🔗 Share this article

What we consume can either nourish us or cause sickness. Not long ago, I explored how food consumption influences the risk of colorectal cancer. However, what of agricultural practices?

Globally, we are observing the rise of cheap meat, primarily fueled by consumer desire from a growing middle class that now has the means to purchase beef, pork and chicken, items that were once unaffordable. Roughly 45% of global consumption growth is occurring in upper-middle-income countries such as India, China, Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia. Chicken is expected to capture an increasingly large share of that growth, projected to grow by 21% by 2034, since it is relatively cheap, widely acceptable and requires less input per kilogram than beef or pork. By 2034, it is projected that poultry will supply 45% of the protein consumed from all meat sources.

But this comes with costs. With scarce acreage and tight schedules, the approach in many countries has been to use antibiotics at scale. This isn’t just to address disease but also as a preventative measure to avoid sickness in overpopulated environments. And, giving antibiotics causes livestock to gain weight more rapidly, although researchers aren’t sure exactly why. All of this means that, unlike their use for humans—where antibiotics are almost always prescribed to combat infection—their application in agriculture is much more widespread and uncontrolled. Research monitoring their consumption suggest that 73% of all antimicrobials distributed globally are utilized in animals raised for food.

This massive misuse is leading to a increase in drug-resistant bacteria. For example, colistin resistance, a “last-resort antibiotic”, first developed in E coli bacteria that then contaminated swine. E coli was afterwards detected in swine handlers. All it takes are aeroplanes and global travel networks for these pathogens to spread globally. And now, colistin-resistant bacteria have been discovered not only in hospitals in China but across the world.

What does this mean for someone sitting in a GP clinic or a medical center in the UK? It means that bacterial illnesses that were once simple to cure—such as ear infections, urinary tract infections or surgical site infections—become untreatable even after a course of antimicrobials. It implies that surgeries such as caesarean sections, joint surgeries and oncology treatments that rely on immune suppression all become riskier. Although new antibiotics are technically possible to create, the pipeline is slow and costly. We have to preserve the arsenal we currently possess.

The remedies to this issue can exclusively come from transforming worldwide agriculture. To be fair, the UK has made significant progress in curtailing antimicrobial use in livestock. Sales of veterinary antimicrobials reared for food has dropped by 59% since 2014. The application of colistin is now virtually nonexistent. The use of highest-priority antimicrobials has fallen to under 0.5% of all veterinary antimicrobial distribution. Moreover, research by European agencies indicated that after antibiotic use in agriculture was cut by nearly half between 2014 and 2021, antibiotic resistance in E coli across the bloc also started dropping.

But just concentrating on the United Kingdom or Europe is a minor effort. Unless the major emerging economies are included in discussions on how animal protein is farmed, we remain just as susceptible to antibiotic resistance. The challenge is that moving towards alternative farming methods requires additional land and duration: increasing the cost of animal protein in highly populated nations can quickly trigger social unrest, political backlash and discontent. The medical necessity is evident, but this needs to be balanced with considerations of nutritional access, economics and public demand.

Climate scientists have repeatedly cautioned about the environmental costs of the current global food system, whether it’s greenhouse gases, biodiversity loss, or forest clearing. But these effects often feel long-term and abstract, especially for people facing cost-of-living pressures or concerned with immediate healthcare access.

Antibiotic resistance is concrete. Virtually all people has used antimicrobials at some point, and we can imagine what would happen if their curative power was abruptly lost. Food production, medicine and the environment are all interlinked. How pig meat is farmed in Asia influences whether your child’s antibiotics are effective in Edinburgh. Whether a female patient in Nigeria survives a C-section is tied to how poultry are farmed in South America.

If we address these pervasive, world-spanning challenges, such as how our diet is sourced and how we use our current medications, we risk losing something precious: the ability to treat infections that we take for granted now.