshall (D-GA)
P Eric Massa (D-NY)
B Mike McIntyre (D-NC)
- Walt Minnick (D-ID)
B Earl Pomeroy (D-ND)
- Mark Schauer (D-MI)
- Kurt Schrader (D-OR)
B David Scott (D-GA)
B Zachary Space (D-OH)
- Timothy Walz (D-MN)
- Frank Lucas (R-OK)
- Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
- K. Michael Conaway (R-TX)
- Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
- Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
- Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
- Sam Graves (R-MO)
- Timothy Johnson (R-IL)
- Steve King (R-IA)
- Robert Latta (R-OH)
- Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO)
- Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)
- Jerry Moran (R-KS)
- Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)
- Phil Roe (R-TN)
- Mike Rogers (R-AL)
- Jean Schmidt (R-OH)
- Adrian Smith (R-NE)
- Glenn Thompson (R-PA) *=House Organic Caucus member B=Blue Dog Democrat
Appropriations
Chair: Dave Obey (D-WI) Ag Sub-Committee
Chair: P Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)
- Sanford Bishop (D-GA)
* Allen Boyd (D-FL)
- Lincoln Davis (D-TN)
*P Sam Farr (D-CA)
*P Maurice D. Hinchey (D-NY)
P Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)
P Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
- Jack Kingston (R-GA)
- Rodney Alexander (R-LA)
- Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO)
* Tom Latham (R-IA) *=House Organic Caucus member
P=Congressional Progressive Caucus
Education and Labor
P Chair: George Miller (D-CA)
- Jason Altmire (D-PA)
- Robert Andrews (D-NJ)
- Timothy Bishop (D-NY)
P Yvette Clarke (D-NY)
- Joe Courtney (D-CT)
- Susan Davis (D-CA)
P Marcia Fudge (D-OH)
P Raul Grijalva (D-AZ)
P Phil Hare (D-IL)
- Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX)
P Mazie Hirono (D-HI)
- Rush Holt (D-NJ)
- Dale Kildee (D-MI)
P Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
P Dave Loebsack (D-IA)
- Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY)
P Donald Payne (D-NJ)
- Jared Polis (D-CO)
- Robert Scott (D-VA)
- Joe Sestak (D-PA)
- Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH)
P John Tierney (D-MA)
- Dina Titus (D-NV)
- Paul Tonko (D-NY)
P Lynn Woolsey (D-CA)
- David Wu (D-OR)
- Buck McKeon (R-CA)
- Judy Biggert (R-IL)
- Rob Bishop (R-UT)
- Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
- Michael Castle (R-DE)
- Vernon Ehlers (R-MI)
- Luis F Fortuno (R-PR)
- Brett Guthrie (R-KY)
- Peter Hoekstra (R-MI)
- Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA)
- John Kline (R-MN)
- Kenny Marchant (R-TX)
- Tom McClintock (R-CA)
- Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)
- Thomas Petri (R-WI)
- Phil Roe (R-TN)
- Todd Russell Platts (R-PA)
- Tom Price (R-GA)
- Mark Souder (R-IN)
- GT Thompson (R-PA)
- Joe Wilson (R-SC) P=Congressional Progressive Caucus
A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the United States, 70 percent of antibiotics are used to feed healthy livestock, with 14 percent more used to treat sick livestock. Only about 16 percent are used to treat humans and their pets, the study found.
I am not a scientist. I already am limited in drugs I can use by allergies, for example, I cannot use penicillin (one of many). Overuse of antibiotics creates resistant strains of bacteria, super bugs if you will. My allergies perhaps make me more at risk than most people, since I am limited in alternatives
But it does not matter if the strain is resistant to all known antibiotics
MRSA, a kind of staph infection - kills about 18,000 Americans annually. That's more than die of AIDS.
Which is why you should read Nicholas Kristof this morning.
PAMTA Senate Briefing
H.R. 1549 - Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA)
Steve Ells Remarks
March 2, 2010
Thank you for joining us today, and for giving me the opportunity to speak on this important issue. I'm Steve Ells, and I am the founder, chairman and co-CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, a national chain of about 1,000 restaurants that is changing the way people think about and eat fast food.
