Emails show pesticide industry effort to influence AMR guidelines

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/09/emails-show-pesticide-industry-effort-influence-amr-guidelines

Chris Dall | News Reporter | CIDRAP News
Sep 30, 2020

Public records obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity indicate that a trade group that represents the pesticide industry helped shape the US government's position on international guidelines for monitoring foodborne antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

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The email exchanges between US officials and CropLife representatives in 2018 show that the trade group was particularly concerned about any references to fungicides in the task force recommendations.

"I want to make certain I am correct in assuming that this document and associated comments do not address fungicide use," Ray McAllister, PhD, senior director of regulatory policy for CropLife America, wrote to officials with the US Codex Office in March 2018, in response to their request to review and provide feedback on US edits and comments on the Codex task force's "Draft Guidelines on Integrated Monitoring and Surveillance of Foodborne Antimicrobial Resistance."

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Although the US Codex Office appears to have ultimately been unsuccessful in its attempts to remove references to crops and antifungals from the Codex guidelines, Nathan Donley, PhD, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, says the emails point to a troubling level of influence from the pesticide industry.

"The USDA was basically looking for edits and approvals of their baseline position, as a member of the task force, from CropLife and some other agricultural industries that use antibiotics as pesticides," said Donley. "There's a whole paper trail…that really painted an awful picture about industry influence in government."

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While the amount of antibiotics used in food crops is much smaller than the amount used in human or veterinary medicine, international concern about AMR is bringing attention to all the ways in which antibiotics—especially those antibiotics that are needed in human medicine—are used. Much of that attention has focused on the widespread use of antibiotics in food-producing animals.

But in recent years, the US Environmental Protection Agency's decision to allow for expanded use of the antibiotic oxytetracycline on citrus farms to prevent citrus greening disease, and consider expanded use of streptomycin, has brought new attention to the use of antibiotics on crops. Public health and environmental groups have expressed concern that spraying massive amounts of antibiotics on citrus trees could pose a threat to human health by selecting for antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the soil, which could then share resistance genes with pathogens that cause disease in humans and animals.

Oxytetracycline and streptomycin are also used to combat bacterial diseases that strike apple and pear trees, and streptomycin is applied to tomato seedlings in greenhouses before the plants are transplanted to fields.

"Compared to how much [antibiotics] are used in humans and animals, it's a smallish amount, but it's still a lot, and it gets into the environment just as easily," said Hansen. "So it's just adding to the problem of antibiotic resistance."

Infectious disease and AMR experts have also warned that widespread use of fungicides on agricultural crops may be contributing to antifungal resistance in fungal pathogens that cause human infections. Donley says that's one of the reasons the email exchanges are troubling.

"We're finding out more and more that antifungal or fungicide use in agriculture use can really be facilitating resistance to some of these drugs," he said. "So I think antifungal and fungicide use really needs to be monitored closely to be sure they're not making an already bad problem even worse."

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