Great British Antibiotics

Following the deprivations of the Second World War, Britain struggled to stem the costs of decommissioning large parts of her military while rebuilding the national industry. Trying to prevent a rise in expensive food and feed imports following bad harvests, the government embarked on a program of subsidized agricultural expansion (chapter 6). Meanwhile, public consumption was held in check by maintaining wartime rationing. Ultimately, the prolonged disruption of international trade, costly colonial campaigns, and the Korean War made postwar rationing last longer than the entire Second World War. Food availability actually decreased between 1946 and 1948. It was only in 1954 that the British Ministry of Food (MoF) was dismantled along with its rationing system.¹ By this time, consumers were craving meat: between 1950 and 1970 UK meat consumption increased by 33.1 percent.²

Similar to the United States, officials and farmers did their best to satisfy rising demand. However, trade deficits and currency devaluations meant that the government had to balance the need for expanded animal production with the need to reduce expensive imports like feedstuffs (chapter 7). It is thus no coincidence that the end of British meat rationing coincided with the legalization of antibiotic feed supplements. In 1947, the Penicillin Act had attempted to curb AMR and protect limited supplies by making biological antibiotics only available via medical and veterinary prescriptions.³ However, in 1953, the Therapeutic Substances (Prevention of Misuse) Act (TSA) exempted the low-dosed nontherapeutic use of antibiotics for feed purposes from prescription requirements.

Initial public optimism about antibiotics’ introduction to agriculture matched that in the United States. Already accustomed to celebrating “British” miracle drugs,⁴ commentators had keenly followed US research and welcomed antibiotic use as a progressive way of increasing animal productivity and welfare. Following Jukes and Stokstad’s report on the antibiotic growth effect in early 1950, the left-leaning tabloid Daily Mirror published an article titled “A New Drug Speeds Pork Chops to Dining Table.”⁵ In Parliament, Conservative MP Rupert De la Bère immediately asked Labour’s minister of agriculture whether AGPs would also be tested in Britain.⁶ Although early feed trials proved inconclusive (chapter 6), British optimism about the new AGPs continued to grow. In 1951, the politically conservative Times described them as a “strange nutrition”⁷ with the potential to speed up animal growth and save feed. By the time of Parliament’s reading of the TSA in 1953, the clause licensing AGPs was popularly known as the “penicillin for pigs clause.”⁸ Enthusiastic reports subsequently appeared in the left-leaning Observer and the conservative-liberal Financial Times.⁹ British commentators also greeted antibiotics’ use in plant and egg production as well as in fodder and food preservation.¹⁰ In 1956, the Times claimed that antibiotic preservatives marked “the greatest advance in the field of processing perishable foods since the advent of refrigeration.”¹¹ The Financial Times covered the landing of the first antibiotic-preserved fish in Britain. US pharmaceutical manufacturers had worked with the British government to trial ice containing 3 to 5 parts per million of tetracycline to retard spoilage and keep fleets on the water for longer. Trials took place aboard the government’s research vessel the Sir William Hardy, which would later be sold to Greenpeace as the first Rainbow Warrior. Antibiotic-preserved cod, haddock, and flatfish landed by the vessel were proudly displayed in the ports of Aberdeen, Grimsby, and Hull.¹²

While most media reports mirrored US enthusiasm (chapter 2), there were also subtle differences. For one, British observers tended to emphasize antibiotics’ benefits for nutritional independence rather than their use against famine-fueled communism. Anxious about an alleged brain drain,¹³ others downplayed US contributions and viewed biological antibiotics as a quintessentially British technology that was now lining American pockets.¹⁴ Stagnating penicillin sales exacerbated this view. Following a dramatic increase of British production between 1947 and 1950,¹⁵ the US government’s decision to increase penicillin production in the face of the Korean War saturated 1950s markets. With revenues declining, British manufacturers had to find new antibiotic outlets. Major producers like Glaxo lobbied the British government to imitate the United States and loosen restrictions on antibiotic feeds for humans and animals.¹⁶ However, international competition remained stiff even after Britain legalized AGPs with US broad-spectrum drugs proving more popular than British-manufactured penicillin, streptomycin, and chloramphenicol (chapter 6).

