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Pyrrhic Progress

The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production

Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

.

New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press; .

Pyrrhic Progress analyses over half a century of antibiotic use, regulation, and resistance in US and British food production. Mass-introduced after 1945, antibiotics helped revolutionize post-war agriculture. Food producers used antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, protect plants, preserve food, and promote animals’ growth. Many soon became dependent on routine antibiotic use to sustain and increase production. The resulting growth of antibiotic infrastructures came at a price. Critics blamed antibiotics for leaving dangerous residues in food, enabling bad animal welfare, and selecting for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria, which could no longer be treated with antibiotics. Pyrrhic Progress reconstructs the complicated negotiations that accompanied this process of risk prioritization between consumers, farmers, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. Unsurprisingly, solutions differed: while Europeans implemented precautionary antibiotic restrictions to curb AMR, consumer concerns and cost-benefit assessments made US regulators focus on curbing drug residues in food. The result was a growing divergence of antibiotic stewardship and a rise of AMR. Kirchhelle’s comprehensive analysis of evolving non-human antibiotic use and the historical complexities of antibiotic stewardship provides important insights for current debates on the global burden of AMR.

Contents

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kirchhelle, Claas, 1987-author.

Title: Pyrrhic progress: the history of antibiotics in Anglo-American food production / Claas Kirchhelle.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Critical issues in health and medicine | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009912 | ISBN 9780813591476 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813591483 (cloth: alk. paper)

Subjects: | MESH: Anti-Bacterial Agents—history | Drug Resistance, Microbial | Food Safety | Legislation, Drug—history | Agriculture—history | History, 20th Century | History, 21st Century | United Kingdom | United States

Classification: LCC RM267 | NLM QV 11 FA1 | DDC 615.7/922—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009912

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

Copyright © 2020 by Claas Kirchhelle.

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Monographs, or book chapters, which are outputs of Wellcome Trust funding have been made freely available as part of the Wellcome Trust's open access policy

Bookshelf ID: NBK554200PMID: 32101389

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