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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."
well known fact. And no regulation to stop it.
Moderation is overrated.
How about we feed the animals the foods they were DESIGNED to eat (i.e. Feed Cows GRASS, Not Corn). Yes, the grass might cost more but you wouldn't need to pump them full of antibiotics.
UPS Sucks
Even better, feed them the food they have EVOLVED to eat.
I'm vegan, if you drink milk you're still supporting it ;)
Anyhow, afaik cows and such don't get antibotics for no reason over here in Sweden. Sure if they get sick (I don't know how that affect slaughter though, don't know if you sell the meat if they are on drugs.)
So it's an american (and most likely others) thing.
May be more needed in really small boxes where you can't move at all and everyone is closer to eachother and so on.
using no antibiotics and killing the diseased animals? In the long rung they would get superanimals :)
Moderation is overrated.
You'd still have to pump them full of antibiotics.
The environment they are in tends to be pretty bad due to trying to pack as many animals together as possible to increase profit by lowering costs.
Doubtless having animals eat the kinds of food they should actually be eating would help the situation some, though, as it would remove some of the needs for antibiotics and artificial diet balancers.
I mean, anyone who has not had their head stuck in the ground for the past 30 years should be well aware of the whole antibiotics/superbug issue. The only possible exceptions being the evolution deniers and, I bet even many of them have some twisted concept that reconciles their philosophy with superbugs.
However, I was reading that there is a new class of antibiotics in development, which are based on immune system antigens and, for some reason (anyone know more?) are thought to, because of their mechanism of action, not be susceptible to the same problem of evolving the bacteria to survive them.
I don't know if its true or how they work but, if the article I saw a while back is right, then, they could be useful here. Then again, this just seems like a bad idea overall.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Occasionally I get to drive by a huge corporate cattle ranch while on a trip; the animal's living conditions are deplorable. No shade in a hot arid climate, and hardly enough room to move around, they pack as many animals into a corral as possible. They stand all day in wet muddy shit, costs too much to provide land to roam and people to round them up.
In my opinion, this exemplifies what is wrong with unabashed Capitalism. Who cares what happens, just make us more money now, is a philosophy ultimately doomed to failure. Time to get smart.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
If you would have RTFA, you would realize that the animals are being pumped full of antibiotics to increase size, not to keep them disease free.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The reason it increases their size is because it keeps them disease-free.
Livestock stressed by illness don't grow as fast.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The usual anti-biotics we used was from a Pfizer product labeled LA-200 and it is expensive at around $140 every 5-ounces: about 1/4 ounce is used for a 350lb cow when we find one with a puncture wound or laceration. I've talked with smaller family farms on what they use on their animals to prevent infections and fight infections and it's always been a simple herbal formula consisting of crushed garlic mixed with crushed black walnut and applied as a paste that is more effective than Pfizer LA-200. Ive tried this same organic mix on fungal infections on my forearms and llower legs and it works better than the expensive tube pastes from convenience stores.
What I find unsettling about LA-200 is that many of the cowboys equally take a smaller dosage by the same needle (before using on the cows though) because it's practically the same as what they would've been given from an HMO but much less expense.
I am not a vegetarian, but we need to reduce our meat consumption. I'll never be a vegetarian, I'm too fond of my Sicilian-American culinary traditions, but two things need to happen: First, we need to reduce the amount of meat we consume, and we need to consume better meat when we do. This diet that America has of eating a big bucket of meat and cheese from Denny's is just ridiculous, and it's killing us on multiple fronts.
I try to follow a basic plan: Vegan (or Vegetarian) before 6pm. I try and make sure the meat I do eat for dinner is high quality. I pay a little extra for it, but the savings throughout the day balance out. There are other types of diets that would be great for reducing meat consumption without any of us thinking we're suddenly living off of soy and wheat germ. Eating smaller portions of meat, but still using it for flavoring, for instance. Even just getting the idea in our heads that we shouldn't eat meat for every single meal.
Factory farming has got to go, it's horrible on so many fronts. I'm not a foodie, and I don't have vegan super powers, and I recognize that people are on a budget, and can't shop for organic at whole foods (hell, I can't afford to, and I have a decent job). But we have to figure some kind of practical way forward, because we can't keep packing animals in to dark crates, standing in their own filth and pumping them full of drugs and then call that dinner.
