Test tube burgers: the healthcare implications of manmade meat

Winston Churchill theorised as far back as 1931 that "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium”, and now almost 90 years later this idea is beginning to become a reality.

In 2013 the first lab-grown burgers were consumed in a public trial, and fared quite well.

Since then the price of generating this product has fallen from in excess of $300,000 to around $11.

This change has meant that marketable cultured meat is not far away; Memphis Meats, a US biotech company, hopes to bring a product to market by 2021.

As biotechnology companies line up to commercialise cultured meat production there are many potential positive consequences for healthcare and medicine.

Free from food poisoning

There were over 500,000 cases of food poisoning in the UK alone in 2014, and the bacteria Campylobacter was the most common pathogen discovered, accounting for around 280,000 cases.

Campylobacter infection is caused by consumption of contaminated meats or animal products, with contamination usually occurring during the slaughter process.    

Cultured meat would not only avoid this issue altogether, but would also be able to be grown in sterile conditions, meaning that it would be possible to deliver a product free from any pathogens, such as E-coli or salmonella. 

Foodborne illnesses are estimated to cost the UK £1.5 billion a year, and the wide-scale availability of cultured meat would take a large bite out of this bill.

Sidelining superbugs

Over the few past decades there has been an alarming lack of new antibiotics, and with 70% of antimicrobial drugs deemed clinically important for human health being used in agriculture in the US, academics have drawn a link to the increasing levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria infecting humans. 

Cultured meat does not use antibiotics to promote growth or prevent mass infection, and this would contribute greatly to reducing the emergence of so-called ‘superbugs’, which are expected to cost the global economy $100 trillion by 2050 at the current rate of increase.

Taming transmissible disease

The culling of livestock over fears that diseases such as swine flu, bird flu and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (or Mad Cow) disease will become pandemics is becoming an increasingly frequent news story.

For cases such as influenza, the close proximity of animals to one another and to humans is a key factor behind diseases becoming transmissible.

As cultured meat will not rely on battery farming to produce large yields, the risk of further new diseases entering the human healthcare spectrum from animals will decrease drastically.

Move over mainstream meat

The healthcare benefits of the industrialised production of cultured meat certainly outweigh the costs of developing large-scale production and distribution.

With companies and governments beginning to smell the bacon, we may soon see a drastic reduction in the incidence of diseases related to industrial animal rearing.

The only question remaining is; will the average consumer be too chicken to try it?