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FDA Backtracks On Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Proposal
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The FDA recognized, 35 years ago, that feeding animals low-doses of certain antibiotics used in human medicine — namely, penicillin and tetracyclines — could promote antibiotic-resistant bacteria capable of infecting people who eat meat, and proposed to withdraw approval for the use of those antibiotics in animal feed. Instead of acting upon the proposal, the FDA has now withdrawn it. Although admitting that it continues to have 'concerns' about the safety of the use of antibiotics in animal feed, the FDA says that it will just continue to rely on 'voluntary self-policing' by the industry, the same method which hasn't worked out too well during the past 35 years, as antibiotic use in livestock and antibiotic resistance have continued to rise throughout the entire period."
FDA continues to admit it's useless and just likes to thrash its arms about in a non threatening manner. I guess I'm not surprised.
Bet you it leads back to Industry.
Trying to dissprove the concept of "tragedy of the commons"?
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
Yet another consequence to greed. View the documentary 'Food Inc.', they show how the food industry have become afraid of the public opinion by creating laws against criticizing food producers and totally dedicated to generate more profit by lowering quality standards and so on..
You know how to tell if someone is a vegetarian?
They will tell you.
Meat gets antibiotics. Vegetables get synthetic fertilizer. No food source can feed the planet without modern agriculture techniques.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As a veterinarian this is finality a topic on Slashdot I am qualified to talk about. However, rather than get into the details I am going to punt this one :)
Here is a four-part series on the struggle over the use of antibiotics in the livestock industry, the threat of antibiotic-resistant pathogens and the veterinary profession’s role in safeguarding animal and public health.
http://news.vin.com/VINNews.aspx?articleId=18645
I think the more apt comparison would be, vegetables get pesticides. And yes, even organic food get pesticides.
Other than the summary - is there any reference that this promotes 'bacteria capable of infecting people who eat meat'? Or does it promote bacteria with resistance to the antibiotics in use that can affect everyone?
http://www.freshplaza.com/news_detail.asp?id=85455 Many other growers use antibiotics on fruits and vegetables. In fact, antibiotic resistance likely comes more from excessive use in ranching and agriculture rather than direct use in humans IMHO.
"I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called 'Mr.Evil,' thank you very much!"
The planet can't support "modern agricultural techniques" which is right up there with military intelligence on the oxymoron list.
This summary might be the most misleading I've ever seen on slashdot.
For one thing, the FDA has almost no authority in many of their jurisdictions; they can recommend things, but in most cases have no power to change policy or punish reckless companies. This is especially true with meat and produce. Do some googling about dirty slaughterhouses and meat packing plants and you'll find accounts of the FDA actually pleading with meat packers and state health districts to stop distributing meat from plants that had floors, walls, and packing equipment test positive for wide varieties of serious food-borne pathogens. The same goes for packing plants that had open holes in the walls and ceilings, or rodents literally scurrying underfoot on the packing line. The FDA had absolutely no authority to mandate closure of those plants, and still doesn't as far as I know.
They shouldn't have withdrawn their recommendation against antibiotics in feed (saying the right thing is never wrong in science), but that recommendation never affected policy in the first place; it's total bullshit to imply, quite strongly, that the FDA just doesn't care anymore and thinks it's totally fine for meat producers to inspect themselves.
They don't think it's fine; they fucking hate it. At least the scientists do, and the field inspectors do. The FDA does have a lot of senior management who, by many internal accounts, dedicate themselves solely to rubber-stamping industry proposals - and harassing any pissant scientist who objects. If this new policy is half as blase or half as scientifically ignorant as the linked article implies, and indeed came about to dodge a lawsuit, you can bet it came from some ass-covering prick at the top who doesn't represent the viewpoints of even 10% of the FDA staff.
So ultimately, the FDA doesn't have the mandate, the funding, or the legal prerogative to do even one-tenth as much as the scientists and lower-management would like - and which organizations like the NRDC expect them to do. The politically appointed senior management pull bullshit like this, and people like the NRDC and the submitter use corruption at the highest levels to denigrate a lot of dedicated, well-meaning scientists by calling the whole organization a bunch of lazy sociopaths.
