Richard Conniff

In December 2003, a farm couple in the Netherlands scheduled their six-month-old daughter for surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. But before Eveline van den Heuvel could be admitted to the hospital, a test showed that she was carrying a strain of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria resistant to the potent antibiotic methicillin. Because of an unusually vigilant prevention program, MRSA—methicillin- resistant Staphylococcus aureus—was almost unknown in the Netherlands until then. It came into the country mainly via people who had spent time in foreign hospitals. But Eveline had never left the country. By itself, her colonization by MRSA might have been harmless. (In other countries, an estimated 5-10 percent of people are colonized, but not infected, by MRSA.) The danger, with surgery, was that it might cause a lethal infection of her heart. But leaving her damaged heart valve untreated would also inevitably kill the child. Her parents, Eric and Ine van den Heuvel began trying to de-colonize their child with a special nasal cream, a mouth wash, and antibacterial soap. Twice, the hospital rejected

The food industry and the medical community have fought bitterly, and for decades, over the widespread practice of adding antibiotics to livestock feed to make animals grow faster. Banning the practice would be an agricultural disaster, food companies predict—or at least the end of affordable meat. Medical researchers say the disaster is already happening: With agriculture now consuming 80 percent of all U.S. antibiotics, the food business bears much of the blame, they say, for an epidemic of antibiotic-resistant infections that kills 63,000 Americans each year. But the debate also raises a more basic question: How did antibiotics get into our food supply in the first place? That is, how did U.S. food companies get to the point of adding almost 13 million kilograms of antibiotics to livestock feed every year, about 300 milligrams for every kilogram of meat produced? The discovery that farmers could make livestock grow faster by dosing their feed with antibiotics was largely the work of a remarkable biologist named Thomas H. Jukes (1903-1999). Jukes, an old school environmentalist, was a