19. Chemo, Superbugs and Diet

     The ultimate superbug that is resistant to the ultimate antibiotic has reached Europe in an apparently inexorable global spread from China.

     In November the medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases reported that researchers in China had discovered bacteria with a dangerous new antibiotic-resistance gene that is spreading from livestock to people in China. This newly identified gene, called MCR-1, is on a mobile piece of DNA known as a plasmid that can copy itself and jump from bacterium to bacterium, spreading antibiotic resistance; the modern superbug.

     Mobile resistance genes spread quickly in the modern world of global traffic; riding in people, animals, and food across continents. MCR-1 bestows resistance to the antibiotic colistin, which, although it has been around for 50 years, is considered the last drug available to treat some deadly infections. It actually fell out of favour due to kidney toxicity and was largely replaced by aminoglycoside antibiotics such a streptomycin, which might explain why it is still effective.

     Colistin is used extensively in animal agriculture in China, where this superbug first appeared and made its jump from animals to humans, and has now been found on a person in Denmark.  
Colistin is also approved for use in factory farming in the European Union and unless action is taking quickly to ban the indiscriminate use of it and other antibiotics in animal agriculture and aquaculture, our livestock production facilities will become breeding grounds for colistin resistant and other multidrug resistant bacteria that will inevitably enter into our food supply and humans.

     Antibiotics such as colistin are essential infection suppressors in chemotherapy treatment, which indiscriminately kills not only cancer cells but also the patient’s immune system. If we cannot contain the spread of bacteria resistant to colistin, and other antibiotics, we could face increasing numbers of untreatable infections afflicting cancer patients at a time when they are at their most vulnerable. Transplant patients taking immuno-suppressant anti-rejection drugs are equally at risk.

     That being said, we need to concentrate on four things to stop cancer:  cancer prevention, research into effective treatment for pre-cancerous states, seek alternative cures to chemotherapy, and make more sensible use of our available antibiotic arsenal

There is some movement in this direction:

Prevention: There is a growing understanding of the importance of lifestyle and diet on prevention of a number of cancers, as advocated in this blog. Carcinogenic pesticides are now understood to cause inflammation leading to cancers such as bowel cancer when introduced into the human food chain via animal feed. There is a growing awareness of the effects of pesticides on our health  and increasing demand for Non-GMO and organic food in our shops and supermarkets.

Treatment: As noted elsewhere under Research, the University of Manchester Viral Oncology Research Laboratories announce encouraging research results into an effective answer to cervical cancer at its treatable pre-cancerous stage.

Cure: Associated US companies AddVie and J & J have just announced excellent trial results for a new drug that significantly reduces death risk and disease progression vs chemotherapy in late stage leukaemia patients.

Further Reading 

Gene Watch  GM crops and foods in Europe and UK.  

GM Freeze  Where to buy non-GM fed animal produce UK.

Non-GMO Shopping Guide USA Listing.

Soil Association  Anti-biotics, farm animals and the need for change.

The Lancet Infectious Diseases :  Colistin resistance: a major breach in our last line of defence.

Breastcancer.org : How Chemotherapy Affects the Immune System.

Manchester 1824 :  HIV Drug used to reverse effects of virus that causes cervical cancer.

Reuters  Trials Drug cuts death risk vs chemo.

18. Frankenfish are here! Farmed Salmon and Cancer

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now approved the first genetically modified food animal for farming; an Atlantic salmon inserted with genes from Chinook salmon and eelpout (an eel-like fish) to make it grow twice as fast as natural wild salmon. The genetically modified salmon's sex hormones have also been manipulated to ensure they're all female and sterile. 

Eelpout fishing: Photo Eelpout fun 

This strange 'Frankenstein with scales' or 'poefish', named after Frankenstein's creator Edgar Alan Poe, has been created for factory-farming in tanks on land. It opens the floodgates to many other edible farmed animal species including chicken, pigs, cows and other fish species now waiting in the genetic engineering pipeline.

Remarkably, the US Food and Drug Administration will not require additional labeling to identify this culinary aberration when it appears in our shops, which it surely will when land-based fishmeat manufacturers and their supermarket outlets latch on to the economics of shorter production cycles and reduced feed costs for 'poefish' production. This fishmeat is produced in "facilities that resemble warehouses, eliminating any interactions between the farmed fish and the external environment", to quote the website of Aquabounty Technologies.  

Believe it or not, as far as the FDA are concerned, this 'poefish' is classed as a drug, not a fish, "because the recombinant DNA construct introduced into the animal meets the definition of a drug." But, because this 'poefish' is allegedly nutritionally equivalent to conventionally farm-raised Atlantic salmon, it doesn't need to be labeled either as a drug or as a genetically engineered product.  So presumably it will just be labeled as 'farm-raised'. 

 Photo: Kruger Kaldnes RAS and Veolia Water Technologies 

Which brings me at last to my blog:

 Diet, Nutrition, Farmed Salmon and Cancer. 

Wild salmon absorb carotenoid from eating pink krill, giving the salmon's  otherwise grey meat its distinctively appealing pink colour. Farmed salmon get no krill in their cage pens so are fed canthaxanthin, a chemical pigment manufactured by pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche.

The European Commission scientific committee on animal nutrition issued a warning about the pigment and urged the industry to find an alternative. But the British Food Standards Agency took the position that normal consumption of farmed salmon poses no health risk and has not banned the pigment from animal feed. Cancer can strike some years after the seeds have been sown however, so one wonders whether the FSA took this incubation time factor into account. 

Scientists are far more concerned however with studies that show that farmed salmon accumulate significantly more cancer-causing PCBs and toxic dioxins than wild salmon thanks to their pellet feed cocktail, which contains higher concentrations of fish oil than wild salmon normally consume. Man-made contaminants, PCBs, dioxins  and insecticides make their way into the ocean and are absorbed by marine life. These pollutants accumulate in fat that is distilled into the concentrated fish oil extracted from sardines, anchovies and other ground-up fish to form the pellets fed to the farmed fish.  It takes 4.5 kilo of wild fish to produce 1 kilo of fishmeal pellets fed to a farmed salmon.  

                                                         Photo: Picjumbo

Thanks to their concentrated fishmeal, farmed salmon are far fattier than their wild cousins, but they contain less of the beneficial omega-3 fatty acids. They also ingest a cocktail of chemicals  antibiotics, pesticides, and other carcinogenic chemicals.  Pesticides like teflubenzuron are given to the farmed salmon in their sea cages to combat the sea lice which infest their overcrowded pens, (up to 90,000 fish in an area just 100ft by 100 ft is not unknown. The mess they make leaches out into the sea to create a major industrial seaboard pollutant that seriously impacts both on local wild sea life and migrating salmon; a vicious circle. 

A residue of the toxic cocktail ingested by the caged fish remains in the plastic shrink-wrapped farmed salmon steak which you buy in your supermarket.  It will not be long before it is a genetically engineered faux-pink 'poefish' on your plate, masquerading as farmed, or even wild, salmon. Unless, that is, you buy certified 'wild caught' salmon when it is in season, and has survived the sea louse pollution from fish farms in its migration from and return to its spawning river. 

Further Reading 

AquaCounty Technologies   Modern Genetics and Aquaculture

Los Angeles Times  Fish farms become Feedlots of the Sea.

About.com  What's Wrong with Fish Farms?

Mercola.com   FDA Approves Genetically Engineered Salmon

ABC News  Frankenfish. GMO Salmon declared safe to eat

Wikipedia    Sea lice which parasitize salmon farms and interact with wild fish.