If you want safe food and better drug testing then don't piss on the FDA: you should bitch at Congress about the fucking pro-corporate morons they appoint to lead the FDA, and about the shitty laws and budgets that leave the FDA with not even half the money and authority they need to do the job we expect of them.
As I understand it this is how it works, they give cows and pigs antibiotics in low doses so they won't get sick in the crowded feeding yards. There is not a problem with the bacteria in cows and pigs being resistant because properly handling and cooking the meat will kill the bacteria, and sick animals are treated before they are slaughtered. However the antibiotics are still in the cows and pigs and are passed on to the consumer, at those low doses bacteria will not be completely eliminated and can become resistant to them. Once the person is sick they will spread the more resistant bacteria to anyone they come in contact with. So it's not a problem that the vegetarians are immune too, vegetarians can't make the bacteria any stronger, but still can get the illness.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Following your google search, I read the first three articles referencing food-related shutdowns. Every one, even the ones entitled "FDA shuts down" or claiming that the FDA "ordered" someone to stop production, ultimately acknowledged that the company "agreed" to cease production and signed a "consent decree" with the FDA.
So it's still exactly as I read in Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan books: the FDA finds violations and they have to whine, beg, and invoke publicity campaigns to get dirty producers to shut down or improve conditions. They still can't force anyone to do anything most of the time.
So anyway, thanks for playing, and judging by your second paragraph it's time for your thorazine, so please follow the nice nurse to your bedroom and she'll give you a nice gentle prick in the ass. Right where your opinions and your research come from.
It's not meant to be a point of criticism, but it's not meat that's making so many American's fat -- it's fructose in the diet from table sugar and just as bad high corn fructose syrup. Here's a link to a fascinating video by Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist specializing in childhood obesity, entitled "The Bitter Truth About Sugar" that covers among other topics the biochemical process that connects fructose to creation of fat cells: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM. Checkout the history between the size of soda cans/bottles and the correlation to obesity rates in America. If you just want the highlights from the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdMjKEncojQ In my own personal research it's mind blowing the amount of fructose in soda vs. other food products. The amount of sugar in a low sugar whole wheat slice of bread: 1g. The amount of sugar in a 24 oz. Dr. Pepper bottle: 80g! Unholy bat guano! It's a miracle that people's pancreas don't explode from the amount of sugar consumed on a daily basis.
For how many thousands of years have there been greater than one billion people on the planet? How do you expect to get the yields to feed that many people without modern agriculture techniques?
It's not greedy corporations that "tell us we 'need' these things in our food". You can go start a farm or garden today, refuse to use these products, and see how your yields turn out. People who grow organically today compete on quality for a reason, they can't get the yields factory farming does.
Not saying the corporate farming industry is without its faults, just being realistic here.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Oh great, another propaganda point that somehow supersedes a 3 centuries of research (keeping soldiers alive on the high seas was an intense focus of research with lots of fuckups ... and you know what they already knew 3 centuries ago ? No matter what the fuckup, raw meat can fix it. Cooked/baked meat and fish (raw or cooked) can fix the large majority of fuckups with a few notable exceptions).
People (mostly small children though) die from not eating meat
If you die from too much meat, it'll be at 50 at the earliest.
And yes with a massively varied diet of plants you can avoid the need to eat meat almost completely. Not quite completely, but almost. To the point that your body can survive for maybe 2 decades without meat. This requires constant nutritional supplements (usually made from fish, so there's barely any nutricional supplements that qualify as vegetarian) and medical monitoring. It is a very difficult exercise, that's basically impossible in all but the most developed countries. You can cheat and drink milk and eat eggs, which will help a lot.
Your dietary suggestion of beans + grain is moronic. How about you eat beans and grains exclusively for 4 months, and we bet for 1000 dollars that it won't work. Of course, that's a bad bet, since either you cheat, or you die ... In both cases I doubt I'll see any money. You will after all have died from the most basic of food diseases, scurvy, after 2-3 months. That would be 2-3 weeks at best if you didn't start out living in one of the most developed nations on earth.
