Pyrrhic Progress

Reviewed by: Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production by Claas Kirchhelle Lisa Haushofer Claas Kirchhelle. Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 442 pp. Ill. $59.99 (978-0-8135-9147-6). In May 2021, a study found that British meat eaters failed to recognize the role of factory farms in the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Industrial-scale livestock raising, with its reliance on antibiotics and its close proximity between humans and animals, is a leading cause for infectious disease. Yet the risks posed by it still fail to register in public perception, and therefore continue to be overlooked as an important site for pandemic prevention. Claas Kirchhelle's Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production provides crucial insight into the historical complexity of risk regimes and their consequences with regard to antibiotic use in livestock farming. By examining the public perception, agricultural uptake, and regulation of antibiotics in Britain and the United States between 1945 and the present, Kirchhelle shows how different antibiotic risk epistemes emerged in both countries, shaping policy and cementing different "antibiotic infrastructures" (p. 38). [End Page 427] The book's four-part structure drives its central point: that the divergence of risk epistemes in each country depended on the complex interaction of three related spheres of antibiotic risk: the public sphere, the agricultural sector, and the regulatory community. Within (and between) spheres, three distinct antibioticsassociated risk perspectives were negotiated. The first consisted of worries about antibiotic residues in food and milk, the second concerned the development of antimicrobial resistances, and the third was about animal welfare. Parts I and II trace the rise of a U.S.-American residue-focused risk episteme and the parallel emergence of a British risk episteme centered on antimicrobial resistance and animal welfare between 1945 and 1969. Parts III and IV follow the fate of these two risk epistemes in both countries from the 1970s to the present. Each part addresses the three spheres of risk development—public, agricultural, regulatory—in separate chapters, forming a layered picture of national antibiotic risk trajectories. In the United States, early enthusiasm about antibiotics as technologies of abundance and animal "growth promotion" quickly gave way to concerns about antibiotic residues by the 1950s. An emphasis on residues fit well within an existing toxicity-focused regulatory regime and resonated with broader fears of invisible chemical substances in food. Threshold-based licensing blurred the boundaries between therapeutic and nontherapeutic use, while the FDA was increasingly encumbered by expanding carcinogen legislation such as the 1958 Delaney Clause. As a result, the busy FDA was incentivized to relax rather than tighten restrictions, and its 1966 report entrenched rather than revisited existing regulatory pathways. The zealous focus on residues in the United States also sidelined concerns about antimicrobial residue formation, an issue at the center of public debate and regulatory concern in Britain. There, a corporatist regulatory system characterized by close interdependencies between antibiotic producers and regulators shaped a number of legislative compromises on antibiotic use on farms. Kirchhelle demonstrates that regulatory landmarks like the 1962 Neverthorpe Report were as much the result of professional feuds between veterinarians, farmers, and public health officials as they were a reflection of Britain's less fragmented public focus on antimicrobial resistance and animal welfare. Subsequent legislation in both countries remained curtailed by the path dependencies created in the early decades of antibiotic use. Fragmentation of concerns and professional interests prompted regulatory attempts of singular issues within established risk regimes rather than a rethinking of antibiotic infrastructures more broadly. Throughout the book, Kirchhelle reveals how antibiotic risk epistemes were politically, scientifically, and bureaucratically produced. While national risk epistemes shaped agricultural use and regulation of antibiotics, the relationship between risk perceptions and policies was neither linear nor straightforward. That a U.S.-style residue-focused risk regime never took off in Britain, for instance, was as much due to a lack of bureaucratic infrastructure to enforce U.S.-style measures as it was to Britain's corporatist system, its cultural attachment to traditional farming, and its technological prowess in

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