Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production

by Claas Kirchhelle

Overview

Winner of the 2021 Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize from the British Agricultural History Society​
2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title​
Winner of the 2020 Turriano Prize from ICOHTEC
Short-listed and highly commended for the Antibiotic Guardian Award from Public Health England​
Long-listed for the Michel Déon Prize from the Royal Irish Academy​

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. This Open Access ebook is available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, and is supported by a generous grant from Wellcome Trust.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813591476
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	01/17/2020
Series:	Critical Issues in Health and Medicine
Pages:	450
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

CLAAS KIRCHHELLE (DPhil, Oxon) is a historian at the University of Oxford in the UK. His award-winning research explores the history of antibiotics and the development of modern risk perceptions, microbial surveillance, and international drug regulation.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations ix

1 The Sound of Coughing Pigs 1

Part I USA: From Industrialized Agriculture to Manufactured Hazards, 1949-1967

2 Picking One's Poisons: Antibiotics and the Public 17

3 Chemical Cornucopia: Antibiotics on the Farm 33

4 Toxic Priorities: Antibiotics and the FDA 54

Part II Britain: From Rationing to Gluttony, 1945-1969

5 Fusing Concerns: Antibiotics and the British Public 77

6 Bigger, Better, Faster: Antibiotics and British Farming 92

7 Typing Resistance: Antibiotic Regulation in Britain 121

Part III USA: The Problem of Plenty, 1967-2013

8 Marketplace Environmentalism: Antibiotics, Public Concerns, and Consumer Solutions 143

9 Light-Green Reform: Antibiotic Change on American Farms 163

10 Statutory Defeat: Voluntarism and the Limits of FDA Power 185

Part IV Britain: From Gluttony to Fear, 1970-2018

11 Between Swann Patriotism and BSE: Antibiotics in the Public Sphere 217

12 Persistent Infrastructures: Antibiotic Reform and British Farming 232

13 Swann Song: British Antibiotic Policy After 1969 259

Conclusion: Antibiotics Unleashed 279

Acknowledgments 291

Notes 293

Bibliography 381

Index 411

Editorial Reviews

"Provides a much-needed and painstakingly researched history of the nonhuman use of antibiotics in live‐ stock production and the professional turf wars and policy debates that have followed their use in farming since the 1940s....Pyrrhic Progress adds to a growing literature on the chemical revolution that has trans‐ formed modern agriculture and the environment more broadly. It adds to a vibrant literature on animal studies which is bringing down conceptual walls that falsely divide the history of humans from that of other animals."

H-Net

"With Pyrrhic Progress, Kirchhelle is delivering on its promise to provide the first detailed, and often thrilling, historiographical analysis of the use of antibiotics in animal health. If we may be surprised at the choice of leaving aside international organizations - the three 'sisters' that are the WHO (World Health Organization), the FAO and the OIE (Word organization for animal health) having played an important role - this absence ultimately opens up new horizons for social scientists interested in veterinary antibiotics and AMR. For them, as for those involved in the field more generally, this book promises to become an essential reference."

Études Rurales

"A thorough, critical review of the use of antimicrobials in the US and British agricultural industries since the turn of the 20th century, examining the effects on production volume and quality from the perspective of three spheres of interest: agricultural. regulatory, and public....Highly recommended."

Choice

"Kirchhelle’s study achieves a considerable and important feat, adding an innovative comprehensive framework, which integrates the production and perception of risks across human and animal medicine as well as across two key countries, to the historiography of antibiotics, technological consequences, and risks."

Technology and Culture - Lucas M. Mueller

"Provides crucial insight into the historical complexity of risk regimes and their consequences with regard to antibiotic use in livestock farming."

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Detailed, ambitious, and enormously capable of explaining the economic, political, industrial, and agricultural cultures relevant to the use of antibiotics in the production of animals for human consumption. Kirchhelle's book is very useful [and] a very interesting contribution on the trajectory of consumer society.

Dynamis - María Jesús Santesmases

"This is an impressive, well-researched, and crucial contribution to the histories of science, technology, medicine, agriculture and policymaking. In the context of our current moment, it helps illuminate the importance and cultural specificity of risk communication work in the wake of both accelerated and slow building health crises."

The English Historical Review

"Pyrrhic Progress is an excellent work of scholarship that makes important, path-breaking contributions to the history of agriculture, pharmaceuticals, politics, and policymaking in the United States and Britain in the post-World War II era. The connection between guarding against and preparing for antimicrobial resistance and climate change is fantastic, and no other work has examined these important issues as exhaustively."

author of Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 - Kendra Smith-Howard

"Antibiotics fueled a great leap forward in food production in the twentieth century, but the price of that progress in terms of potential drug resistant infections was known from the start. This timely historical analysis shows us why previous warnings went unheeded and, in the current climate of concern over a post-antibiotic future, how a history of public discourse can provide salient lessons for one this century’s most pressing issues."

University of Exeter, author of Pathological Lives - Steve Hinchliffe

"This is a great book! Essential reading for anyone concerned about the rise in antibiotics and resistance: Kirchhelle’s carefully researched text reveals the back-stories of antibiotics and farming.

Professor in Medical Anthropology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine - Clare Chandler

"Kirchhelle reveals both the local contexts and the global consequences of the historical relationship between antibiotics and food production.  Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, this is a crucial work for understanding how we evaluate and react to 'risks' more broadly." 

Harvard Medical School, author of The Antibiotic Era: Reform, Resistance, and the Pursuit of a Ratio - Scott Podolsky

The meticulous work done by Kirchhelle is certainly commendable: the book stimulates the reader imagination for developing further stories and historical investigations of farmed antibiotics that would be more-than-Western, more-than-elitist and more-than-human.”

Agricultural History Review - Camille Bellet