How decades of factory farming paved the way for today’s superbugs crisis

Behind a high grey wall in the rolling countryside in the middle of England is a huge farm, a starting point for many of the dizzyingly complex supply chains that put food on our plates. Bushy hedgerows and wooded coverts surround an ugly sprawl of livestock sheds that house thousands of cattle being fattened for the meat trade. If you eat beef, there’s a good chance you’ve eaten beef from here.

The scenes at this farm are far from idyllic. For a start, the cattle here don’t graze in fields. Many spend their days in grassless pens without shade, shelter or space to roam. This is a “feedlot”, a feature of the intensive cattle farming that has expanded in the UK in recent years.

I smelled the farm long before I saw it. When I climbed onto the wall overlooking the farm, I realised why: hundreds of cattle were standing or lying in rancid pools of waste and water, or on the pockets of dry ground where bales of soiled straw had been thrown down in an attempt to provide bedding. The scene was the same in each of the many outdoor pens stretching into the distance, with dozens of cattle in each enclosure.

Many were caked in a grey-brown sludge – a mix of excrement, mud and other muck – that covered everything in sight. Some waded knee-deep through it to reach the feed and water troughs at the edge of the pen before plodding back to huddle on dry land.

Conditions like this paint a bleak picture of animal welfare. But there is a bigger issue here too – one that poses an existential threat to human health. Farms like this are central to the emergence and spread of so-called “superbugs”.

Experts describe a correlation between factory farming methods and the spread of illness between cattle. One vet who was shown pictures of the feedlot said the conditions were “absolutely terrible”. He said farming like this required fewer animals, proper facilities and suitable drainage, or else there was a risk that the cattle could develop infections.

These conditions – and the attendant risks – are not unique to this farm. Factory farming practices have been in operation around the world for decades. To compensate, there’s been an easy fix: antibiotics. For at least 70 years, these drugs have been administered to animals to paper over the cracks in questionable farming methods.

But decades of free and easy drug use has come at a cost: the rise of superbugs. In simple terms, antibiotics have been overused and infections that would once have been straightforward to manage with a course of antibiotics are increasingly failing to respond to drugs. An infection that would previously have been innocuous can now prove fatal.

This unfolding crisis of antibiotic resistance (AMR) is captured in a new film directed by Alex Tweddle, AMR: Dying To Change The World, shown for the first time this week. Co-written by the UK’s special envoy on AMR, Dame Sally Davies, and narrated by the Succession star Brian Cox, the documentary exposes a catastrophe that it says jeopardises health, food, economic security and sustainability.

‘If the climate doesn’t kill us, this will’

As many as 700,000 people globally die every year from infections caused by bacteria that have become immune to antibiotic treatments. One study predicted that by 2050 this number could rise to 10 million.

Although antibiotics’ overuse in human healthcare is largely driving the problem, their usage on farms is a major factor: the meat industry is responsible for 73% of global antibiotic use.

In Denmark, the film investigates the spread of a livestock variant of MRSA, a potentially deadly bacterium that can be resistant to even the strongest antibiotics. It can be contracted from contaminated meat or contact with infected animals.

Ten years ago, I also visited Denmark to report on the superbugs crisis after thousands of people had contracted pig MRSA. At least six died. We later revealed that loopholes had allowed infected pigs to be freely exported from Denmark – including to the UK, where more pigs also became infected.

The new film claims that virtually all of the 14 million pigs exported from Denmark annually are contaminated with livestock MRSA. Niels Fuglsang, a Danish MEP, describes how he followed a truckload of more than 600 Danish pigs on a journey to Italy that lasted nearly 24 hours. Inside the lorry, he recalls, the pigs were lying in their own excrement. (A 2023 assessment by the European Food Safety Authority said the duration of journey imposed on live animals was a significant factor in the spread of superbugs.)

Hans Kolmos, a clinical microbiology professor, says in the film that the Danish meat industry “carpet bombed” pigs with antibiotics and kept animals in farms with “poor hygiene”. He says: “If the climate doesn’t kill us, then [antibiotic] resistant organisms will.”

