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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."'"

3 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Total BS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    No pun intended. The fact is, no antibiotics in general use on farms are also used for human treatments. There is absolutely no chance of any of these paranoid delusions becoming reality. These are just more assholes using animals as an excuse to let them act as bullies, because what they really want to do is hurt people.

  2. Re:Factory farming should stop, really by Rich0 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Ok, that all sounds nice in theory, but I don't exactly see people keeling over from soybean allergies.

    I'm all for a reasonable level of proper regulation, but I wouldn't really consider that to be Japan. In any case, Japan doesn't really regulate more than anybody else - they just tend to do everything in a particular way so that all your money spent gaining certification in any other first-world nation gets you nowhere in Japan. Most companies then just work with a local Japanese company to navigate the red tape, and since that is all the local authorities care about that usually works out well.

    Monsanto's problem is just that they didn't buy 49% or whatever of some Japanese company like everybody else does and issued the product under their name.

  3. Re:Factory farming should stop, really by ChromeAeonium · · Score: 1, Troll

    A simple tl;dr would have sufficed. Here's what you do. Hold the button that says Ctrl, the press the button with the F. Then type in the word 'herbicide' in the little box that pops up. It will actually take you right to the part of my post where I talked about that! kthxbai