Kyrie’s superbug: It’s the big picture, stupid
By Christie Keith
April 22, 2008
I’ve been very touched by the outpouring of sympathy and suggestions from everyone here after my recent update about my dog Kyrie’s struggle with a drug-resistant staph infection. But I was also feeling something nagging at me, a sputtering sense of “yes, yes, but,” and yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the hell the problem was. What was it about all these kind and caring comments that was making me feel a little head-explodey?
And that’s when I got it; apparently sometimes I’m a little slow. Because whenever I think about heads exploding, I think about the pet food recall, and that makes me think about the FDA, and of course, the FDA makes me think about drugs and science and medicine and food, and how the regulatory agencies designed to protect public health and safety have been downsized and small-governmented into a state of near-impotence.
Which is, my friends, why we have drug-resistant staph infections.
Because while, of course, right now my primary concern is Kyrie, and if someone else had this problem the first thing I’d be telling them is the kind of stuff a lot of you said to me — look for the underlying cause, try alternatives, read the research, etc. — there’s something else.
It’s exactly the same thing I said when my fellow-homemade diet feeders encouraged me to use the pet food recall as a platform to advocate for homemade pet diets, and I refused to do it. My belief was, and is, that no matter how people decide to feed their pets, they should be able to walk into the supermarket and buy food that doesn’t have poison in it.
And I also believe that this planet shouldn’t be riddled with mutant bacteria that came into existence largely due to the widespread abuse of powerful drugs, most of it in livestock feed, used because the way we raise commercial meat in this country promotes ill health and disease in those animals.
Then there’s the complete collapse of the nation’s health-care system, leading to hospitals that are understaffed and using outdated, hard to sterilize equipment, and are full of people without health care insurance flooding emergency rooms and being handed inappropriate prescriptions for antibiotics because it’s cheaper and easier than actually diagnosing and treating their illnesses — or their poverty.
Of course, there’s really nothing I can do about all that, so I’ll go back to the medical grade honey and expensive veterinary dermatologist and skin cultures and last-ditch antibiotics. I’ll check Kyrie’s thyroid and immune system, and wonder if I need to soak my entire house in bleach.
But let’s not forget the bigger picture, and the fact that the same guys who brought us the pet food recall are also bringing MRSA to our communities and MRSI to our pets. Don’t let them off the hook by allowing them to reduce this to a problem dealt with in our homes with antibiotics and herbs and guilt, because this problem didn’t start in our homes, even though that’s where it’s hitting us.
Well said, Christie.
Comment by Marcy — April 22, 2008 @ 10:23 pm
Christie, all those things are big factors, the big factors, but there are two smaller contributing factos: people who push their doctors to give them those inappropriate antibiotics (useless for colds or flu, for instance), and people who, when given a prescription for antibiotics appropriately, stop taking them as soon as they feel better, rather than finishing the course of antibiotics. These two things contribute to building drug-resistant bugs, smaller than the others you mention, but one we as individuals can choose not to do.
And another big factor you didn’t mention: the creation and aggressive pushing of antibacterial cleaning & personal care products. Washing your hands in antibacterial soap doesn’t really make you any safer from illness (washing your hands with ordinary soap and warm water for 20-30 seconds does that just fine), but it does contributed to building drug-resistant bacteria in the general environment. And it’s sometimes a real challenge to find ordinary, non-anti-bacterial, liquid hand soap in the vast array of the anti-bacterials in the supermarket. And in public and company restrooms? Forget it! It’s all anti-bacterial soap!
This short-sighted, long-term-stupid stuff is everywhere, at every level.
Comment by Lis — April 23, 2008 @ 4:23 am
Which is one reason I make my own soap. So far, only in the bar form. One of these days, I’ll get around to trying liquid soap (made by using potassium hydroxide instead of sodium hydroxide and adjusting the saponification values accordingly for you soapers out there . . . . . . )
Comment by The OTHER Pat — April 23, 2008 @ 5:02 am
Great article! And bleach everything!!
Comment by Jess — April 23, 2008 @ 6:09 am
The anti-bacterial soaps in the washrooms damage the skin on my hands.
For home use, I use a non-drying Satin Soap made by Jason that is sold in Whole Foods Market.
