Glyphosate: One of 3 Herbicides Causing Antibiotic Resistance

Heather Callaghan
Activist Post

The overuse of antibiotics, 80 percent of which are foisted on factory farm animals, is a part of modern day antibiotic resistance. That is, an environment that allows surviving bacteria to mount a strong defense against antibiotics, making them useless against infection. Other factors like inattentive “sick care” contribute too – when antibiotics are handed out like cough drops or when lack of self-care leads to the constant request for them at the doctor’s office or ER.

In recent years, both patients and the medical community have been blamed for the influx of antibiotic resistance. This is unfair, when not only were these methods approved as safe, but also consider their comfortable use for so many decades. (And again, most antibiotics are used in farming.) So what could explain the unbreakable and aggressive new strains of bacteria?

Scientists now think that another unfortunate part of corporate industrial farming has led to the rapid and exponential increase of antibiotic resistance. In fact, it could be leading to more trips to the doctor…

“Biocides” like herbicides are tested individually for their toxicity levels but not for where it counts, such as at their sublethal effects at the microbe level. Researchers from New Zealand and Mexico discovered that glyphosate (aka Monsanto’s Roundup), dicamba (Kamba, propietery to Monsanto), and 2,4-D play a role in antibiotic resistance. They tested their theory on e.coli and salmonella bacteria which cause potentially dangerous food poisoning and are sometimes found on factory farmed foods.