Team:Dundee/Integrated Practices
Integrated Practices
Integrated Practices
Integrating Human Practices
For our project this year, we have to consider a wide range of ethical, scientific and legal questions relating to our final product. We are working with GMOs, a hot ethical topic of debate, and we want to feed animals these GMOs, requiring the approval and trust of governments, farming bodies and farmers, whilst reducing the quantity of antibiotics given to the animals, promoting concern over outbreaks and reduced rates of production of meat. For all of this bother, we are looking to reduce the rate of development of antimicrobial resistance and help prevent the next pandemic – but will anyone see that in the ethical and legislative minefield that is Genetically Modified Organisms?
Initially, our project started as a treatment for food poisoning – we would use bacteriocin-producing bacteria in a pro-biotic drink, where the bacteriocins would target common causes of food poisoning. We thought our project would have a great impact for those who are suffering from food poisoning as antibiotics are very rarely prescribed, and there are no other medical alternatives other than ‘waiting it out’. Using our method, we could treat the bacterial infection and have the patient starting to recover within 8-12 hours.
After consultations with doctors at NHS Tayside, the local branch of the National Health Service, and a final meeting at Food Standards Scotland, the feedback we received all pointed in one direction – we were going in the wrong direction. There were too many issues that we couldn’t fix – we couldn’t cover every single possible cause of food poisoning as this would be an almost impossible task, we couldn’t account for treating Norovirus as it isn’t caused by bacteria, and is responsible most cases of vomiting and diarrhoea, and we couldn’t be responsible for patients delaying seeking medical treatment while they first tried our remedy.
At Food Standards Scotland, all of this feedback came to a head when they suggested leaving the idea of treating the infections in humans, and aim our method at the source of the infections - livestock. Rather than creating a drink to cure all illnesses, start methodically removing the infections from the meat one at a time. We understood the need for this, and we believed our method could do this, so we redirected our project to removing pathogenic bacteria in chickens. We received further feedback form the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD), a division of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Katherine Grace, a Veterinary Research Office for Antimicrobial Resistance, said our project was exciting and that it was definitely a step in the right direction. She suggested that aiming our method at a specific disease would improve the presentation of the method as we could identify a bacterial infection that our method could target. She suggested Post-Weaning Diarrhoea, found in pigs, would be a good place to start, as E. coli, which we are targeting, is the bacterial pathogen responsible. Without the feedback from these industry professionals, without consulting for and integrating their advice, we would still be trying to create a pro-biotic remedy.
The Scottish government banned the cultivation of GM crops, stating “The cultivation of GM crops could damage Scotland’s rich environment and would threaten our reputation for producing high quality and natural foods.”
A study by Food Standards Scotland found that 51% of Scottish respondents surveyed were concerned over GMOs in their food. The equivalent body in England, the Food Standards Agency, found that 22% of English respondents were concerned by GMOs in their food. This large difference could be due to the stigma that has been built around GMOs in Scotland due to the Governments outright ban.
Upon further advice from Katherine Allan at the VMD and feedback from the public in our survey, we developed our design to include the ‘self-destruct’ lysis cassette that destroys the cell in response to bile salts in the animal’s intestine. This should address the concerns of GMOs entering the natural environment and eliminate the chance of release into the environment.