We shall have to superboost our immune system to deal with the environment with all the “superbugs” around us.
Comment by Colorado Transplant — April 23, 2008 @ 6:20 am
I just felt like adding that I don’t want “super” anything - supergood, superbad, supersized… Is it too late to just get “regular”?
Comment by slt — April 23, 2008 @ 6:22 am
There is a desperate, last ditch, very old fashioned treatment, actually two of them, that are effective and seldom fail.
Maggots to clean the wound and a saline drip, directly on the wound.
Maggots are better at wound debridement than any surgeon and if you can get the wound clean, that is half the battle.
Keeping the dog still for the process? Not easy.
It can be done and I have used this method several times, the results are worth the intense one on one nursing it requires.
I hope Kyrie gets better.
Comment by Duaneisadork — April 23, 2008 @ 6:39 am
I also think the antibacterial products are a major contributor here.
And, it isn’t just soap, but also other cleaners that kill 99.5% of bacteria or whatever, because it’s that .5% that need to be worried about.
I do hope a treatment works, though, and soon. Poor Kyrie.
Comment by Christine — April 23, 2008 @ 7:26 am
I want to thank you, Christie, for writinng in an earlier posting that it is very expensive for veterinarians to store a lot of different drugs.
Now I know why I was getting drops for my cat’s eyes only at the cat eye specialist. I was given ointment at the regular veterinarian’s office which was extremely hard to put across the eyeball and somewhat repelling to me to touch the eye, thinking I was injuring my cat.
I suppose the vets have their problems, too.
My cat is getting better, but she still has to take interfuron for her herpes and her immune system. Poor cat, she hates it all. At least she is opening up her eye.
Kyrie looks so sick, I hope you will find sucessful treatment or treatments.
Comment by Colorado Transplant — April 23, 2008 @ 7:43 am
I have looked heavily into “mutant bacteria that came into existence largely due to the widespread abuse of powerful drugs, most of it in livestock feed” on the assumption it was true. I found the evidence was weak at best. The most immediate cause seems to be people using antibiotics too often and *most* people stopping their medications too soon (when they feel better) and flushing the rest. If stock food is a contributor to resistent bacteria it is probably not anywhere near as important as human over-use and improper use by people. This is not letting them off the hook for propping up intensive practises and using antibiotics frovolously to improve feed conversion, but it is easier to blame groups we already don’t like that much than look at the data and follow the evidence baxck to our collective selves.
I am currently taking antibiotics for only the second time in my life and my doctor didn’t even *mention* the importance of finishing the prescription and disposing of excess drugs (the painkillers I didn’t use but had just in case) safely.
Comment by emily — April 23, 2008 @ 11:22 am
p.s. the evidence being that feed use is largely limited to different drugs from those used on people and strain tracking shows the bad bugs seem to be grown more often in people than animal reservoirs like pigs—even when present in both places. People just don’t contact farm animals that often and these bugs rarely get into our wounds from meat, eggs or milk. Our stomachs (e coli etc) yes, but not our wounds.
Comment by emily — April 23, 2008 @ 11:26 am
Emily, I think that’s missing the big picture I’m talking about, even if true, which I don’t accept — and I’ll explain that in a minute.
I didn’t say anything about humans getting sick from drug resistant bacteria. I said there was a global emergence of superbugs, and the rise in these hard-to-treat infections is part of that pattern.
However, I still don’t accept your premise even on its narrow terms. Fluoroquinolone resistance is extremely widespread in bacteria today — Baytril being a fluoroquinolone, as is the human drug cipro. Baytril was the drug my vet first put Kyrie on, but it’s now known that these bacteria rapidly become resistant to fluoroquinolones, including Baytril, even if initial testing indicates they’re sensitive to it.
And yet, when FDA announced in 2000 it was going to ban all use of fluoroquinolones in poultry feed, opposition in the industry was enormous. It took FIVE YEARS for that decision to be implemented, due to the that opposition. And yet, as “Fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter species and the withdrawal of fluoroquinolones from use in poultry: a public health success story” states:
Even if you and I didn’t hang out at poultry farms and get explosed to fluoroquinolone-resistant bacteria, it doesn’t matter. Those bacteria enter the environment, where they trade genes for drug resistance with other bacteria.
To overly-focus on one tiny piece of the puzzle is to miss the big picture.
