XPost: ba.politics, dc.media, soc.penpals   
   XPost: alt.burningman   
   From: vtan@ucla.edu   
      
   IF you walk into a farm-supply store today, you’re likely to   
   find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth   
   of poultry and livestock. That’s because decades of agricultural   
   research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in   
   young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds.   
   Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding   
   antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves. Dusty agricultural   
   journals attest to the ways in which the drugs can act like a   
   kind of superfood to produce cheap meat.   
      
   But what if that meat is us? Recently, a group of medical   
   investigators have begun to wonder whether antibiotics might   
   cause the same growth promotion in humans. New evidence shows   
   that America’s obesity epidemic may be connected to our high   
   consumption of these drugs. But before we get to those findings,   
   it’s helpful to start at the beginning, in 1948, when the wonder   
   drugs were new — and big was beautiful.   
      
   That year, a biochemist named Thomas H. Jukes marveled at a   
   pinch of golden powder in a vial. It was a new antibiotic named   
   Aureomycin, and Mr. Jukes and his colleagues at Lederle   
   Laboratories suspected that it would become a blockbuster,   
   lifesaving drug. But they hoped to find other ways to profit   
   from the powder as well. At the time, Lederle scientists had   
   been searching for a food additive for farm animals, and Mr.   
   Jukes believed that Aureomycin could be it. After raising chicks   
   on Aureomycin-laced food and on ordinary mash, he found that the   
   antibiotics did boost the chicks’ growth; some of them grew to   
   weigh twice as much as the ones in the control group.   
      
   Mr. Jukes wanted more Aureomycin, but his bosses cut him off   
   because the drug was in such high demand to treat human   
   illnesses. So he hit on a novel solution. He picked through the   
   laboratory’s dump to recover the slurry left over after the   
   manufacture of the drug. He and his colleagues used those   
   leftovers to carry on their experiments, now on pigs, sheep and   
   cows. All of the animals gained weight. Trash, it turned out,   
   could be transformed into meat.   
      
   You may be wondering whether it occurred to anyone back then   
   that the powders would have the same effect on the human body.   
   In fact, a number of scientists believed that antibiotics could   
   stimulate growth in children. From our contemporary perspective,   
   here’s where the story gets really strange: All this growth was   
   regarded as a good thing. It was an era that celebrated monster-   
   size animals, fat babies and big men. In 1955, a crowd gathered   
   in a hotel ballroom to watch as feed salesmen climbed onto a   
   scale; the men were competing to see who could gain the most   
   weight in four months, in imitation of the cattle and hogs that   
   ate their antibiotic-laced food. Pfizer sponsored the   
   competition.   
      
   In 1954, Alexander Fleming — the Scottish biologist who   
   discovered penicillin — visited the University of Minnesota. His   
   American hosts proudly informed him that by feeding antibiotics   
   to hogs, farmers had already saved millions of dollars in slop.   
   But Fleming seemed disturbed by the thought of applying that   
   logic to humans. “I can’t predict that feeding penicillin to   
   babies will do society much good,” he said. “Making people   
   larger might do more harm than good.”   
      
   Nonetheless, experiments were then being conducted on humans. In   
   the 1950s, a team of scientists fed a steady diet of antibiotics   
   to schoolchildren in Guatemala for more than a year,while   
   Charles H. Carter, a doctor in Florida, tried a similar regimen   
   on mentally disabled kids. Could the children, like the farm   
   animals, grow larger? Yes, they could.   
      
   Mr. Jukes summarized Dr. Carter’s research in a monograph on   
   nutrition and antibiotics: “Carter carried out a prolonged   
   investigation of a study of the effects of administering 75 mg   
   of chlortetracycline” — the chemical name for Aureomycin —   
   “twice daily to mentally defective children for periods of up to   
   three years at the Florida Farm Colony. The children were   
   mentally deficient spastic cases and were almost entirely   
   helpless,” he wrote. “The average yearly gain in weight for the   
   supplemented group was 6.5 lb while the control group averaged   
   1.9 lb in yearly weight gain.”   
      
   Researchers also tried this out in a study of Navy recruits.   
   “Nutritional effects of antibiotics have been noted for some   
   time” in farm animals, the authors of the 1954 study wrote. But   
   “to date there have been few studies of the nutritional effects   
   in humans, and what little evidence is available is largely   
   concerned with young children. The present report seems of   
   interest, therefore, because of the results obtained in a   
   controlled observation of several hundred young American males.”   
   The Navy men who took a dose of antibiotics every morning for   
   seven weeks gained more weight, on average, than the control   
   group.   
      
   MEANWHILE, in agricultural circles, word of the miracle spread   
   fast. Jay C. Hormel described imaginative experiments in   
   livestock production to his company’s stockholders in 1951; soon   
   the company began its own research. Hormel scientists cut baby   
   piglets out of their mothers’ bellies and raised them in   
   isolation, pumping them with food and antibiotics. And yes, this   
   did make the pigs fatter.   
      
   Farms clamored for antibiotic slurry from drug companies, which   
   was trucked directly to them in tanks. By 1954, Eli Lilly &   
   Company had created an antibiotic feed additive for farm   
   animals, as “an aid to digestion.” It was so much more than   
   that. The drug-laced feeds allowed farmers to keep their animals   
   indoors — because in addition to becoming meatier, the animals   
   now could subsist in filthy conditions. The stage was set for   
   the factory farm.   
      
   And yet, scientists still could not explain the mystery of   
   antibiotics and weight gain. Nor did they try, really. According   
   to Luis Caetano M. Antunes, a public health researcher at the   
   Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil, the attitude was, “Who cares   
   how it’s working?” Over the next few decades, while farms kept   
   buying up antibiotics, the medical world largely lost interest   
   in their fattening effects, and moved on.   
      
   In the last decade, however, scrutiny of antibiotics has   
   increased. Overuse of the drugs has led to the rise of   
   antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria — salmonella in factory   
   farms and staph infections in hospitals. Researchers have also   
   begun to suspect that it may shed light on the obesity epidemic.   
      
   In 2002 Americans were about an inch taller and 24 pounds   
   heavier than they were in the 1960s, and more than a third are   
   now classified as obese. Of course, diet and lifestyle are prime   
   culprits. But some scientists wonder whether there could be   
   other reasons for this staggering transformation of the American   
   body. Antibiotics might be the X factor — or one of them.   
      
   Martin J. Blaser, the director of the Human Microbiome Program   
   and a professor of medicine and microbiology at New York   
   University, is exploring that mystery. In 1980, he was the   
      
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