It will be a long time before Congress acts, if ever. But you can protect yourself and make things better by buying meat from "organically" raised animals: animals that were raised without antibiotics and without having been raised in factory farms. Note that the "organic" label itself may be misleading depending on what you are and who uses it, so check more carefully what it means for that particular product (the label usually says it if they did go through the trouble of doing the right thing). You should also probably avoid genetically modified animals, foods, and feeds, not because the genetic modifications are harmful (usually they are not), but because many genetic modifications are intended just to enable bad and dangerous farming practices. Both of these are in your own interest (not just socially good things to do) because you yourself may run a higher risk of infection with a resistant strain if you eat animals raised on antibiotics.
You vegetarians want to save the animals, but we carnivores are doing our part to cut down on this superbug problem. If we listened to you vegetarians, these animal farms would be a huge drain on the economy, raising animals for no practical use, and the animal population would spiral out of control. Stop shifting the blame and take responsibility to this disaster you're creating.
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Nobody knows for certain, but it does work. (If it didn't work, agribusiness wouldn't be spending so much money on it.) It's probably that it's normal for animals to get bacterial infections, and while they are fighting them, they aren't eating and growing as much. If you can eliminate most of those infections, they will just grow without interruption, meaning they will grow bigger over the same time period.
Actually, while there are a lot of theories (some of which are discussed in other responses), no one really knows why. It's not really curing any disease... antibiotics make even healthy animals grow faster. So actual answer to your question is no, no one can really explain this.
They help animals digest there food more efficiently. For example, about 5% of the food a pig eats would normally lost to the bacteria in the digestive tracks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
5) slaughter livestock, grind up by products, then feed to other livestock.
That bit also happens unhygienically - very often the animal feces and bacteria get splattered everywhere contaminating the meat.
Then the consumers are told to cook everything properly, and if stuff happens, it's the consumer's fault, not agribusiness fault...
I've heard of a case where they dunk all the chicken in the same water after removing the feathers, and naturally that mixes and spreads all the bacteria and gunk from all chickens...
Watch a documentary or two. Animals raised in an environment where they aren't exposed to typical bugs don't develop the same strong immune system as animals exposed to these things since birth. Imagine you were born in a box and lived your whole life in that box. After some time your immune system would become suppressed and you would need this stuff to survive.
This reminds me of a study I once read about (I think it was done in Germany) where they looked at the immune systems of children raised on farms and were regularly exposed to livestock. They compared this to the immune systems of children raised in an urban setting and found that kids who grow up with regular exposure to animals had a stronger immune system. Same concept.
I like to eat animals, but it is troubling to know the truth about how they are raised. I feel fortunate to live in a region where it is possible to raise animals in a less manufactured way.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The summary gets one thing wrong. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are not stronger than those that are nor antibiotic resistant. As a matter of fact they are weaker. Generally, the way that bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics is by shutting down the cellular mechanism that the antibiotic uses to get into the cell. However, that cellular mechanism serves a useful function in the cell (usually to bring nutrients into the bacterial cell). When antibiotic resistant bacteria are in an environment without antibiotics they generally die off over a relatively short time-span. This is why currently most infections with antibiotic resistant bacteria occur in hospitals.
That being said, excessive use of antibiotics is still a bad thing.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The USDA prohibits feeding mammal tissues to ruminants.
That still leaves them room to feed chicken to cattle though.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Basically, they use them as a broad-spectrum prophylactic against things that might otherwise affect them and make them less productive/healthy animals.
Essentially to compensate for industrial farming practices which are more or less awful conditions (cows enclosed in a stall standing in their own shit for hours at a stretch) they inoculate them against everything. They're also feeding them stuff that would make you cringe ... mad cow came from feeding sheep-parts (brains) to the cows (herbivores) for instance to put more protein in their diet. The prions in the sheep brain crossed into the cow in a way that would never have happened without people intervening -- when was the last time you saw a bunch of cows standing around the carcass of a sheep?
Small scale farming (the way it was done for thousands of years) didn't have these problems because the conditions were different. Yes, cows could still get sick, and probably did. But, people weren't putting them in unsanitary conditions and feeding them part of other animals.
