Super Eco

Photo credit: sarah gilbert

An antibiotic is any substance that inhibits the growth of bacteria; commonly, antibiotics are medicines used to fight illnesses caused by bacteria in humans and animals. Typically, the term "antibiotics" excludes natural substances that inhibit bacteria, such as hydrogen peroxide, and synthetic compounds such as sulfonamides.

While the first known use of antibiotics was in China 2,500 years ago, modern antibiotics owe their parentage to Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in 1877, and in 1928, Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin revolutionized medicine. And while antibiotics continue to be considered safe and effective for human use to treat infections, the reaction of bacteria, both in the human host and in the environment at large, has come to cause major concern among environmentalists and health activists. In an individual who is using an antibiotic, occasionally the intestinal flora can be disrupted enough to allow an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria, leading to diarrhea or other intestinal maladies. The other concern is the emergence of antibiotic resistance, or an evolutionary process, in which those bacteria with an enhanced ability to survive doses of antibiotics survive. Both penicillin and erythromycin have become far less effective as the bacteria which they were used to combat have become more resistant.

CAFO farms that raise pigs and cows for meat, in the United States, typically feed their animals so-called "prophylactic antibiotics" while they are young to combat the many diseases bred by such close quarters. Nicholas Kristof, writing for the New York Times, calls out "the routine use—make that the insane overuse—of antibiotics in livestock feed" for the development of MRSA and "superbugs," or bacteria which have evolved a resistance to antibiotics. Other strains blamed on the use of antibiotics in animal feed include Salmonella spp., Campylobacter spp., Escherichia coli, and Enterococcus spp. In addition to the use of antibiotics in animal feed, over-prescription of antibiotics in humans for the common cold or other non-bacterial illnesses has been blamed for the rise of superbugs, and the substances persist in groundwater to the extent that scientists fear fish and other aquatic life have been affected detrimentally. Antibiotics are often blamed for hormonal imbalances and have even been suspected of contributing to early puberty onset in human girls.