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New Avenue For MRSA 'Superbug': Pigs
smitty777 writes with news that researchers have discovered another way methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics. According to the study (abstract), the bacteria made the jump to pigs on livestock farms, developed greater resistance through the rounds of antibiotics commonly used to keep the pigs healthy, and then jumped back to humans.
"The important development in the story of ST398 is its move back off the farm into humans, causing first asymptomatic carriage in that original family, and then illnesses in other Dutch residents, and then outbreaks in healthcare settings, and then movement across oceans, and then appearance in retail meat, and then infections in people who had no connection whatsoever to farming—all from an organism with a distinctive agricultural signature. That’s an important evolution, and an illustration once again that, as soon as resistance factors emerge, we really have no idea where they will spread. So it would be a good idea to take actions to keep them from emerging, or at the very least to implement surveillance that would allow us to identify them when they do."
Seriously, why was it considered ok to dump antibiotics into animal feed? It seems like total idiocy from this angle, regardless of the short term benefits.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Sausage,
Baby Back Ribs,
Scrapple,
Baloney,
Capicola,
Pork Fried Rice,
and Bacon
Thus MRSA is an acceptable risk
We can be meat eaters and still be alarmed about the health and quality of the food supply. Being a vegetarian/vegan has nothing to do with it. There are serious concerns about our grain, vegetable and fruit supplies as well between pesticides, GMOs and processed foods. Quit sticking your nose to the sky and actually look at the whole problem.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Stick your finger in the mouth and feel the meat ripping teeth.
I half joke that all the hub-bub over the bird-flu research papers being released is unnecessary - all any 'terrorist' has to do to get a 'superbug' is to get involved in any chicken farm. (Or pig farm.)
And no, small-scale farms show no evidence of being any less likely to reduce chances of 'growing' and spreading disease. Keeping a bunch of animals in confinement is asking for it. Period.
Shit, I hit the wrong mod button; Apologies! So , I am commenting on your post, of which I tried to mod 'insightful', and instead, erasing my mod of 'redundant' in the process.
Cheers!
Also, take my wife, please.
Authoritarian Left : Antibiotics in animal feed increase yields thus benefiting the proletariat.
Authoritarian Right : Antibiotics in animal feed increase yields thus benefiting the shareholders.
Libertarian Left : If the superbug kills you then you can sue the farmer in court.
Libertarian Right : If the superbug kills you then you can sue the pathogen in court.
the modern human is 'evolved to eat meat'
FTFY.
I blame the animal lovers. Hands off the pigs.
please remind me again how the modern human is 'designed to eat meat'
we have eyes on the front of our head and incisor teeth because we are predators.
please remind me again how the modern human is 'designed to eat meat', and how 'natural' meat is, and how vegetarians suffer from various delusions and alarmist theories about the health and quality of the food supply.
Nah, I'd rather just remind you that you're a self-righteous fucking moron.
the "keeping healthy" phrase in connection with animal feed.
Story is that continuous small amounts of antibiotics in animal feed are causing increased growth in animals.
(told verbally by a farmer relative I know) Internet search comes up with:
Quote from: http://www.udel.edu/chem/C465/senior/fall97/feed/present.html
"Antibiotics have been used in animal feed for about 50 years ever since the discovery not only as an anti-microbial agent, but also as a growth-promoting agent and improvement in performance. Tetracyclines, penicillin, streptomycin and bactrican soon began to be common additives in feed for livestock and poultry."
and:
" In chicken feed, for example, tetracycline and penicillin show substantial improvement in egg production, feed efficiency and hatchability, but no significant effect on mortality."
And yeah, the loosing jobs argument again further down in that. Reverse the argument, do something unwise, create jobs and buy medical services stock.
Humans are Omnivores for a reason. Meat eaters are healthier then vegetarians because it is overly complex to match the incomplete proteins in plants all the time. If we were intended to eat just vegetables we would have multiple stomachs like cattle do so that we'd be able to get those vitamins and proteins easier. A good number of Primates eat meat as well for the same reason. The Illusion that Vegetarians are "healthier" is because they typically are more "health conscious" and go to the doctor frequently, watch their weight, and all the other hypochondriac things they have to do.
Keeping a bunch of animals in confinement is asking for it. Period.
The obvious answer is to slaughter all animals currently in confinement, clean and eat the carcasses, and replace them all with new animals. Problem solved.