The antibiotics help to mitigate (in a non-specific way) some of the effects.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Some people still do. It's not something you can get at Walmart but if you live anywhere close to the country there is a good chance that:
1) There are farmers markets around. The best and freshest produce and meat money can buy, and usually competitive on price.
2) Some farmers let you just buy a side of a cow (or an entire cow). So for $x00 you can buy an entire cow. The farmer raises it, kills it and you can have a say in how it is butchered. This does require a deep freezer (unless you're going to throw one heck of a braai). Usually ends up cheaper than super market and you know exactly where your meat is coming from.
Cut out the middle man.
1) the animals use a very low, non therapeutic dose, most of which is lost in their waste.
2) there isn't any good evidence that this causes superbugs. Yes, intuitively it seems so, and there may be a mechanisim in place, and it really wouldn't surprise anyone if this turned out to be the case, but no study backs any of that up.
3) it is now that the over use of therapeutic doses causes this issue.
4) not all bugs become superbugs
5) superbug doesn't mean more virulent.
Now:
We need to understand the precise mechanism on how the antibiotics work for growth. The exact chemical reaction. Then we can produce more specific drugs.
We should be using the Swedish model. Slightly less product per animal. I I don't think a 1% increase in meat costs is going to be a big deal to any individual persons budget
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Eh? Evolution has no specification and only one requirement: Survive to reproduce.
Speaking of hippies, I stopped by my token hippy friend's place the other day and they were watching this documentary about food. It was called Food Inc. and after literally the first 5 minutes, I planted myself on the couch and watched it. I always knew our (ie. us Westerners) diet was pretty bad, but I really had no idea HOW bad the food system is. We're basically eating crap 24/7.
Long story short, I've been reading up about this topic lately and can suggest a few easily accessible resources for anyone who wants to learn a bit more:
Food Inc. - A decent documentary to get you started.
The Omnivores Dilemma - An easy read that can point in the right direction for further research.
http://www.foodincmovie.com
This is not a bad example of the superstitious fallacy that market forces fix everything, and we should deregulate all markets because regulations only get in the way, blah blah blah. Feedlots exist because in the short term they are by far most efficient from the strict standpoint of profitability. They are monstrously inefficient overall because they externalize the costs of waste disposal, coliform contamination of meat, feed costs (corn, the favorite animal feed, is subsidized), high fat-content in the resulting meat (due to the use of corn instead of forage), etc. The public must bear these costs so that meat producers can enjoy a profitable business. The power of the market is largely a myth that exists mainly in academic discussions rather than in real life.
...the uncontrolled experiment in microbe evolution being conducted in workplaces all over North America. In my own workplace there are these sanitation stations on every floor, in every wing, that dispense alcohol gel. Thousands of people everyday, in my complex alone, depopulate the flora and fauna of their hands to let the evolutionary lottery pick new winners to see what develops. I truly fear for the future of humanity.
People are blindly following the sciences, and that's a huge problem.
Yeah, here's a little hint: People blindly doing anything without considering the long-term consequences will likely fuck shit up. At least science provides us with the necessary tools to predict and evaluate those consequences.
I mean, you don't *really* think this whole "livestock superbug" thing is suddenly a new, entirely unpredicted discovery, do you?
disclaimer, I raise some cattle
This whole scene with the huge feedlots is a ripoff for the consumer and the end user eater..and for us small farmers. We only have a hand full of big packers in the US. Small farmers are forced to sell their feeder cattle at auction, because it is SO difficult to market full size eatin cows locally. It's possible, but mostly it just sucks, almost impossible People just don't have full size freezers anymore where they can fit a "side" or half a cow. So, we are forced to sell the cows at a lower weight, typically around 500-600 lbs at auction, for a suck ass cheap price, so the very few corporate buyers get them and ship them to the feedlots where they are fattened up like you describe in medium rank conditions. They have basically a ripoff cartel that sets prices. We as small farmers don't make much at all, most of the loot is made upstream at the packers and then the shippers, then with the wall street speculators who make a *ton* for doing nothing at all except being leeches. That $8.99 1lb ribeye you are eating we got paid around a buck for...maybe
If more people would buy locally, we could change this. Our cows are grass fed and happy, plenty of room to move around, shade, all of that. What happens after the auction is out of our hands. You as consumers can change this, buy local, spend the money and get a decent sized freezer, you will get much cheaper beef and better quality.
