May 20, 1999 (The Canadian Press via COMTEX):
Americans
who eat meat overseas are bringing back resistance to certain
antibiotics used to treat stomach upset and other bacterial illnesses,
researchers reported Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The
report is the first to link Americans' growing resistance to antibiotics
primarily to foreign travel. Until now, scientists believed resistance
was growing largely because doctors were overprescribing antibiotics
Resistance
to the class of antibiotics called quinolones has been reported
in Europe and Asia because of the widespread use of antibiotics
in poultry and other livestock there. The problem had not been
well-documented in the United States.
The
study also attributed the problem in part to the growing use of
antibiotics in chickens in the United States, a practice approved
by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995.
''There
is definitely a public health problem with using quinolones in
poultry, and we need to take a hard look at that,'' said the study's
lead author, Kirk Smith, an epidemiologist with the Minnesota
Health Department.
Smith
said the study should prompt the FDA to adopt more stringent guidelines
for the use of antibiotics in food animals in this country. But
he said solving the problem ''is going to take a very well co-ordinated
international effort.''
John
Keeling, a spokesman for the Washington-based Animal Health Institute,
which represents producers of health products used in food animals,
said antibiotics are used sparingly on domestic livestock -- at
most three per cent of poultry -- and only when prescribed by
a veterinarian.
What's more, he said, it's possible travellers are being exposed
to antibiotics through other means, like water, for example.
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