Anyone not aware of the risks GMO's are posing on society should really do some reading. The scientists that are developing these seeds and pesticides wont even go near them because there is no long-term research on what risks they could offer 10 or 20 years from now. Scarey shit.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Primates have binocular vision so they have depth perception so they can jump from tree to tree. Eyes in front is not because we are an evolved predator, but because we evolved from Primates.
please remind me again how the modern human is 'designed to eat meat', and how 'natural' meat is
Here's a pretty good article on the subject.
pesticides, GMOs and processed foods
Processed foods I'll give you. People really should move back to whole foods, preferably vegetables, in place of highly processed grains and sugars. Pesticides have their place. There's a lot to be said for moving more toward IPM strategies than we currently have, sure, but they are a necessary evil. Heck, even plants produce their own pesticides. They don't make those secondary metabolites for the fun of it. And it's funny that you mention GE crops as a problem in the same sentence as pesticides, considering the effects they've had on pesticide usage. There's plenty of criticisms to make about how people eat and how food is grown. Processed foods are one. Monoculture & lack of biodiversity, over-fertilization & run-off, water scarcity & depleting aquifers, ect. would be much better practices to gripe about, and issues like peak phosphorus, declining agricultural research, and agriculture in the face of climatic issues are also worth considering. Pesticides and especially biotechnology (in and of themselves anyway) are not...not that pesticide use shouldn't be reduced where possible.
Vegetarians "healthier"?
This is in direct contradiction of all vegetarians I know - they are all slim and look healthy from a distance, but they lack energy, become ill easily and just seem under nourished.
I think the term healthier is being use in a very subjective manner these days...
Never happened. True story.
Primates have binocular vision so they have depth perception so they can jump from tree to tree.
It may help but it's not at all necessary. Squirrels and birds also need depth perception but they achieve it through motion parallax among other cues.
The GP actually has a point even though he fails horribly to put it forward in any constructive manner. The argument is that keeping animals for food almost inevitably results in them being more likely to contract diseases due to living in closer proximity to one another. Furthermore, because humans handle these animals frequently, the risk that a new and nasty pathogen can jump from animals to humans increases. While excluding animal products from our food chain would not completely eliminate the risk of infections ( there are bacteria that can attack both plants and animals ) , it would drastically reduce the risk of animal-human transmission, and also reduce the risk of relatively benign pathogens mutating in animal carriers and then jumping back to humans.
This is particularly beneficial for illnesses that are expensive or difficult to treat, because it would probably not be economical to try to eradicate them from farm animals, but if that infection vector was eliminated, one could almost eradicate the disease from human populations by making sure to treat or vaccinate the humans.
An illness that is of particular concern to many researchers is the flu virus. These viruses can infect many livestock animals, such as pigs and birds, and is also very contagious and difficult to treat. We also know that flue viruses have killed very many people in the past. In some cases these have been epidemic outbreaks ( like teh Spanish flu ) , but even the regular seasonal flu kills quite a lot of people every year. Unfortunately many of these outbreaks originate in poorer countries in south east Asia, where poultry is often kept in very poor conditions, and with people living close to the animals. Convincing them to go vegetarian would mildly speaking be "challenging".
That is an outdated thought process that lost all credibility before bell-bottoms did. Humans can synthesize all of our protein requirements as long as we get the basic amino acids. Tofu and quinoa are both complete proteins, and you'll find that most, if not all, vegetarians eat both of those. With a simple mix of rice, bread, and legumes (which you're eating as a vegetarian) you're going to get all your aminos. You don't have to plan it at all nor do you have to "blend" proteins to get them all in one meal. Just don't eat white rice every day, every meal and you'll be fine.
I eat a vegan diet and I'm in the best health of my life. I lead a very active lifestyle -- I bike to work, scuba dive, teach spin classes, and work out regularly. (I'm known as one of the tougher spin instructors.) I go to the doctor about once a year to get a checkup.
I get sick about once a year. It manifests as sniffles and goes away in about a week. Of course, that may be a factor of exercising regularly, having kids that went through daycare, being a Y member, and swimming in the ocean for fun.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Did you miss the word Illusion in his statement?
Stay away from pigs.
Anyone not aware of the risks GMO's are posing on society should really do some reading.
Anyone who bought into the fearmongering and often times outright lies of the anti-GE campaign should do some reading.
The scientists that are developing these seeds and pesticides wont even go near them because there is no long-term research on what risks they could offer 10 or 20 years from now.
Funny, I've spoken with scientists who do just that. I didn't notice them eating any differently than anyone else. I've transformed plants before. I have no problem eating genetically engineered food. I do it all the time.
And there has been long term research (unless you define long term as X+5 so you can always keep moving that goalpost). Darnedest thing is though, what hasn't been done is for someone to propose a plausible mechanism as to why GE crops would be dangerous. We know the genes inserted (cry genes, epsps, bar, nptII, PRSV/CMV coat protein genes) are safe, but for all the cries of 'what might happen' no one has explained what in GE crops allegedly hurts you, how it is produced, its mode of action, ect. I suppose GE crops could kill us all 20 years down the road, but only in the same sense that the smallpox vaccine could do the same thing, or that there could be an invisible heatless dragon in my garage waiting to eat me. After so much study has been done, you can only play the appeal to ignorance card for so long, then the burden of proof shifts to the people believing that to prove it.