Americans’ success was in part due to skillful marketing. Responding to antibiotic patriotism, US producers subcontracted British companies like Boots to produce tetracyclines, which could now be branded as British.¹⁷ When Pfizer opened a terramycin (oxytetracycline)-plant in Sandwich in 1955, Pfizer’s vice president stressed the plant’s Britishness: “although the installation was financed by the United States it was partly designed and wholly built and operated by the British.”¹⁸ Courting clients inside and outside agricultural circles, US companies also placed expensive advertisements in national newspapers. In 1953, Lederle purchased a large advertisement section in the Times ahead of the launch of its chlortetracycline-based feed AUROFAC 2A.¹⁹ Sales personnel were also in high demand: in 1956, Pfizer announced that the “world’s largest producer of antibiotics” was “expanding its Agricultural Sales Force” and looking for male British personnel with an agricultural background and experience in “modern sales techniques.”²⁰ Three days later, Lederle announced that it too was looking for “top-class Sales Representatives who will sell Animal Feed additives such as Aurofac.”²¹ Celebrating its new Gosport plant in 1958, Cyanamid claimed that AUROFAC and other products were “bringing untold benefits to almost every sphere of life,” “Cyanamid contrives to make a new discovery almost every day, transmuting the hopes of yesterday into the realities of today.”²²

Increasing antibiotic consumption and improving economic outlooks gradually dispersed anti-American sentiments in the British press. By the early 1960s, positive media reports presented both US and UK antibiotics as part of a safe and efficient movement to industrialize food production and to secure influence in a rapidly decolonizing world.²³ In 1962, the Financial Times reported on a Pig Industry Development Authority survey of 20,000 litters comprising about 200,000 pigs: whereas pigs fed no antibiotics weighed 38.1 pounds after eight weeks, those fed antibiotics weighed 38.7 pounds. According to industry figures, antibiotic supplements created 1s 6d additional worth per piglet as a result of saved feedstuffs.²⁴ Similar reports on an antibiotic-optimized era of livestock production appeared in the Times.²⁵ Drug manufacturers also continued to hammer home the message of antibiotics and modern agriculture as preconditions to ethical, safe, and plenty food. In 1961, Cyanamid started an aggressive advertisement campaign for aureomycin. One ad showed a laughing pig exclaiming, “Yes, I’m a Scientific Pig” and presented agricultural antibiotics as a progressive way of improving animals’ well-being and farmers’ profits: “Indeed, to quote the vernacular, pigs in Britain ‘never had it so good’ …”²⁶ Further commercials featured grateful cows cured of mastitis and praised aureomycin’s role in preventing any “disastrous rise of mortality”²⁷ in modern poultry production.

FIGURE 5.1

Cyanamid advertisement, “Yes, I’m a Scientific Pig,” The Times (London), April 14, 1961.

A Plethora of Concerns

Not everybody was happy about the rapid expansion of agricultural antibiotic use. During the 1950s, three interrelated yet distinct strands of antibiotic criticism emerged in Britain’s public sphere: one group of critics attacked antibiotics’ adulterating presence in foodstuffs; a second group of critics began to warn about the spread of AMR on farms; a third group condemned antibiotics as accomplices to the deplorable conditions of animals in intensive housing units. Depending on one’s position within the various opposition camps, antibiotics’ image could vary from dangerous adulterator to endangered miracle substance or partner in cruelty. While disparate risk perceptions fragmented early protest, their fusion during the 1960s would pose a far more systemic challenge to agricultural antibiotic use than “narrow” residue criticism in the United States.

A groundswell of elite British antibiotic criticism had existed even before the 1953 TSA. In 1951, former Labour Parliamentary Secretary Lord Douglas of Barloch warned his peers in the House of Lords against “poisonous chemicals in the growing and preparation of foodstuffs.”²⁸ Focusing on antibiotics, DDT, and hormones, Barloch called “for strict control over all processes which might affect the natural quality of food.”²⁹ Two years later, Barloch’s Conservative colleague Lord John Justyn Llewellin expressed concern about allergic reactions caused by penicillin residues in meat.³⁰ Similar fears were voiced in the House of Commons. In February 1953, Conservative MP Anthony Hurd asked whether there was sufficient evidence that AGP residues would not endanger the public.³¹ One week later, Conservative MP Dodds asked Conservative Minister of Agriculture Thomas Dugdale how consumers could be protected when “famous experts … have declared that more harm than good”³² would result from the TSA. Seconding his colleague, Conservative MP Colonel Gomme-Duncan asked “whether we have all gone mad to want to give penicillin to pigs to fatten them?”³³ Concerns were not limited to Parliament. Following a 1952 report on the planned TSA,³⁴ readers of the social-liberal Observer worried that AGPs might destroy the intestinal flora’s capacity for producing vitamins and lead to infertility and degeneration.³⁵

