Tuesday, October 8, 2019, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

MARYN MCKENNA, Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of Human Health; TED speaker and author of Big Chicken (2017) and Superbug (2010)

"Agriculture, Antibiotics and the Future of Meat"

The development of antibiotics in the 1940s changed medicine forever—first by saving lives that had been lost to infectious diseases, and then by introducing the menace of antibiotic resistance, which undermined generations of the miracle drugs. But it's little known that agriculture adopted antibiotics as soon as they debuted, adding small doses to the diets of livestock — not to cure diseases, but to protect against them and to cause animals to put on weight more quickly. Those uses laid the foundation for modern intensive meat production, but they also fostered the emergence of additional resistant bacteria that moved through the food chain and the environment to further threaten human health. Reversing that historic mistake took decades of research and policy maneuvering, but what really turned the tide was neither better science not tougher regulations: It was the power of consumer coalitions forcing the meat industry to change.