Resistance kills
70% of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are not prescribed for sick people, but are routinely fed to healthy animals in overcrowded factory farms.
Many of the same antibiotics fed to animals are deemed critically important in human medicine by the FDA, including penicillin, tetracyclines and sulfonamides. In recent years, public health experts say there has been an alarming increase in the number of bacteria that have grown resistant to antibiotics, leading to severe, untreatable illnesses in humans. In 2009, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 3% of salmonella tested was cephalosporin-resistant.
The FDA has tried to limit the use of antibiotics in agriculture since 1977, but its efforts have repeatedly collapsed in the face of opposition from the drug industry and farm lobby.
The European Union banned the feeding of antibiotics and related drugs to livestock for growth promotion in 2006.
In 2008, the FDA issued an outright ban of cephalosporin for livestock. But the agency withdrew the plan after strong opposition from industry groups.
In 2010, the FDA issued voluntarily guidelines urging the judicious use of these drugs. But those have yet to be finalized. Last year, several environmental and public health groups sued the FDA to force it to stop the industry from adding certain antibiotics to the feed of healthy animals.
Last Wednesday, the FDA finally said it would limit the use of cephalosporin in cattle, swine, chicken and turkey. This is just a first step. The meat industry must stop giving antibiotics to healthy animals.
As discussed previously, meat production also creates more greenhouse gasses than transportation.
Nobody expects everyone to go “whole hog” and become vegan, but we would all be healthier if we cut back on our consumption of meat. Here are some helpful tips.
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January 8th, 2012 at 6:58 am
Here’s a link to a page that reports on a piece I heard on NPR (there is a link there to the audio piece as well).
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128849908
Essentially, it reports that many scientists think that our ancestors adopting a meat based diet allowed the evolution of larger brains.
Quoting from the piece:
“Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello.”
January 8th, 2012 at 8:00 am
That’s the theory. Even if eating meat was one factor in our evolution over millions of years, that doesn’t mean it makes individuals smarter. Our ancestors mostly ate vegetables, supplementing it with meat when it was available, while expending lots of energy. It isn’t healthy or smart today to eat huge portions of meat with our relatively sedentary lifestyles. The anthropologist Richard Wrangham quoted in the article is a vegetarian.
My main problem is with the way we mass produce meat today. It is a major source of water pollution and global warming. It is also producing antibiotic-resistant diseases that kill people, because bacteria evolve too.
January 8th, 2012 at 10:31 am
If you were so worried about the development of anti-biotic diseases when it comes to meat production, then you would also then speak out against MSM (Male Sex with Male) sexual practices. At one time there was hopes that Syphilis would go the way of Smallpox and be completely eradicated. Some explain the reason for why Syphilis, increasingly drug resistant, has exploded again on that it is now OK to be gay and OK for males to have sex with males alone.
I do not know if the latter claim is correct, but I do know that those males who have sex with males are responsible for about 2/3rds of all Syphilis cases as reported by the Center for Disease Control. You claim they just need to be educated, but experience shows they will only change their willingness to engage in unsafe sex when it might result in a death sentence. (Watch out, I can support this opinion from what I heard on NPR from the Gay community on this, no bigotry involved.)
January 9th, 2012 at 6:34 am
While you are at it, why not outlaw all extramarital sex? (Yeah, that will work.) There have always been homosexuals. Discriminatory laws against them does not reduce gay sex, it just drives it underground. Disease is best treated in the open, with education, prevention, and treatment. Syphilis is generally cured with penicillian. Encouraging monogamy might also be helpful, but you oppose gay marriage.
Meanwhile, the meat industry is breeding antibiotic-resistant deadly diseases.
January 9th, 2012 at 9:13 am
Well, prostitution is illegal, and that is why I am in favor of keeping it illegal. So as not to be accused of being a hypocrite on prostitution, yes I have employed a few (and yes exactly half the time I ended up with a sexually transmitted disease as a result). It is my opinion that discriminatory laws against prostitution does result in it occurring less often, although we will never succeed in eliminating it completely (especially in Nevada).
I am torn on the anti-biotic arguments in meat production. I think I really do not know enough to develop an informed opinion. I do know that ground beef is running nearly four bucks a pound, and I do not want the price to climb any higher. Some of that price increase I attribute to using feed corn for ethanol but there might be more to this issue then what one might think.
January 9th, 2012 at 9:45 am
Without getting too far afield, maybe the liberartians are right about this and it would be better if prostitution was legal and regulated, with testing and treatment for disease. I’m not sure it would affect the amount of prostitution, but it might make it safer on both sides. I’m not advocating for that, but it is an interesting point.
Like many other things, meat only appears to be cheap because the price at the grocery store or restaurant doesn’t include all the externalized costs. Meat and dairy production is subsidized by our tax dollars, and we also pay for it in other hidden ways due to the resulting environmental damage (water pollution and global warming) and health effects (high cholesterol, obesity, and related diseases). The dangers of antibiotic resistance is just another hidden cost.