Cows are partially designed. Many domesticated species differ greatly from their wild ancestors. Cows included. Chickens too. Pigs a little, but not so much. Bananas are an extreme example.
However, I was reading that there is a new class of antibiotics in development, which are based on immune system antigens and, for some reason (anyone know more?) are thought to, because of their mechanism of action, not be susceptible to the same problem of evolving the bacteria to survive them.
I liked what the Russians were working on for a while - Phages. More completely, Bacteriophages. Viruses for bacterias.
No chance of the virus crossing over to affect humans, and a bacterial colony already under assault by the human immune system isn't generally going to last long when it's also 'sick' with a virus. As a bonus, immunity doesn't really happen because the virus adapts right along with the bacteria.
The problem with phages is that they're the opposite of broad-spectrum antibiotics. They're very, very, specific. They'll clear a throat infection right up, but first you need a culture to determine which species of bacteria you have(there's millions/billions of them), then find an effective phage against it.
That can take a week, then you gotta get the phage to the clinic, as most don't have the room for the number of phage samples you'd need.
I don't read AC A human right
Including chicken litter, which may include undigested chicken feed, which includes mammal tissues. Producers voluntarily stopped using chicken litter as cattle feed recently, but could go back to using it at any time.
is the International Business Times an authority on anything. I'd never even heard from them before today.
/. fell for it.
Additionally, as someone with a doctorate in animal science and a researcher in the field, I have to say that the case against animal agriculture is overstated. No one will argue that they don't contribute, but the relative importance of antibiotic use in animals (that less than 1% of the population ever come into contact with while they are alive) relative to that of rampant, large-dose, antibiotic abuses in hospitals (You know where all of those sick people hang out, transferring infections back and forth) has never been ascertained empirically.
First, the vast majority of the bacterial species that live in livestock are not capable of living in people. Therefore, the rate of resistance transfer from animal bacteria to human bacteria is relatively low. Evidence exists that these species can, and do transfer resistance gene between eachother. However, the majority of the evidence is "Resistance gene A is present in pig bacteria and human bacteria, and genes are essentially identical, therefore the gene came from animals!" This of course, completely ignores the possiblity that the gene arose to prominence in the human population and then was transferred to a pig via a farm worker that was a carrier. Talk about placing the cart in front of horse.
Second, low levels of antibiotic use in the swine industry is usually only during the first month after weaning. Pigs are weaned at between 18 and 24 days on most farms in order to prevent the sow (aka "Mom") from transmitting certain diseases to the piglets that have little effect on adult animals, but can kill piglets very easily. At this age the maternal antibodies from the colostrum are starting to wear off, but the piglets own acquired immune system is not completely up to the task. Therefore the antibiotics buy the piglets time by reducing the overall microbial load in the intestine, and coincidentally increasing the efficiency of feed utilization (which is good for the environment). Many farms then discontinue the use of prophylactic, or growth promoting antibiotics because antibiotics cost money and feed costs can account for 60-70% of total production overhead. Expensive feed can drive you out of business in a hurry.
Third, to all those bragging about being from the EU, where there is a total ban on prophylactic antibiotics a word of caution. The total amount of antibiotics used in EU agriculture is not actually lower than it was before the ban. The difference is that instead of giving antibiotics to prevent infection, and improve production they are now given to tread disease outbreaks that wouldn't of otherwise happened and to try and minimize reductions in production. Also, the antibiotics of most relevance to human medicine are not routinely used for growth promotion, but they are used to treat disease outbreaks. So, the total tonnage of antibiotics being administered has not really gone down (it did until they banned them in the nursery which was the last phase of the ban), and the antibiotics being used are MORE likely to also be used in human medicine. Bravo, talk about unintended consequences!
Finally, I fail to see how this made the front page here. It is not the usual fare of geek (no computers anywhere), it is not actually news (this controversy has been around for at least a decade), this article contributed nothing new to the discussion (restates already rampant FUD), and the IBTimes are not exactly the NYTimes or LATimes. The only thing I can see in its favor is that it lets the ignorant "Organic" group say I told you so without any real technical points for those few of us in the field to respond to. The original article is link-bait, plain and simple and
Pathetic
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Pork fat, pastry is made with lard. Not tallow. That would be horrible.
