Why You Should Thank America For Superbugs


`Superbugs' that are now killing people around the world first appeared in America where antibiotics have for years been wildly over-prescribed and used in vast quantities by farmers anxious to boost up the bulk, and therefore the market value, of their animals. (In America over half of all the antibiotics sold are fed to healthy animals). The problem first became clear when it was noticed that the percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin had risen from 13% in 1960 to 91% in 1988.

To begin with, the new superbugs only caused problems within hospitals - where they caused many deaths among patients whose immune systems had been compromised by other diseases or by physical or mental stresses.

However, by the early 1990s the staphylococcal superbugs were appearing both inside and outside hospitals all around the world. The problem was so great that the extra costs incurred when doctors had to prescribe increasingly expensive antibiotics was beginning to add an enormous burden to all those responsible for providing health care facilities.

In America the extra cost of dealing with antibiotic resistant organisms was, as long ago as the end of the 1980s, estimated at being in excess of $30 billion a year. The dollar cost will now be significantly greater than that. The human cost is inestimable.

Doctors in America continue to over-prescribe antibiotics and farmers continue to give antibiotics to their animals in order to increase the animals' bulk and their profits.


Taken from `Rogue Nation' by Vernon Coleman, published by Blue Books 2003. `Rogue Nation' is available from the shop on this website. Copyright Vernon Coleman 2003


Copyright Vernon Coleman 2003