However, in contrast to the United States, fears of antibiotic residues failed to dominate public perceptions of antibiotic risk. British consumers had a long history of remaining less concerned about invisible microbial or chemical hazards than other countries.³⁶ This does not mean that residue fears were absent—they were simply less pronounced. During the 1950s, deaths resulting from pesticide-contaminated Welsh flour and the radioactive contamination of milk following the 1957 Windscale fire did make national headlines.³⁷ British supporters of “pure” and “natural” food had also published numerous books with colorful titles like Constipation and Our Civilisation³⁸ on the dangers of artificial additives, chemicals, and drugs since the interwar period. However, as in the case of 1950s detections of penicillin in British milk (chapter 6), residues did not provoke widespread anxiety.

It was only around 1960 that agricultural antibiotics’ “toxic association” with other hazardous chemicals became more pronounced. Often enough, British commentators imitated contemporary US coverage. Referring to American residue scandals, a series of articles on “What’s in our food” in the conservative tabloid the Daily Mail warned readers that there were two kinds of modern food-related dangers: malnutrition and the overconsumption of food sprayed with “poisonous insecticides and weedkillers” and produced by animals, which had been reared in darkness and fed “tranquilisers, antibiotics, hormones.”³⁹ In 1961, a Times interview exhorted farmers and veterinarians to protect consumers from drinking “diluted pus with noxious additions such as penicillin.”⁴⁰ Media concerns about residues peaked in 1963 when the Milk and Milk Products Technical Advisory Committee reported that 14 percent of English and 11.6 percent of Scottish milk tested positive for antibiotics.⁴¹ Although officials introduced US-style monitoring (chapter 7), the 1963 scandal triggered a longer-term increase of public criticism of conventional agriculture and antibiotic adulterants.⁴² According to the Guardian’s Michael Winstanley, the days of “pure” food were gone.⁴³ Meanwhile, purveyors of antibiotic-free organic food like the Soil Association and Cranks restaurant in London experienced an unprecedented surge of media coverage—often also in conservative publications like the Spectator or Daily Mail.⁴⁴

Residue warnings in the media were accompanied by a series of critical bestsellers. In 1960, physician Franklin Bicknell published Chemicals in Food and in Farm Produce.⁴⁵ Rehashing warnings from his The English Complaint (1952)⁴⁶ and attacking a wide range of chemicals, Bicknell devoted a whole chapter to agricultural antibiotics and the long-term hazards of antibiotic exposure via milk, meat, and eggs.⁴⁷ Remarkably, he also linked discussions of residues with warnings about wider agricultural AMR selection: “by 1956 penicillin-resistant staphylococci were present in 47 per cent of samples of milk in Dorset, and resistant [E. coli] strains have been found in the faeces of 36 per cent of pigs going to a bacon factory …. Urban England could cynically ignore this farming problem were not our farms still the basis of our food and therefore unavoidably a possible source of human infection.”⁴⁸ Warning that regulators were only focusing on hospitals as places of AMR selection, Bicknell was especially concerned about antibiotic preservatives’ creation of “reservoirs of resistant bacteria”: “all the fish sheds and butchers’ shops and poultry packing stations will harbour resistant bacteria; … however carefully the use of antibiotics is in theory controlled, in practice they will just be sloshed over any food.”⁴⁹ Similar concerns were voiced by natural foods advocate Doris Grant. Quoting Bicknell, Grant’s Housewives Beware (1958) and Your Bread and Your Health (1961) warned about AGPs and antibiotic preservatives. In chapters titled “Beware of the Dragon”⁵⁰ and “The Poisons on Your Plate,”⁵¹ Grant discussed a possible correlation between AGP use and animal illness as well as the use of antibiotics to mask disease in abattoirs. According to Grant, “the only way to escape this particular aspect of our twentieth-century chemical orgy is to become vegetarian.”⁵²