Oh and stop using Crisco, that stuff sucks. Mix butter and lard 50/50 if you must.
3) pipe sewage to huge waste ponds, then spew it out onto open ground. To hell with the neighbors who complain about the smell
It's not a waste pond, it's 100% all natural fertilizer storage the type of which has been in use since humanity began farming, including by those family farms you imagine were run so differently. The alternative is to spread artificial petroleum based fertilizer on everything or not be able to farm the same field after about 10 years. So yeah, to hell with the neighbors who complain about the smell, they don't know what they're talking about.
THIS!
I (we) buy all of our food directly from farms. We live in a suburb of New York City, and still we have found farms not too far away.
We buy a 1/4 cow (we split it with three other families) and it feeds us for a year. All of our produce comes from farms as well.
Our beef and chicken is raised walking around eating grass and bugs and whatever it would naturally eat.
The food tastes better and is better for us.
A month doesn't go by that I don't hear of some horrible contamination-caused food recall that doesn't affect me or my family.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
so stop buying the cheapest meat as possible
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
As a vegetarian....
Actually, you know, I can't think what to write next.
Lack of protein and/or necessary combinations of amino acids does that to one's cognitive abilities. Try mixing mushrooms with lima beans. And eat more nuts and sprouts.
We are both partially right. From http://www.fao.org/docrep/article/agrippa/555_en.htm
According to the National Office of Animal Health (NOAH, 2001), antibiotic growth promoters are used to "help growing animals digest their food more efficiently, get maximum benefit from it and allow them to develop into strong and healthy individuals". Although the mechanism underpinning their action is unclear, t is believed that the antibiotics suppress sensitive populations of bacteria in the intestines. It has been estimated that as much as 6 per cent of the net energy in the pig diet could be lost due to microbial fermentation in the intestine (Jensen, 1998). If the microbial population could be better controlled, it is possible that the lost energy could be diverted to growth.
Thomke & Elwinger (1998) hypothesize that cytokines released during the immune response may also stimulate the release of catabolic hormones, which would reduce muscle mass. Therefore a reduction in gastrointestinal infections would result in the subsequent increase in muscle weight. Whatever the mechanism of action, the result of the use of growth promoters is an improvement in daily growth rates between 1 and 10 per cent resulting in meat of a better quality, with less fat and increased protein content. There can be no doubt that growth promoters are effective; Prescott & Baggot (1993), however, sho ed that the effects of growth promoters were much more noticeable in sick animals and those housed in cramped, unhygienic conditions.
Currently, there is controversy surrounding the use of growth promoters for animals destined for meat production, as overuse of any antibiotic over a period of time may lead to the local bacterial populations becoming resistant to the antibiotic. This is it not an invariable rule: Streptococcus pyogenes remains sensitive to penicillins after over sixty years of clinical use but such examples are, however, very rare. Undoubtedly, the medical exploitation of antimicrobial chemotherapy, particularly to treat human infections, has imposed an enormous selection pressure on formerly sensitive bacteria to acquire genetic elements that code for resistance to antibiotics.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
...more expensive beef might be a good thing.
Most definitely! Have you had Kobe beef? MMmmmm.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
That's not how survival of the fittest works though. ;)
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Gawd, not this/i unimaginative debate again. ... why can't a "Universal Awareness" (I dislike the word "God," to me it sounds so ass-backward and presumptuous) have used "evolution" to influence "design?"
Actually, in this case that's what people were talking about. Except the "design" wasn't done by a [Gg]od. It was done by a million local animal breeders over thousands of years, who started with a number of wild animals, and through selective breeding, produced the modern milk/egg/meat machines that give us most of our protein.
Similar selective breeding was done by other millions of growers to produce our modern grains, some of which are so different from their wild ancestors that we're not sure just which wild species were the ancestors.
However our domesticated animal and plant species came to be, we know a fair amount about how they turned into the current species. There was a good deal of "intelligent design" in this process. Urban stereotypes of dumb rural hicks aside, many of those millions of growers and breeders did know what they were doing and how they wanted their animals and crops to change.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Yes, in fact bureaucrats do have a better track record than for-profit companies.