Not everyone agrees. John Haugegaard, head of the Danish Pig Veterinary Society, questions the risks, describing how he visits farms regularly, follows good hygiene – hand washing, changing shoes and clothes, showering – and hasn’t personally caught MRSA.

It’s not just MRSA we should be worried about. In my years reporting on the risks of antibiotic use on farms, I’ve covered numerous examples of how the meat we eat can come with all sorts of unwelcome surprises. Most recently, this has been drug-resistant salmonella in imported supermarket chicken.

But while we’ve only recently come to recognise the superbugs crisis for what it is, the warning signs have been there for decades.

Failure to act

“Is our food being poisoned?” was the headline splashed across the Reading Evening Post one Wednesday in June 1966. John Fielding, a young reporter on the paper, had been investigating the dangers to the public of modern intensive factory farming and his first story in a landmark series highlighted the recent death of a Staffordshire farmer.

“There was no coroner’s post mortem, no inquest, no publicity. Yet the man’s death could have the greatest possible significance to the health pattern of this country,” Fielding wrote. “Because the disease leading to his heart attack was contracted from his dairy herd and the drugs used to fight the illness were ineffective. They were ineffective because identical drugs had been used extensively on his cattle and the bacteria had built resistance to the drugs.”

Two years earlier, Ruth Harrison’s book Animal Machines had exposed the cramped and dirty conditions in Britain’s new wave of factory farms. It highlighted antibiotic use and quoted vets who reported that their treatments were no longer effective.

Medical chiefs and the livestock industry knew about the risks by this stage, particularly given that a pioneering public health official, ES Anderson, had also drawn the link between drug-resistant salmonella and antibiotic use in England’s veal industry. Anderson’s findings helped kick start a string of government enquiries and scientific reviews.

In 1969, the landmark Swann report concluded that the misuse of the drugs in farming did indeed pose a danger to human health, and intensive farming practices were part of the problem. But it stopped short of recommending wholesale changes to the way antibiotics were being used (including the practice of dosing healthy animals with drugs) and instead called for limitations on antibiotics being used for growth promotion purposes – essentially to fatten animals up.

Experts say the report’s weak recommendations, and a failure to act firmly in the wake of the committee’s findings, paved the way for the “antibiotic-dependent intensive farming practices” we see today.

Global emergency

It would be decades before significant reforms: in 2006, an EU ban on the use of antibiotics as growth promoters on farms came into force, with similar measures adopted in the US in 2017. In 2022, further laws were passed in Europe that banned all routine antibiotic use in farming, meaning they can only be given to sick animals (and not whole herds). A year later, in the US, new rules were phased in requiring a prescription for all antibiotics used on farm animals.

But why did it take so long to tackle the issue? Claas Kirchhelle, a veterinary antibiotic expert at University College Dublin, puts it down to “special interests”. He told TBIJ: ”Successful organised opposition – including the use of counter-science to discredit AMR data and critical experts – by agricultural organisations, pharmaceutical companies and the feed industry managed to prevent, water down or even roll back regulatory attempts to ban or restrict antibiotic classes.”

The film hears from Monique Eliot, former director general of the World Organisation For Animal Health, who says there are still too many countries using drugs for growth promotion. “Many countries do not have the tools, they do not have the training, they do not have the appropriate legislation to tackle the issue,” she says.

The adoption of intensive farming practices in middle-income countries will mean yet more drugs used on the world’s livestock, experts have warned. Antibiotic use on farm animals is expected to double in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa by 2030.

The film also examines the misuse of antibiotics in human healthcare, interviewing victims of drug-resistant infections and documenting over-the-counter sales of medicines whose use should be tightly controlled. It goes some way to addressing a critical and enduring lack of media coverage around an existentially threatening issue. And it’s a project that has become acutely personal for the film’s co-writer and director, Alex Tweddle.

After months of filming, he says he returned home exhausted, only to receive the devastating news that his mother had suffered a stroke and had been rushed to hospital.

But what eventually killed her, he says, was not the stroke: “It was sepsis, a deadly infection resistant to antibiotics. Despite numerous treatments, the antibiotics failed her … This tragedy only underscored the urgency of our film.”