Despite their increasing prominence, concerns about antibiotic residues, however, failed to displace other strands of public antibiotic criticism. Discussed in more detail in chapter 7, the late 1950s saw a growing number of British researchers point to agricultural AMR selection as a potential human health hazard. Experts’ use of national surveillance data to demolish existing distinctions between AMR on farms and in hospitals led to fierce public debates about who should have access to antibiotics. In contrast to the threshold-oriented thinking of their US colleagues, British researchers deemed low-dosed AGPs particularly likely to select for AMR. Veterinarians in particular highlighted dangers resulting from farmers’ unsupervised use of AGPs and therapeutic antibiotics—even though the latter were often sold by veterinarians.⁵³ Speaking at the 1959 congress of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), the deputy director of the government’s Central Veterinary Laboratory (CVL), E. L. Taylor, warned that AGPs eliminated competing microorganisms and enabled resistant pathogens to spread.⁵⁴ In early 1960, Britain’s Agricultural Research Council (ARC) suggested a general review of medical feed additives. The government subsequently launched a joint inquiry into agricultural antibiotic use. Chaired by the recently retired NFU president James Turner—now Lord Netherthorpe—the committee sat between 1960 and 1962.⁵⁵ Although medical journals like the Lancet continued to print complacent and even positive reviews of agricultural antibiotic use,⁵⁶ the rise of powerful British AMR concerns stood in contrast to Americans’ ongoing focus on residues.

Animal welfare concerns constituted a third distinct strand of public antibiotic criticism. In Britain, animal protection had a long and illustrious history. Starting in the late eighteenth century, an increasing number of Britons campaigned for the improved treatment of animals. Founded in 1824, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was the first organized body for animal protection. During the second half of the nineteenth century, anti-vivisectionist and animal protection campaigns for horses and other animals commanded considerable public support and resulted in legislative reforms. In 1911, the Protection of Animals Act was passed to prevent willful cruelty to animals in public spaces. Their interest in animals not only set Britons apart from other nations but also led to patriotic self-descriptions as being a “nation of animal lovers.” This alleged national trait was reinforced during the two world wars with officials and campaigners emphasizing British compassion in opposition to German cruelty.⁵⁷

After 1945, notions of being a nation of animal lovers increasingly clashed with farmyard realities. Concerned about new production methods, a growing number of activists and journalists attacked antibiotics as facilitators of systematic welfare abuse. Although intensive farming was not as widespread as activists claimed (chapter 6), the so-called factory farm soon turned into the main target of rising welfare criticism.⁵⁸ In 1959, Observer journalist Clifford Selly described the “highly artificial conditions” in which modern “ill-fated chickens” lived.⁵⁹ Never seeing daylight, broilers were “heavily drugged to keep them alive” and were victims of a system “more akin to the factory than the farm.”⁶⁰ Over the next two weeks, Selly’s article provoked passionate reader responses both in favour and against intensive farming. G. B. Houston accused the “poor, deluded city dweller” of facilitating the production of “drugged and misused broiler fowls”⁶¹ while F. A. Dorris Smith recommended visits to broiler houses by women’s organizations to “bring this abomination to an end.”⁶² Another reader specifically blamed antibiotics for enabling harmful practices.⁶³ Although establishment organizations like the RSPCA initially distanced themselves from “factory farm” criticism,⁶⁴ antibiotics’ association with welfare neglect posed a serious threat to the drugs’ public image.

By the early 1960s, three distinct strands of antibiotic criticism were thus gaining ground in Britain. Readers of conservative and liberal newspapers were regularly learning about the hazards of antibiotic residues as well as about AMR selection on farms. At the same time, the nation of animal lovers was coming to terms with antibiotics’ ambivalent capacity to provide animal welfare and enable its absence. However, without a common reform agenda to unite them, the distinct strands of public antibiotic criticism remained too disjointed to challenge growing antibiotic infrastructures in agriculture or ongoing antibiotic optimism in large parts of the media.

A Fusion of Concerns

A more holistic framing of antibiotic risks occurred between 1964 and 1966: British research on “infectious resistance” and the publication of Ruth Harrison’s bestselling Animal Machines⁶⁵ led to a fusion of preexisting AMR and welfare warnings around the potent symbol of the “factory farm.” Resulting calls for systemic antibiotic reform were amplified by fatal outbreaks of resistant gastroenteritis among newborns.

