Ethanol's Drug Problem

The Food and Drug Administration found recently that samples of a feed
by-product from dozens of corn-ethanol plants were contaminated with
antibiotics. With that news, producing vehicle fuel from grain is
looking not only like a wasteful and inefficient process, but also
like a danger to human health.

Growing corn is a leading cause of soil erosion as well as water
depletion and pollution. Corn ethanol plants further stress our water
supplies by consuming four gallons of water for every gallon of fuel
produced.

Now to the list of ethanol's environmental insults we can add
pharmaceutical pollution.

There's nothing inherently wrong with getting help from biological
processes to meet industrial needs. But when colossal volumes of
product and enormous profits are at stake, as they are in the
alternative-fuel industry, biological methods can backfire
disastrously.

To survive economically, ethanol plants depend on sales of distillers
grains, solid material left over from corn fermentation. Distillers
grains are a nutritious, high-protein livestock feed. But they can be
laced with multiple antibiotics, the FDA and University of Minnesota
scientists have found.

Addition of antibiotics is one of several methods ethanol
manufacturers use to control bacterial contamination. Bacteria
interfere with the work of yeast cultures that convert sugars to
ethanol. Antibiotics can increase ethanol output by 1 to 5 percent,
according to Ethanol Producer magazine.

That sounds small, but that extra efficiency could boost profits by
many millions of dollars as national production is scaled up from its
current 9 billion gallons per year.

The discovery of antibiotics in distillers grains has raised concern
that ethanol plants could breed and disperse drug-resistant bacteria,
and that those bugs could share their genes with bacterial species
that cause human diseases. Sampling by university and industry
researchers has turned up antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the
processing streams of ethanol plants.

This case of pharmaceutical contamination comes on top of a
half-century of over-prescribing antibiotics for medical and
veterinary use, along with routine feeding of the drugs to healthy
livestock to promote growth. Nature's predictable response: bacterial
populations that can no longer be killed by drugs that were once used
to treat them. Now, of 90,000 Americans who die of bacterial
infections each year, more than 60,000 are killed by such
drug-resistant types, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

The ethanol industry says that one widely used drug, virginiamycin,
doesn't show up in meat produced with distillers grains, so we need
not worry about the food supply. But such assurances take the
narrowest possible view of the threat.

Johns Hopkins University researchers argued in 2008 that public health
officials have also taken a narrow approach to antibiotic resistance,
thinking clinically "rather than ecologically in terms of reservoirs
of resistance genes that may flow across the microbial ecosystem." Use
of the drugs in agriculture is more widespread than in medicine, and,
they contend, creates excellent conditions for the spread of resistant
organisms.

In fact, it's already happening, with germs borne via manure, air,
groundwater, soil, flies and irrigation water.

The Johns Hopkins review concluded that overuse of antibiotics in
agriculture "has compromised the efficacy of most antimicrobials used
in the United States and throughout the world."

Distillers grains are set to move beyond the feedlot, having been
tested as fertilizer on farms, lawns and gardens, and as feed in fish
and shrimp farming. The pet food industry also is starting to use
distillers grains, and we don't know what evolutionary mischief might
start going on in the feces of dogs, which harbor an especially rich
range of bacterial species.

Meanwhile, methods being developed to manufacture new biofuels also
depend on biological processes. If and when fuels from algae or
cellulose are taken to the billions-of-gallons scale, vast new
quantities of antibiotics could be deployed.

Ethanol can be manufactured without using antibiotics -- just ask the
liquor distillers -- so all such drugs should be banned from biofuel
production.

In fact, ethanol's drug problem is just the latest of many reasons to
impose a moratorium on production of fuels from grains. If industry
cannot supply sufficient quantities of alternative fuels without
risking an even deeper medical crisis, it might just be another sign
that our thirst for vehicle fuel has outgrown all ecological limits.