Resistant Bacteria in Gastrointestinal Tract of Meat Eaters

Escherichioa coli greatly magnified.
Acknowledgment: American Academy of Family Physicians, Wikipedia

Dr Abe V Rotor

The rapidly increasing incidence of drug resistance is now recognized worldwide as a serious threat to the treatment of life-threatening infections in both humans and animals. Antibiotics resistance can emerge as a result of genetic change and subsequent selection process through the use of anti-microbial drugs.

The initial appearance of a resistant bacterium in a susceptible population is often caused by mutation in a single bacterial gene. The frequency of such initial mutation may be low, occurring at a rate of one mutation in a population of several millions. However, other bacteria can become antibiotic resistant at a much higher frequency merely by acquiring a gene from a bacterium that is already resistant.

The genes for resistance can be transmitted or passed on from one organism to another by transformation, conjugation and transduction.

Resistant Bacteria in Gastrointestinal Tract of Meat Eaters

In her doctoral dissertation at the University of Santo Tomas, Vicky Conception Mergal found out that drug-resistant strains of Enterobacter and Escherichia coli found in the gastrointestinal tract is related indirectly to ingestion of meat conditioned to antibiotics, or its combined effect with exposure to medication in cases of infectious diseases.

How do we explain this finding?

The respondents in the study of Dr. Mergal are of two categories. One group consists of vegetarians and the other group of non-vegetarians or regular meat eaters. For the first group, the incidence of finding drug-resistant bacteria is very little. But in the second group – the meat eaters – the existence of drug resistant Enterobacter and E. coli is high.

Overuse of Antibiotics on Poultry and Livestock

Dr. Mergal’s adviser, Dr. Irineo Dogma, has the explanation why there is higher incidence of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract of non-vegetarians because of their intake of meat. As a background to this contention, poultry, hogs and livestock are given consistently high ration of antibiotics in their feeds. This is to safeguard the animals from possible outbreak of diseases, which are a threat to business.

Imagine this scenario of a whole ranch wiped out by foot-and-mouth disease, or a battery of chicken with corriza, a commercial piggery with scouring. Huge investments must therefore be protected with antibiotics even if the animals do not actually need this because they have their own defense mechanism - natural immunity.

Resistance to antibiotics among bacteria is built this way, and repeatedly, more and more of these resistant strains develop, thus necessitating further increase in antibiotic dosage, or change to more potent antibiotics. What happens to the residue of the antibiotics in the body of the animal, or in eggs and milk?

Residual Antibiotics in Bad to Our Health

When we eat meat, eggs and milk from animals treated with antibiotics we are introducing into our body the antibiotic residues that our body does not need. In fact, the presence of antibiotics makes our immune system idle, so to speak. In the event that the supply of antibiotic residues stops, we become predisposed to infection and related kinds of diseases because there is nothing now to suppress the resistant bacteria in our body. This explains the findings of Dr. Mergal, as well as the puzzling high rate of death due to infection – in spite of antibiotic treatment.

This leads us to recall the term, super bacteria and super bugs. These are man-induced resistant pathogens. Man’s interference with nature, and abuses often in the guise of progress has unwittingly created a new Frankenstein. I have the inkling that nature has its own ways of dealing with the folly and abuses of man, and one of them is the emergence of resistant organisms that threatens man himself. ~

NOTE: Escherichia coli (E. coli) are members of a large group of bacterial germs that inhabit the intestinal tract of humans and other warm-blooded animals (mammals, birds. The best-known and most notorious Stx-producing E. coli is E. coli O157:H7. It is important to remember that most kinds of E. coli bacteria do not cause disease in humans, indeed, some are beneficial, and some cause infections other than gastrointestinal infections, such urinary tract infections.E. coli O157:H7 was first recognized as a foodborne pathogen in 1982 during an investigation into an outbreak of hemorrhagic colitis (bloody diarrhea) associated with the consumption of contaminated hamburgers (Riley, et al., 1983). The following year, Shiga toxin (Stx), produced by the then little-known E. coli O157:H7, was identified as the real culprit. In the ten years following the 1982 outbreak, approximately thirty E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks were recorded in the United States (Griffin & Tauxe, 1991. Acknowledgment: Marler Clark Sponsored Websites

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