The 1964 publication of Animal Machines was the first event to shift public discourse. A Quaker and vegetarian, the book’s author, Ruth Harrison, descended from a family with close ties to the avant-garde Whitechapel Boys and author George Bernard Shaw. She had served in the Friends Ambulance Unit during World War II and then studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1960, a leaflet against animal cruelty on “factory farms” made Harrison take on the cause of animal welfare and write Animal Machines. In her book, Harrison combined easy-to-read summaries of scientific findings with vivid descriptions of animals’ plight in factory-like production systems. She also linked animal welfare concerns with a more general consumer and environmentalist critique of factory farming. Appearing one year after the British publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Animal Machines not only contained a foreword by Carson but had in fact been edited by Carson herself. The book’s authority was further strengthened by a preface from Sydney Jennings, a former president of the British Veterinary Association (BVA).⁶⁶

Claiming that meat eating had become an ethical and health hazard, Animal Machines explicitly associated modern farmers’ antibiotic-dependency with animal cruelty, drug residues, and AMR.⁶⁷ The book underlined its claims by using shocking pictures of conditions in “factory farms” and by referencing Silent Spring, the recent milk scandal, and medical AMR warnings. For Harrison, it was “ironic to think that while authorities are steadily urging that antibiotics be used only with great discrimination on the grounds of dangerous resistance building up, the agricultural authorities are encouraging even wider use. Perhaps, these two should get together some time to discuss the matters, before it is too late.”⁶⁸ According to Animal Machines, agricultural antibiotics and “factory farming” were synonymous with health, environmental, and ethical problems. This fusion of concerns was reinforced by Rachel Carson’s foreword. For Carson, the days of pastoral agriculture were over. Instead of animals wandering over green fields, producers had erected “factorylike buildings in which animals live out their wretched existence.”⁶⁹ As a biologist, Carson found it inconceivable that such animals could produce healthy food. Establishments were regularly swept through with diseases, and were “kept going only by the continuous administration of antibiotics.”⁷⁰ Previously associated with promoting health and spreading prosperity, agricultural antibiotics were now portrayed as upholding an unhealthy and “unnatural” system of dark satanic mills.

While protracted negotiations prevented its publication in the United States,⁷¹ the public attention paid to Animal Machines in Britain was impressive. This was in part due to a pre-publishing campaign in the left-leaning Observer. Titled “Inside the Animal Factories”⁷² and “Fed to Death,”⁷³ articles by Harrison introduced readers to the main claims of her book. In her first article, Harrison accused the “factory farmer and the agri-industrial world behind him”⁷⁴ of acknowledging cruelty only when profitability ceased. As long as animal growth remained stable, rearing systems were not questioned. Antibiotics were “incorporated in [animals’] feed and heavier doses of drugs [were] given at the least sign of flagging.”⁷⁵ Focusing on poultry, Harrison claimed that young birds suffering from respiratory diseases or cancer often ended up on consumers’ tables—the birds’ ill health masked by antibiotics.⁷⁶ In her second article, Harrison focused on the intensive rearing of calves in darkened sties. Calves’ diets consisted almost “exclusively of barley, with added minerals and vitamins, antibiotics, tranquilisers and hormones.”⁷⁷ Living in these conditions, some calves became blind and many suffered from liver-damage and pneumonia: “their muscles become flabby and they put on weight rapidly, but they are not healthy.”⁷⁸ Using more antibiotics to keep animals alive, farmers and veterinarians contributed to a race “between disease and new drugs.”⁷⁹ Quoting veterinary practitioners and the first Netherthorpe report, Harrison warned about AMR and residue-laden “tasteless meat”⁸⁰ from factory farms.

Reactions to Harrison’s claims ranged from furious denial to emphatic support. Seven days after publishing the second article, the Observer had received around 320 letters.⁸¹ Many expressed outrage: one reader compared animals’ suffering to child labor;⁸² a second reader demanded labeling products from intensive farms;⁸³ a third reader urged compatriots to imagine pets incarcerated in factory farms.⁸⁴ While RSPCA Chief Secretary John Hall praised Harrison,⁸⁵ animal health lecturer David Sainsbury accused her of presenting a “grossly distorted picture of what is actually happening.”⁸⁶ In Wales, the dean of Llandaff rehashed the “nation of animal lovers” theme by comparing factory farms to Nazi concentration camps—thereby “othering” intensive farming as barbaric and anti-British: in a speech covered by both the Daily Mirror and Guardian, the dean also warned his congregation about antibiotic and hormone residues.⁸⁷ The trope of antibiotic-abuse on “farm Belsens”⁸⁸ was powerful in both left-leaning and conservative circles. After publishing a misogynist attack on the “fertile mind” of the “housewife, mother, and vegetarian”⁸⁹ Ruth Harrison, the Daily Mail was inundated by letters condemning its supposed endorsement of materialism and un-British barbarism on KZ-like farms.⁹⁰ Subsequent reporting in the Mail was notably more subdued.⁹¹

