Tag Archives: agriculture

Global Health: Antibiotics and Superbugs

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In 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, thus bringing one of the greatest medical advances of our time: antibiotics.

Innocuous infections, operations and injuries were no longer a death sentence.

Since then, antibiotics have been developed to treat an array of diseases but this slowed, and then stopped in the 1980s. Although our arsenal of development ceased, the bacteria, viruses and fungi did not stop evolving.

This asymmetric development has resulted in an antimicrobial resistance problem: bacteria causing common infections and illnesses are now increasingly resistant to the drugs used to treat them.

By 2050, the death toll could be a staggering one person every three seconds if AMR is not tackled now. Infographic from the AMR review

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Attribution notice: ‘Review on Antimicrobial Resistance.’ From the O’Neill Report in 2016.

Solving this issue is not straightforward.

It involves a complex landscape of policy makers, clinicians, vets, law makers, and many others.

As part of Bristol Doctoral College’s Research without Borders Festival 2017, a public discussion was held exploring the problem of superbugs and antibiotic resistance, in both the context of research happening at the university of Bristol, and from a wider perspective.

Discussions revolved around patent law, and how it may affect development of new drugs and solutions, the role of agriculture, in particular dairy farming, in reducing antimicrobial resistance, and what we can do as individuals to help address this problem.

Below is a brief snapshot of the research relating to antimicrobial resistance being undertaken across the University of Bristol by the postgraduate researchers who took part in the RWB discussion panel. Continue reading →

“A food dystopia: Is Britain sleepwalking into a crisis?”

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Back to the future?

Terry Marsden is Director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute, and Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning, Cardiff University.

Kevin Morgan is Professor of Government and Development, Cardiff University

The historical ability for the UK state to periodically create self-inflicted harm upon its own food system seems to be raising its head again as the country triggers Article 50 to remove itself from the European Union. We should remember that the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s, opening up the UK to cheap food imports (based indeed on subsidised imperial preferences to its colonies), in exchange for colonial penetration of its financial and manufacturing interests and sectors, created the conditions for a long- running agricultural and rural depression in the UK, lasting well into the 1930s. That Imperial regime of ‘free trade’ created much harm to the British food system, its rural areas, and indeed shaped a dependent food diet based upon imports from colonies and other European nations (like Danish Bacon and Dutch eggs and pork). What is ironically labelled as the ‘full English’ breakfast up and down the land derives from the successful import penetration of its component parts from overseas. The decline in our food-based infrastructure was so bad that, by the onset of the 1st World War, Lloyd George had to go ‘cap in hand’ to the likes of Henry Ford to plead concessions on building his tractors on these shores in order to resolve food and rural labour shortages. Even by 1941 the national farm survey found the agricultural situation in a parlous state, even before the U-boat campaign further disrupted food supplies and led to a period of prolonged public food rationing until 1954. Continue reading →

After 2016; how to achieve more inclusive food policy?

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Photographer: Ed Gregory

Dr Elizabeth Fortin, PolicyBristol Coordinator for Social Sciences, Law, Arts and Humanities,
E.Fortin@bristol.ac.uk

Having spent my British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship researching forms of governance that aspire to achieve that nebulous concept of ‘sustainability’ in relation to certain parts of the global agro-food/fuel system, it seemed fitting that the last event I attend in this capacity should be City University’s annual Food Symposium.

This year’s Symposium enabled Prof. Tim Lang, who is passing the baton of running City’s influential Food Centre to Prof. Corinna Hawkes, and a number of his colleagues, to reflect on the past 25 years of food policy. But it also provided an unprecedented opportunity to 40 audience members from both academia and civil society to imagine a more utopian future – not difficult in our troubled present – to table their vision of ‘How to do food policy better‘. We heard from a headteacher, a producer, a proud ‘Colombian peasant’, a farmer’s daughter, a student, the BBC chef of the year, a former advertiser, a community food network coordinator.  We then went on to hear from a panel of those who have been working to enable such diverse voices to be heard both in relation to the research they have been undertaking or the programmes they have been endeavouring to implement. Continue reading →