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FDA Sued To Stop Antibiotic Abuse On Factory Farms
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Medical groups from the American Medical Association to the American Society of Microbiology have appealed to the government and industry for years to restrict the practice of providing sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics for livestock, lest critical antibiotics become useless for human treatments. Now Tom Laskawy reports that a coalition of environmental groups has decided to sue the Federal Drug Administration to follow its own safety findings and withdraw approval for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed to healthy livestock when it's not medically necessary. 'While this may cause eyerolls among some who look at this as "just another lawsuit," there's something very important going on with the courts and contested science right now,' writes Laskawy. 'As it happens, one of the main roles of a judge is as "finder of fact." In practice, this means that judges determine whether scientific evidence is compelling enough to force government action."'"
Next, maybe some of our environmental guardians will do something about fracking ...
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
While I completely agree, that regulations have to be a lot stronger about hormones, GM products and antibiotics, I would like to see this go a step further: ban factory farming as a practice. It is inhumane, produces an unhealthy product, outbreaks of infections, excessive pollution and unnecessary suffering. I suggest to watch "Food Inc, Meet your Meat, and Earthlings for the non-faint at heart, both of which talk about the subject from different viewpoints.
People can be amazingly adept at "contesting" science they don't like. See: creationism, vaccines causing autism, climate change denial, or (a few decades ago) cigarettes being harmless.
It's one of the many government organizations staffed by executives from the companies that they regulate, so that they can facilitate the wishes of the corporations. For example, push through bovine growth hormone without due diligence and then have to reverse the decision years later, after it lead to far more contamination in the milk we drink as well as hideous "mutations" that can only be described as nightmarishly inhumane occurred in the cows themselves.
And, you know, then all the Monsanto evilness . . . since they have Monsanto executives in their mix. And the whole magic "now that we have people who are directly tied to the success of aspartame being approved sitting on the committee, we're going to go ahead and just approve aspartame" thing.
If the FDA ever does anything even remotely right, I can only assume it's done as a "okay, we're getting too much heat so lets at least do some token action to get people off our backs so we can continue being evil as shit".
Typical revolving door government, along the lines of "I"m Ken Lay and I run Enron and the president has just appointed me as security advisor and I'm going to advise that we deregulate energy to directly benefit my shady practices in fucking over California and manufacturing a non-existent energy crises so I can get rich".
There are too many stupids in this nation for the buying habits of the smart to influence the stupid.
It's not stupidity as much as a money thing. Let's weigh an unseen evil (factory farms) against paying 30% more for meat, when most dual-income families are barely making ends meet as it is. It's a no brainer.
Same argument goes for "Made in USA" btw.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
> For colds they'd be better off taking a zinc supplement at the onset of the symptoms.
Is it proven this works?
Why do you ask for proof when you yourself peddle dodgy alternative type remedies?
In any case colds are caused by viruses, and nobody who knows what an antibiotic is ever claimed it worked for those.