Although Karen Sayer and Abigail Woods have shown that intensive indoor farming was by no means ubiquitous,⁹² debates about factory farming soon penetrated national politics. In Parliament, Labour MP Joyce Butler launched an inquiry into the agricultural use of chemicals and residues in food.⁹³ Public calls for the labeling of “factory farmed” food were examined by the British Food Standards Committee.⁹⁴ When opening the 1965 Royal Dairy Show, Prince Philip was handed a copy of Animal Machines.⁹⁵ Cross-party pressure ultimately forced a reluctant government to launch a review of animal welfare led by medical scientist Francis W. Rogers Brambell.⁹⁶ Published in 1965, the influential Brambell report stated that animal welfare was more than the absence of physical pain and also comprised mental and behavioral aspects. Animals should have the freedom to stand up, lie down, turn around, groom themselves, and stretch their limbs. Although the drugs were not included in the committee’s brief, the Brambell report commented on antibiotics’ beneficial role in protecting animals from disease but found itself unable to assess long-term effects on public health.⁹⁷ This risk assessment was about to change.

In the same year that Animal Machines linked AMR and cruelty allegations, Britain’s last major typhoid outbreak in Aberdeen brought home the microbial hazards of industrialized food production. The responsible Salmonella Typhi strain had spread via contaminated Argentinian meat but had proven susceptible to antibiotic treatment with chloramphenicol (chloromycetin).⁹⁸ However, experts worried that future episodes might prove chloramphenicol resistant. Resistant typhoid outbreaks with higher fatality rates were already being observed in India, West Africa, Greece, and the Middle East.⁹⁹ One of the concerned experts was Ephraim Saul (E. S.) Anderson. As director of the Public Health Laboratory Service’s (PHLS) enteric reference laboratory, Anderson had provided expertise to the recent Netherthorpe review of agricultural antibiotics and advised during the Aberdeen typhoid outbreak.¹⁰⁰ Anderson’s ability to draw on extensive bacteriological resources and growing skepticism regarding agricultural antibiotic use would play a decisive role in creating widespread public support for AMR-focused antibiotic reform.

In 1965, Anderson and geneticist Naomi Datta published a paper titled “Resistance to Pencillins and Its Transfer in Enterobacteriaceae” in the Lancet. In their paper, Anderson and Datta reported the discovery of transferable AMR against multiple antibiotics in Salmonella typhimurium isolates from humans and a pig. S. typhimurium was a close relative of typhoid and a leading cause of food poisoning. Isolated plasmids (chapter 1) had the same AMR patterns and were likely related to each other. Given pigs’ role as S. typhimurium reservoirs, the authors speculated whether transferable AMR might have first arisen on farms and then spread to human settings. In the laboratory, Anderson and Datta had also managed to transfer multiple-resistance from wild-type S. typhimurium isolates to sensitive Escherichia coli strains, which in turn transferred multiple-resistance to sensitive S. typhimurium cultures.¹⁰¹ The fact that bacteria could exchange genetic information was not new. Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum had observed bacterial conjugation in 1946, and Tsutomu Watanabe had shown that plasmids could encode resistance to multiple antibiotics during the late 1950s.¹⁰² What was new about Anderson and Datta’s 1965 paper was that horizontal resistance selection and transfer also occurred in nonhuman settings and could cross over to bacteria in human populations. Popularizing the dangers of horizontal gene transfer and nonhuman AMR reservoirs, Anderson and Datta warned: “Many of the drug-resistant strains of S. typhimurium causing human infection may originate in livestock.”¹⁰³