In practice 2 weeks will cause enough symptoms to manifest themselves that the pain alone will drive you back to normalcy : after about a week on your proposed diet you will get small wounds which won't heal, usually in places like the corners of the mouth or between the fingers and toes. They won't heal. A little after that they will start to rip open merely because you move your body. A crust will form on them, time and again, but it will be unable to remain attached to your skin. These wounds will slowly grow in size. From that point on you will feel extremely bad and spend upwards of 14 hours in bed each day, you will lose interest in anything and everyting, complaining of a constant headache. And we're not even at ONE month yet. After a month you will lose the ability to breathe normally and have a constant sharp pain in your bones. Keep it up, and a few teeth will fall out, you will constantly have blood in your mouth, the result of large infected areas in your mouth, rendering you unable to eat or drink without extreme discomfort. Likewise, blood will leak from the other small wounds, which at this point won't be all that small anymore. After this, random internal bleeding will start occuring, making you look like a person who's gone 10 rounds against Mike Tyson, unsuccessfully. From this point on, if you're unlucky, it takes a few weeks for you to die. You will die from total loss of internal body cohesion : blood will literally leak everywhere, and at the autopsy if they break your skin without taking the pressure of first, it will gusher out.
Any other dietary suggestions ? Hint : best include the most basic of additives, vitamin C. It would also be great if you actually noticed that plants do not contain all 9 of the essential amino acids, and so you will have to include at least two non-plant lifeforms. And please note that children have 13 essential amino acids, so their dietary requirements (in the sense that they die if they don't get it) are more extensive. There are tons of special cases where additional nutrients are required either because of genetic predisposition or simple external factors ranging from contact with salt water to lack of sunlight.
There is one substance that contains all required nutrients for a human being : meat (raw meat). With fish being a close second (likewise raw), with only a few omissions. Pulverizing the bones and adding them to the meat itself makes both meat and fish much healthier (a feature ironically only part of "low-quality" meats).
Are they absolutely required ? No. But if you don't take them ... you get to puzzle everything together. Miss one piece and you will not like the result at all.
I usually like NewYorkCountryLawyer, but I'm going to have to ask him for some proof for the statement "antibiotic use in livestock and antibiotic resistance have continued to rise throughout the entire period". I would offer the alternative that antibiotic use peaked, and then declined because overuse led to antibiotic resistance. Currently I believe that livestock antibiotic use is minimal, simply because frequent heavy use doesn't work well. And the livestock antibiotics is only a minor cause for the rise in antibiotic resistance. That resistance, which predates livestock use, is primarily caused by overuse in humans.
I hope you didn't stop liking me. I was relying on the knowledgeable folks at Grist for the statement that the practice of feeding antibiotics to livestock not for treating disease, but for the purposes of promoting growth and enabling the use of more dangerous living conditions, has increased. I know that the total amount was estimated at 29,000,000 pounds per year, and that 80% of that is estimated to be for non-therapeutic uses.
Your statements about increased resistance and use of antibiotics actually miss the point; no one is complaining about use of antibiotics to treat disease. What we are talking about is the 80% of antibiotics which go into two nefarious uses for antibiotics in livestock: (1) to increase growth [for reasons still unknown, agribusiness discovered at some point that antibiotics promote growth] and (2) disease prevention.
While "disease prevention" sounds like an ok thing, it is really a code word for "enabling the animals to be kept in such inhumane and unlivable conditions that it is assumed that antibiotics are needed to prevent the diseases they would otherwise be given by such living conditions".
So while I can't put my fingers on the data regarding growth of these uses for antibiotics in animals, I can say with certainty that the use is about 10 times the amount of antibiotics used on humans, and that 80% of it is used for purposes other than medical treatment.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
No.
The give an extremely small amount of antibiotics. something like 1/100 th of a dose. 90% of which is peed out. This kills bugs in the animals gut. Then the animal absorbs more food.
There is NO TRACE in any meat when processed.
When an animal is sick, it is isolated, given proper doses, and has to be without antibiotics. If memory serves, 3 months isolation.
Isolation may also mean several animals who might be sick.
The dose is far too low to create a 'superbug'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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