We are doing this in a lot of ways, but none more important to me than our quest to serve the best tasting food we can, made from ingredients from more sustainable sources. We call this commitment "Food with Integrity."
I recently heard a presentation by the President of Elanco - a division of Eli Lilly. He's shopping his presentation (and accompanying whitepaper) around to industry leaders and government officials (in the U.S. and abroad) to tout his company's products. The whitepaper refers to its drug Paylean by saying:
"Use of an FDA-approved feed additive for swine can reduce manure production in pigs by 8 percent."
and
"an FDA-approved swine feed additive could enable the U.S. to maintain pork production levels while raising 11 million fewer hogs. This would also reduce demand for cropland used to grow feed grains by more than 2 million acres."
These are offered as reasons why Elanco's products are "green." They aren't just smart for a farmer's bottom line - they are good for the earth! But that's not the whole picture. A new expose by Alternet shows that Ractopamine (a.k.a. Paylean) is unsafe for humans and cruel to animals. This drug is administered in the last stage of the animal's life, and up to 20 percent of it remains in the animal's tissue at slaughter. This is a drug labeled "Not for use in humans. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask." That's not something I'd want to eat.
Alternet also says:
Where was mention of the farmer phone calls to Elanco reporting, "hyperactivity," "dying animals," "downer pigs" and "tying up" and "stress" syndromes, asks the FDA letter. Where was the log of phone calls that included farmers saying, "animals are down and shaking," and "pig vomiting after eating feed with Paylean"?
Wow. No wonder the President of Elanco refers to this drug anonymously when he presents on how sustainable and fantastic his company is. If he told people what he was selling, they'd know he's full of it. This drug is banned in 160 countries, so why is it legal here?
I just finished reading The War on Bugs by Will Allen (not the Will Allen of Growing Power - a different Will Allen) and I can't recommend it highly enough! This was a book that Allen was uniquely qualified to write. He grew up on a farm, and then went into the Marines where he was an atomic, biological, and chemical warfare paramedic. Following his years in the Marines, he went to college and - as part of his education - did research in the tropical forests of Peru, living among forest farmers. He says, "The ability of these [Peruvian] farmers to produce surpluses without chemicals in an environment ravaged by pests started me thinking that maybe the miracle chemicals that the sales men pushed were not so necessary after all." After college, Allen went back to farming. Upon taking a pesticide and fertilizer applicator's course at a local college, he found out that the chemicals commonly sprayed on farms were "modified versions of the nerve poisons and antipersonnel weapons that I learned about when studying chemical warfare in the Marine Corps."
So - with his firsthand observations of food grown without chemicals and his knowledge of the toxicity of common farm chemicals - Allen went to work finding out where our dependence and trust of pesticides came from in the first place. His findings actually surprised me. I knew part of the picture, which I wrote about in my own book. I don't think my book was inaccurate, but Allen fills in a lot of details and really makes it clear what happened and how.
What do consumers want? Cheap, tasty, convenient food. And they DON'T care how you produce it. That's what Elanco, subsidiary of Eli Lilly, maker of rbGH and other animal drugs says in a white paper available from their website. Details below.
S. 619, The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), just gained 3 new co-sponsors in the Senate: Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI), Sen. Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Sen. Specter (D-PA). This brings it up to a total of 15 co-sponsors in the Senate (and 100 co-sponsors in the House version, H.R. 1549). That's still not enough to pass it in either body, but it's nice to see some movement on such an important bill. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be a left-right issue since both Senators from Maine plus Lieberman have signed on. You'll notice a lack of co-sponsors from the center of the country though.
The bill does not ban all antibiotics in livestock. If an animal is sick, of course the farmer should be able to treat it. The ban will be on nontherapeutic uses (i.e. when an animal is NOT sick) classes of antibiotics that are used in human medicine. The goal is exactly like the name of the bill says - to prevent the evolution of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics used to treat humans. This bill was introduced into the House by Louise Slaughter, and she's got a microbiology background. The Senate version was introduced by Ted Kennedy and it's unfortunate that he won't be around to vote for it. I've included a full list of Senate co-sponsors below. If either of your Senators aren't on the list, shoot 'em an email and ask them to co-sponsor it.
