[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 93 (Tuesday, July 18, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H6359-H6360]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 19, 1999, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise to sound the alarm about a 
silent war that is going on all over the world, the war between people 
and infectious diseases.
  It is not a new war. Since humans first walked the earth, microbes 
have preyed on us and we have fought back. As recently as the 19th 
century, the average life span in Europe and North America was 50 
years, and the likelihood of dying prematurely from infectious diseases 
was in most places as high as 40 percent.
  With the widespread introduction in the 1940s of penicillin and other 
antibiotics, we thought we had won the war. Finally, we could cure a 
whole raft of infectious diseases that routinely took human lives 
across the whole span of a human lifetime, from infancy through the 
prime of life to old age.
  A month ago, the World Health Organization issued a report that 
paints a comprehensive picture of the renewed danger we face from 
infectious diseases. Microbes are mutating at an alarming rate into 
strains that too often fail to respond to drugs.
  Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, director general of the WHO, recently 
stated, we currently have effective medicines to cure almost every 
major infectious disease, but we risk losing these valuable drugs, and 
our opportunity to eventually control many infectious diseases, because 
of increasing antimicrobial resistance.
  The report describes how around the world almost all infectious 
diseases are becoming resistant to existing medicines. In Estonia, 
Latvia, and parts of Russia and China, over 10 percent of tuberculosis 
patients have strains resistant to the two most powerful TB medicines. 
Because of resistance, Thailand has completely lost the means of using 
three of the most common anti-malaria drugs. In New Delhi, typhoid 10 
years ago could be cured with three inexpensive drugs, but now these 
drugs are largely ineffective. A small but growing number of patients 
are already showing primary resistance to AZT and other new therapies 
for HIV-infected people.
  Patients admitted to hospital wards are especially vulnerable. In the 
U.S.,

[[Page H6360]]

some 14,000 people become infected and die every year from drug-
resistant microbes to which they were exposed in hospitals. As many as 
60 percent of infections around the world acquired in hospitals are 
caused by drug-resistant microbes.
  In the U.S., overuse of the antibiotics is a key cause of resistance. 
The more frequently that microbes are exposed to these drugs, the more 
quickly they develop defenses against them. Patients are demanding and 
physicians are prescribing drugs for conditions that simply do not 
require antibiotics.
  Overuse of antibiotics in the agricultural sector is also 
contributing to the resistance problem in a big way. Livestock 
producers use antibiotics to treat sick animals, as they should, but 
they also use antibiotics to promote more rapid weight gain in healthy 
animals. Many of the antibiotics used in livestock are also used in 
humans, including tetracycline and penicillin. In farm animals, 
prolonged exposure to antibiotics provides a breeding ground for 
resistant strains of salmonella, E. coli, and other bacteria which are 
harmful to people. When transferred to people through the food chain, 
these bacteria can cause dangerous infections that are resistant to 
drugs.
  Antibiotic use in livestock is causing resistance in large part 
because of the sheer volume of antibiotics used in the farm for 
subtherapeutic purposes, not treating ill animals but making livestock 
put on weight more rapidly so they are ready for market more quickly.
  Forty percent of all antibiotics manufactured in the United States 
are given to animals. Eighty-eight percent of all antibiotics used on-
farm are used subtherapeutically, just for weight gain.
  Among hogs, 93 percent receive antibiotics in their diets at some 
time during their quote/unquote grower/finisher period.
  The medical community has been raising concerns about antibiotic use 
in livestock for decades. Thirty years ago, the Swann Committee in the 
United Kingdom concluded that antibiotics used in human therapy should 
not be used as growth promoters in animals. Since that time, mounting 
scientific evidence has pointed to the dangers of overusing these 
precious drugs in livestock. It is time, Mr. Speaker, to take a close 
look at antibiotic use in agriculture, and take decisive action to 
protect people from resistant microbes that move through the food 
chain, from animals to our young children to our oldest citizens and to 
all of us.

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