Which was the point of my post. This is a huge problem that crosses all species and threatens the health and safety of all of us and our pets and livestock. It involves food safety, the revolving door between a number of industries including agribusiness and the drug companies with the agencies that regulate them.
Even if we stop misusing antibiotics personally — even if, like you, and like Kyrie herself, someone has never or rarely taken antibiotics — drug resistance is an environmental problem. And there is no question that the subtherapeutic use of antibiotics is a recipe for creating resistant organisms, whether they are given in livestock feed or the ER.
Comment by Christie Keith — April 23, 2008 @ 2:24 pm
The big picture is that all of these things have impacts to degrees that are frankly hard to judge. Part of what I am reacting to is a strand of not looking at the big picture but blaming ‘agribusiness’ (farmers? Big brands?) and the FDA (yes, clearly they want to poison us) rather than taking that extra step back and seeing all of the contributors including the urban and suburban pet owner. If anything rather than focussing on the evil ‘other’ focussing on our own part of the equation helps us take direct action. Because that last line seems to almost say ‘why should we change if it won’t fix the whole problem?’ — which I can tell you from direct experience (just a week ago at a meeting) is exactly what the agribusiness people are doing too. The pot and kettle can call each other black all they like, but will it move us forward?
Comment by emily — April 24, 2008 @ 7:15 am
What I guess I’m not getting here, Emily, is why discussing a problem becomes “blaming.” We all have a part in creating this mess — producers, regulators, consumers/citizens — and we all have a part in fixing it.
But we cannot as citizens do our part without understanding that there IS a problem, and what the problem is. And with all due respect, industry, industry trade groups and government regulators are extremely reluctant to divulge the information we need to make informed decisions when it comes to voting or buying.
And by the way, Emily, it would be nice if you were honest with the readers here as well, divulging who you work for (or at least, where you’re using a computer, according to your IP address) so we all can fairly evaluate what factors may go into your point of view.
Comment by Gina Spadafori — April 24, 2008 @ 7:25 am
The pot and kettle can call each other black all they like, but will it move us forward?
Of course I’m not literally saying “there’s nothing I can do.” That was a rhetorical device, as I suspect nearly everyone reading the entry realized.
I’m a journalist and a columnist and a blogger. What I “do” is write about things so people can think about these conditions and hopefully take action in their communities and their governments to change things.
What I’m pointing out, Emily, is the false equivalency of individuals with government agencies as well as giant industries,trade groups, and corporations, all with their teams of lobbyists, press relations experts, advertising agencies, and lawyers.
Take food safety. We find that our food supply has become contaminated with fecal bacteria. There is a quite justified campaign to inform individuals of this problem, and to encourage us to do things to counteract that problem in our own kitchens. So we’re told to use gloves and cook things more than we might normally cook them, and wipe our counters down with bleach and use disposable cutting boards and stop eating Ceasar salad and rare hamburger and eggs over easy. To never give our dogs a bone.
And we do those things.
But individuals have an additional option: To realize that there are industrial and corporate and yes, government reasons why there are feces in our hamburger.
The role of the individual here is not, as I see it, to let contaminated food be the norm in American grocery stores while the entire responsibility for safe handling devolves onto the home kitchen.
Of course I’m taking steps that the food I eat is safe in my own kitchen. But that’s not all I should be doing, because this is not a home kitchen problem. No, my act as an individual, my way of taking responsibility, is to demand answers to the simple question of why there’s poop in my dinner in the first place.
Fecal bacteria in the human food supply is not a home kitchen problem. Melamine in the pet food was not a home kitchen problem, either.
And superbugs are not a home medicine cabinet problem, even though people should, indeed, be using medications responsibly.
To say “The pot and kettle can call each other black all they like, but will it move us forward?” is the worse sort of disingenousness here. This isn’t pot v kettle; this is David v Goliath.
Comment by Christie Keith — April 24, 2008 @ 9:31 am
Christie, I’m not sure how effective they are, but silver sulphate products are used to treat and prevent infections in humans. There are a lot of sham products out there, but a medical grade silver product may be worth looking into if your options are narrowing, it certainly won’t hurt. Best wishes.
Comment by Angelique Lee — May 9, 2008 @ 6:46 pm