Why is it that physicians who care for humans worry about antibiotic resistance from overuse of antibiotics, but veterinarians are not at all concerned? The vast majority of antibiotics used in this country are given to animals who aren't even sick. The antibiotics are intended to promote growth and to prevent infections from occurring in factory farmed animals whose immune systems are compromised by the harsh conditions they live in. The practice of giving non-therapeutic antibiotics to livestock threatens the effectiveness of antibiotics in human medicine, yet the American Veterianary Medical Association has come out against a bill to ban 7 classes of antibiotics used in human medicine from non-therapeutic use in livestock. What gives?
Antibiotic resistant bacteria is not a future problem - it's a current problem. In addition to reports of MRSA on factory hog farms, I've also seen reports like this one from Bill Marler about antibiotic-resistant Salmonella:
Just in the last week, the reality (again) of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella Newport has surfaced (again), this time sickening dozens so far in several states, and leading to the recall of nearly a million pounds of tainted hamburger. This follows a recall of nearly a half a million pounds of Salmonella-tainted burger in Colorado after sickening several a month ago.
Of course, this is not the first time that antibiotic-resistant Salmonella has hitched a ride in hamburger - there were illnesses in 1999, and it was reported by the CDC in 2002 and a WARNING issued by FSIS in 2007. The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services has urged a strategy to combat multidrug-resistant (MDR) Salmonella in ground beef. The CDC, through NARMS has continued to raise concerns about the over-use of antibiotics in our food supply. And, there is clearly no question that these bugs are in the cows we get our milk and the meat that we eat.
The CDC has reported that Salmonella Newport is the third most common Salmonella serotype in the United States. During 1997 - 2001, the number of laboratory-confirmed Salmonella Newport infections reported to CDC increased from 1,584 (5%) of 34,608 reported Salmonella infections to 3,152 (10%) of 31,607 (CDC, unpublished data, 2002). The increasing number of Salmonella Newport infections in the United States appears to be associated with the emergence and rapid dissemination of multidrug-resistant strains of Salmonella Newport. Since 1996, NARMS has identified an increasing number of Salmonella Newport isolates that are resistant to at least nine of 17 antimicrobial agents tested: amoxicillin/clavulanate, ampicillin, cefoxitin, ceftiofur, cephalothin, chloramphenicol, streptomycin, sulfamethoxazole, and tetracycline.
There's a Class 1 recall of tainted ground beef - 825,769 lbs of it, from Cargill. It's tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. That's bad. And it's not just proof that we need a better food safety system - it's also proof that we need to get the nontherapeutic antibiotics out of our factory farms.
The USDA is supposed to tell us which stores are selling (or have sold) the tainted beef, to make it easy for us to figure out if we've accidentally bought tainted beef so we don't eat it. So far, according to Bill Marler, the USDA has not given us that information. Ummm.... that's kinda important.
Congressman Leonard Boswell (D, IA-03) used to be a full-time farmer and still owns a farm that raises cattle. On July 13 he testified before the House Committee on Rules in connection with H.R. 1549, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009. I've posted the full text of his testimony after the jump, but here are some highlights of the case he made against new limits on routine use of antibiotics by livestock producers:
1. Science doesn't support blaming the livestock industry for antibiotic resistance. "Pound for pound, humans and their pets use 10 times the amount of antibiotics used in food animal production."
2. "America's livestock, dairy and poultry producers [...] are committed to using antibiotics responsibly and have developed responsible-use guidelines for each of their respective industries."
3. By removing some classes of antibiotics from the market, H.R. 1549 "would require antibiotic sponsors to prove again what has already been proven during their initial FDA approval" and would leave livestock producers with "few, if any, medicines to prevent and control animal disease."
4. Denmark has seen more disease and piglet mortality in its swine herd since a ban on preventive and growth-promoting use of antibiotics went into effect. That has increased the use of therapeutic antibiotics to treat sick animals.