Scarey shit.
What's scary is that agriculture is staring down an increasing population, global climate change, increasing energy costs, peak phosphorus, increasing pressure on fresh water resources, evolving pests and pathogens, desertification, deforestation, greater demand for animal protein, and agriculture has to take care l that without expanding the amount of land under the plow, and we've got people having not based in science blanket opposition to what will probably go down as the most significant breakthrough in plant improvement since unraveling Mendelian genetics. Now THAT is scary.
No it is not. Period.
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We are design to get fats and protien from meat.
I'm not sure why you would think otherwise.
And to the best of my knowledge, meat is natural. I'm not familiar with non meat mammals, so I would call meat natural.
"and how vegetarians suffer from various delusions and alarmist theories about the health and quality of the food supply."
this has nithing to do with the other two issue; however, I have never heard a vegetarian state a sane theory about the health and quality of the food supply.
And the person who wrote this book is drawing clearly biased conclusion and basing her statement on the flimsiest of correlations.
SO stop accepting things because the agree with your bias, and learn to understand scientific studies on this issue.
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Wash your hands after handling meat, wash all the implements and counter tops that may come into contact with raw meat. Cook the meat well.
Be careful with restaurants; to minimize your chances of exposure, just say no to eating out unless you can't avoid it. Once in a while is OK but several times a week is a good way to pick something up, if not MRSA then hep-C or some other nasty microbe that the waiter carried to your plate from someone else's plate. If you don't see the waiters wash their hands after taking your plates away, then you can bet they didn't wash their hands after taking the previous customer's plates either. When the water boy comes over to refill your glass, hand it to him by the rim, so he's forced to pick it up by the bottom. Use a straw.
And stay out of hospitals. Those places can make you sick. MRSA is one nasty infection that you don't want to get, but there are others as well. Basically it's a rather closed environment full of sick people, and also full of well people carrying the germs from one sick person to another, and your life may depend on how well they washed and sanitized their hands before touching you.
This may seem kind of paranoid, but we live in an increasingly crowded and mobile world where a nasty little microbe in some little corner of the globe can make its way into your soup literally days or hours later.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Sorry, I know scientists who work in that field, and you are full of shit.
Please stop. Just.. stop.
You people either making shit up, or reading something on "Mypersonalechochamber.com" are harming real research. You create bad data which leads to bad policy decisions.
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Pesticide we use are far safer the not using pesticides.
I have yet to find some who thing we should stop to have even rudimentary knowledge of things like half-life, dosage, absorption. That is the most BASIC information you should have before forming an opinion.
But , you know, that's hard. SO we will continue to march along with opinion based on books in the 70s that had no science behind them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
true. One big eye could also be used, as long as the internals were separated.
Note: even people with one eye have some depth perception.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You can actually be a perfectly healthy vegetarian; but you need to be smart and knowledgable about your diet.
Jack la Lane was a vegetarian, and who could probably kick most people ass, and rarely got sick.
He was intelligent about how he ate, and he exercised every day.
Most vegetarians just eat anything as long as it's not meat,and don'r exercise.
Oh, he did start eating meat when he was around 65, or so. There wasn't any other way to get certain fats an elderly person needs. Once again, he was smart about his diet.
I am not a vegetarian, but I would like to see people pull back on meat portions. Cause there is a difference between eating meat, and eating a pound or more of meat a day.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nothing more.
A book where she conviently ignors the fact that if this was true, superbug would be PIGS AND COWS.
Her book draws several correlations to gether, does NOTHING to lok at causation, ignores anything that is counter to her claim, tells scary stories.;however it demonstrates nothing.
All this for her over arching goal to end industrial ag.
Actual well done scientific studies have show it priparily comes from hospitals, and to a lesser extent peopel not complete there antibiotic treatment.
IN this case:
"and their friends all did for a living, and received the answer that they were all pig farmers."
That is her big piece of evidences. As if the pig couldn't have got it from a person, or they couldn't have gotten in form a non immediate family matter.
This is typical of her 'evidence' . When ever question about her evidence, ot question about other paths she take the cop out:
"I'm just a journalist and report what I find."
Curiously enough, she doesn't seem to take that stance when trying to bolster the evidence(lack of) to her support her agenda.
This is a serious issue, and issue that we should be putting more money to get a better idea of what exactly going on,ass wipes like this twist it to their own agenda, and they should be shunned. They cause a misdirection in the public and that leads to bad policy decisions.
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. I lead a very active lifestyle -- I bike to work, scuba dive, teach spin classes, and work out regularly. (I'm known as one of the tougher spin instructors.) I go to the doctor about once a year to get a checkup.
And this is why you are healthy.