Three months later, Anderson published a second paper together with M. J. Lewis in Nature.¹⁰⁴ Reporting a dramatic rise of AMR in S. typhimurium phage Type 29, the authors linked the spread of type 29 to calf transports and warned against the “infective hazards of intensive farming.”¹⁰⁵ By the end of the year, Anderson published an even more direct attack on agricultural antibiotics in the British Medical Journal (BMJ): between December 1964 and November 1965, Anderson had collected over 1,200 animal (mainly calf) and 500 human samples of type 29 S. typhimurium. Of these, 97.6 percent were drug-resistant. In contrast to earlier papers, Anderson was able to provide concrete evidence of AMR transfer from animal to human bacteria: human and animal S. typhimurium samples showed similar resistance to furazolidone, a drug used exclusively in veterinary medicine. Anderson was certain that of the analyzed samples “most human infections of undetermined source were bovine in origin.”¹⁰⁶ Anderson’s data prompted the BMJ’s editorial to wonder whether the risks of veterinary ampicillin use—the other antibiotic of choice against typhoid—could be so great that “it may perhaps be thought advisable to abandon this form of treatment.”¹⁰⁷

The public impact of Anderson’s AMR warnings was impressive. Published only one year after Animal Machines, scenarios of “infective resistance” underlined Ruth Harrison’s criticism of intensive farming and were seemingly corroborated by other international studies showing rising AMR in E. coli, Salmonella, and Staphylococci.¹⁰⁸ In popular discourse, the “factory farm” became firmly connoted as a place of dubious welfare and dangerous bacteria. In February 1965, a Times report suggested “that antibiotics should be kept well away from livestock food.”¹⁰⁹ Two months later, the Daily Mail reported on a medical conference at the Yorkshire Institute of Agriculture. A panel on “chemical farming”¹¹⁰ had called for residue curbs and AMR-focused restrictions of medically relevant antibiotics. By June 1965, the Labour government was facing calls from its own MPs to investigate AGPs’ potential hazards.¹¹¹ In November, the Observer blamed “super-farms”¹¹² for AMR. According to the Times, Anderson’s findings and new research by veterinary bacteriologists necessitated a wider “reappraisal of the use of antibiotics.”¹¹³ Meanwhile, another Observer article explicitly warned against “factory farm bacteria.”¹¹⁴ Whereas AMR warnings did not resonate strongly in the residue-focused United States (chapter 2), the combined force of Animal Machines and “infective resistance’ led to the formation of an AMR-focused risk episteme in Britain.

This risk episteme also influenced Britain’s organic sector. By the late 1960s, publications like The Wholefood Finder referred to AMR and the “cruelties of factory farming”¹¹⁵ before detailing the Soil Association’s new definition of organic food. Relying heavily on Animal Machines and going beyond US publications’ focus on residues, the Soil Association’s “wholefood standards” required that animals be fed organic feeds and kept in a free environment defined according to Brambell-inspired comfort regulations. Organic products had to be free of antibiotics and other chemicals. On farms, antibiotics and other drugs should not be used routinely but only “in an extreme emergency.”¹¹⁶

British officials similarly revaluated existing antibiotic policies. In spring 1965, the British government reacted to Anderson’s AMR warnings by reconvening its Netherthorpe committee on AGPs (chapter 7). In January 1966, the Netherthorpe committee called for a new committee to reevaluate agricultural antibiotics in general.¹¹⁷ While the government was slow to respond to this demand, new studies, ongoing media reports, and parliamentary inquiries kept the issue of “infective resistance” alive.¹¹⁸ In 1966, veterinary researcher Herbert Williams Smith published a study showing that transferable plasmid-mediated resistance against multiple antibiotics was common in pathogenic E. coli isolated from both humans and pigs, calves, and fowls receiving antibiotics: “The high incidence of resistant strains to a large number of drugs and the complex resistance patterns of some of the strains was a disquieting feature of this survey, particularly as the diseases caused are acute and severe to the extent that they may terminate fatally if the drug with which they are first treated is not active against the infecting strain; the result of sensitivity tests cannot be awaited before commencing treatment.”¹¹⁹ The Guardian’s Anthony Tucker and Bernard Dixon from the New Scientist— both allies of E. S. Anderson—used scientific warnings to press for antibiotic reform.¹²⁰ Dixon in particular attacked “the irritating British habit of seeking expert guidance on a technical matter and then pigeon-holing the advice when it comes.”¹²¹ Citing Anderson and Williams Smith, Dixon referred to the danger of multi-resistant E. coli strains causing neonatal diarrhea in babies.¹²² By December 1967, these warnings sounded tragically prophetic. Described by Robert Bud in chilling detail, multi-resistant E. coli 0119 and 0128 caused a severe outbreak of gastroenteritis among infants in the northeastern town of Middlesbrough. Poor hospital hygiene and transferring infected infants to other hospitals spread the infection. Fifteen infants died.¹²³

