Animal Farms Are Pumping Up Superbugs

oxide7 writes "The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche once famously said, 'That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.' That may or may not be true for human beings, but it is certainly true for bacteria. The superbugs are among us and they are not leaving. Indeed, they are growing stronger. 'The problem is that the animal agriculture industry makes massive use of low-dose antibiotics for growth promotion and in place of effective infection prevention methods,' Young said, adding that the farm animal population is much larger than the human population. The low-dose antibiotics do not kill the disease. They make the disease stronger, more resistant to those and other antibiotics. The animals — the cattle, pigs and chickens — thus treated become superbug factories. The diseases stay in them and they wash off them to infect the surrounding environment."

Comments

Why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to influence politicians on this issue for at least a decade. Feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals is one of the several ways that the human species is trying to commit suicide, and if a /. reader wasn't previously aware of the issue you need to spend less time on /, and more time learning about the world we live in.

Um, then stop it!

[Paul Bristow]

Seriously, if we are so stupid that we can't see how dangerous this is for our species we deserve to be wiped out in a horrendous antibiotic resistant plague.

Oh, wait...

###### no carrier ######

Re:It is all your fault (fyi this is a joke)

[morari]

It seems to me that the only animal population that is out of control is the human animal... Maybe we should think about initiating an open season on that to take care of your meat needs?