5. Pigs that have been sick during their lives "have a greater presence of food-safety pathogens on their carcasses." Public health could be undermined if we eliminate animal antibiotics.
6. The 2008 Farm Bill provided for more USDA research on antibiotic resistance, and the Animal Drug User Fee Amendments of 2008 require the FDA to collect more information about antibiotic sales. Those provisions should be allowed to work before Congress removes products from the market, as H.R. 1549 would.
Post any relevant comments or rebuttals in this thread.
Just when you though the world couldn't get any crazier, it turns out the E. Coli turning up in hamburger might be due to ... antibiotics used to control the unwelcome bacteria in the ethanol production process(!)
Finally there's a war on drugs I can support: the fight to get non-therapeutic antibiotics OUT of livestock feed. Hallelujah!
Following Nicholas Kristof's fantastic op ed Pathogens in our Pork, today Louise Slaughter and Ted Kennedy each introduced bills into the House and Senate, respectively, that would ban 7 classes of antibiotics from nontherapeutic use in livestock.
There are a few reasons why these bills are so good. First, the problem of antibiotic resistance is reversible. It's not "too late" and stopping the practice of nontherapeutic antibiotic use (i.e. giving drugs to animals who aren't sick for disease prevention or growth promotion) WILL make a difference. Second, it's important to not only ban drugs used in human medicine from nontherapeutic use in livestock but entire drug classes as the bill does. This is because a bug that evolves resistance to a drug can easily become resistant to other drugs in the same drug class. In other words, Slaughter and Kennedy really got it right when they wrote this bill.
One of my favorite Congresswomen, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) is reintroducing her Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA) to limit use of antibiotics in livestock. I don't yet know the bill number in this Congress but you can look it up as H.R.962 in the 110th Congress to find the bill text from before.
ACTION: Email your representative and ask them to co-sponsor this bill. (Last time she had 40 co-sponsors so you can check at the link above to see if your congresscritter's already on the list.)
Here are all of the stories on my plate this afternoon that predict - in one way or another - that the sky is falling. Hope it doesn't give you indigestion!
Yum! Want some mercury in your high fructose corn syrup? Cuz you might be getting it whether you want it or not. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found it in 9 out of 20 HCFS samples from 3 manufacturers. Then they tested 55 brand name foods and beverages and found mercury in 1/3 of them.
The mercury comes originally from chlor-alkali plants used to make caustic soda. The caustic soda is used, in turn, to separate corn starch from the corn kernal. The mercury can contaminate the caustic soda and then contaminate the HFCS. There IS newer, cleaner technology that the chlor-alkali plants can use (in fact, only 4 U.S. plants still use mercury and the rest don't).
The FDA just decided how to regulate genetically engineered animals, bringing them a step closer to becoming a reality. The GE DNA will be treated as a drug, the same as a hormone or antibiotic, and does not need to be labeled on the final product.
Civil Eats reports on MRSA with your BLT. Looks like the real consequences of overusing antibiotics in livestock are coming home to roost.
Industrial ag has ruined everything else, and now they are ruining manure, says Elanor from The Ethicurean. Turns out all those antibiotics we needlessly give to livestock wind up in the manure - and then in the veggies the manure fertilized.
According to Crops Absorb Livestock Antibiotics, Science Shows, you might be eating antibiotics in your veggies. The antibiotics get there via manure used in fertilizer. They got into the manure because they were fed to animals to promote growth and prevent disease. The vast majority of antibiotics used in America are given to livestock subtherapeutically (i.e. when the animals aren't even sick). Just another way you meat eaters are trying to screw us vegetarians...
(Thanks to LA Locavore for this fantastic diary! - promoted by Jill Richardson)
Barack Obama is inheriting Ag policies and food safety policies that have been the subject of huge debates for years, and the FDA has just pulled off a whopper of a policy reversal to add to the mix. They're following the lead of other Bush regulatory bodies, which are scrambling to codify old policies in the Lame Duck microseconds that remain before Obama takes office, but FDA's stealth reversal stands to permanently alter the US food chain and profoundly endanger public health.