Although there were no proven links, preconditioned British readers connected the multi-resistant Middlesbrough strains to intensive farming and agricultural antibiotic use. It seemed as though there was no end of dangers accruing from factory farms. Following heated exchanges between veterinary science lecturers and organic campaigners,¹²⁴ an article in the London Illustrated News linked the Teesside epidemic to agricultural antibiotic use: “one cannot help wondering why man should take the chance of placing himself in danger of returning to conditions of the pre-antibiotic era when, for example, the death of fourteen babies from gastro-enteritis would certainly not have made news headlines.”¹²⁵ In February 1968, a BMJ review of the Middlesbrough outbreak by E. S. Anderson poured further oil onto the fire of speculation. Although he noted that it was not possible to distinguish between R-factors of human and animal origins, Anderson warned that the transferable AMR of the Middlesbrough strains might well have originated in nonpathogenic E. coli on farms:

The risk to man that arises from the too free use of antibiotics in human medicine is obvious …. It should be remembered, however, that they could also have arisen in livestock as the result of antibiotic malpractice …, which has made it practically certain that not only multiple-drug-resistant pathogens such as Salmonella typhimurium but also multiresistant non-pathogenic E. coli are transmitted from livestock to man, the latter on a large-scale …. It is pointed out that restricting of the use of antibiotics in man and animals is overdue.¹²⁶

The Middlesbrough epidemic put immense pressure on the British government to implement the reconvened Netherthorpe committee’s suggestions and launch a wider review of agricultural antibiotic use.¹²⁷ Appointed in July 1968 and announcing its findings in November 1969, the Joint Committee on the Use of Antibiotics in Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine—the so-called Swann committee—divided antimicrobial substances into therapeutic and nontherapeutic antibiotics.¹²⁸ While therapeutic antibiotics were relevant to human medicine, nontherapeutic antibiotics were considered medically irrelevant. Only nontherapeutic antibiotics below certain doses were to be allowed in growth promoter feeds. Medically relevant penicillin, chlortetracycline, and oxytetracycline were to be banned from AGPs. The Swann committee, however, left many other areas of agricultural antibiotic use untouched: it merely cautioned against the use of chloramphenicol in veterinary medicine and did not address ongoing veterinary prescriptions of now restricted medically relevant antibiotics (chapter 7).¹²⁹

Facing substantial public pressure—not least because Michael Swann, the committee’s head, had noted that the Middlesbrough strains might have originated on farms—¹³⁰ the British government hastily committed to implementing the Swann report. Despite protests by US manufacturers,¹³¹ the Swann recommendations were endorsed by nearly all segments of the British media. Most commentators explicitly noted that the proposed AGP restrictions were based on precautionary risk predictions rather than hard evidence of AMR-related harm. They were also aware that the Swann proposals left most other aspects of agricultural antibiotic use unchanged. While a Times editorial lauded the decision to limit laypersons’ access to therapeutic substances,¹³² agricultural correspondent Leonard Amey noted that a more ambitious complete ban of antibiotics would have been politically unfeasible and could have jeopardized British intensive animal production.¹³³ This continued tolerance of many other forms of agricultural antibiotic use was criticized by the Guardian.¹³⁴ However, overall, even critical voices were satisfied that agricultural AMR selection had now been successfully addressed in Britain.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the 1960s thus saw initial public enthusiasm about agricultural antibiotics become ambivalent. However, antibiotic perceptions were not the same in the United States and the United Kingdom. Economic constraints and accusations of US profits accruing from “British science” had already led to a different tone of British reporting during the 1950s. But it was in the field of risk perceptions that transatlantic views of agricultural antibiotic use differed most. In the United States, deep-seated concerns about food adulteration led to a framing of antibiotic risk nearly exclusively in terms of antibiotics’ potential presence as invisible residues (chapter 2). A very different risk episteme emerged in the United Kingdom when traditional animal welfare concerns fused with new “infective resistance” warnings under the dystopian umbrella of the factory farm. This episteme framed antibiotic risk as AMR spreading from cruel factory farms to humans. On both sides of the Atlantic, interpretations of antibiotic risk were thus influenced by their alignment with already existing deep-seated cultural risk narratives. The resulting national risk epistemes exerted a powerful influence on agricultural and political decision-making.