I eat a vegan diet
Not this.
Granted your diet likely involves not loading up on potato chips, and twinkies every day... so a "healty diet" is important. But it doesn't need to be "vegan" to be "healthy".
Jack la Lane is smart about it but eating fish disqualifies you as a vegetarian unless your Asian. For some reason Asians don't believe fish is a meat, I've never understood why.
Your use of the word "shit" (twice) pretty much ensures nobody will take you seriously. If you have facts to back up your argument please present them, otherwise you come across as a kook.
ah. i see. thanks for reminding me that i am a stupid vegetarian, and that super MRSA is not, in fact, related to the fact that people eat pork when it is entirely unnecessary.
by the way, if there is something wrong with the food supply, then perhaps restaurants and grocery stores could stop throwing it out when its perfectly good to eat, . . . or perhaps the government could stop paying farmers to not grow things. and maybe most of food costs , if they were not related to packaging , marketing, reprocessing, re-reprocessing, value added, etc,..... until those things happen, i am not sure i will ever be convinced there is a 'food shortage'.
what? hey, you might bring about the end of human civilization becasue 'you dont like tofu', or 'pork tastes great', but at least you arent a self righteous fucking moron
and a host of other horrific diseases that have killed millions of people are directly related to the fact that humans eat meat when it is, in fact, not necessary to sustain life.
http://lifeinthefastlane.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/swine_flu_spread.jpg
Have gnu, will travel.
The Jews had the right idea all along. If we didn't eat/farm pigs then this wouldn't be happening. The problem is that Pigs are Physiologically too similar to Humans, so when you eat Pig products, physiologically, it is not too dissimilar from eating a human. A human and a pig would probably taste the same given the same diet.
Science as a Candle in the Dark
Yeah, that's true too. There are bunches of regulations on how long before harvest you can spray for any given pesticide, and by the time you eat it, the amount left over isn't something I'd worry about. When people complain about pesticides, they rarely take that into consideration (and by rarely I mean I haven't actually seen it happen yet). It's always nice to minimize inputs if you can do so while keeping the output constant (especially if you're a farmer and those sprays are coming out of your bottom line), but unless you're in some country where the oversight is totally crap, the food you get is perfectly safe. I like those 'Dirty Dozen' lists where they compare produce then say which has the most residues without putting it into perspective. It'd be like having a group of world class runners race then calling the ones who come in last slow, even if they're faster than 99.9% of the population.
And that crops grown with pesticides are safer than without is more true than most people realize. Not just ensuring against crop failure due to insect damage, but in the replacement of natural pesticides. Most plants don't want you eating them (with the exception of their fruits of course), so they evolved defense strategies for their leaves, roots, stems, and seeds. When humans started cultivating plants, we also selected for those that tasted better. The reason these plants tasted better was because they had lower levels of chemical defenses, which made them better for consumption, but also put them at greater risk of being attacked by insects and created the need for pesticides. I'd choose a plant without high natural pesticides sprayed with synthetic ones over a plant with high levels of the natural ones any day. It'd be safer, and taste better too. Even now, I'm pretty sure you're still getting more of these natural pesticides than you do residues from produce. Though for most of the people complaining about pesticides, the appeal to nature card circumvents than inconvenient issue.
But anyway, it does grind my nerves that there are so many people who wouldn't know a potato plant from a soybean, yet still go on about all these evil agriculturists with their this and their that and ect. But they've got it all figured out because they watched Food, Inc. Ugh.
Don't deal with pigs without a lawyer.
Maybe because they are Catholic Asians? I've never figured that out, either.
You're fail to understand what drives some scientists to adhere to the principal of least harm.
If there are possible adverse, irreversible effects of human activity on our ecosystem, and the state of our knowledge is such that we can as a species initiate such effects without understanding how they manifest, then one school of thought is to halt human intervention/activity in those potentially sensitive shared domains.
Your shouting at length to "explain how this harm may come about" when we do not have the technical understanding about how such harms may come about is, despite your education and rational abilities, stupidity in action.
The moral of the story here is there are things we don't know that can cause great irreversible harm and that regulating/preventing activity in certain circumstances can avoid these harms.
blog
it's just technology dude
GMO can do all sorts of good and evil things. good things like grow in the desert or increase vitamin A yield. bad things like require pesticide use or unintentionally mess with ecosystems
but what they can't do is poison you or give you cooties. it's just technology. technology like metalworking: it can used to make better harvesters, or better guns. or chemical engineering: mass produce aspirin, or mass produce phosgene
standing against the technology doesn't mean you stand just against the bad the technology does, it also means you stand against the good it does
so stop standing against technological progress. just stand against the bad things people can do with technological progress. and celebrate the good things they can do with technological progress
your kind of thinking currently, it speaks of ignorance of science and fear of science. it doesn't mean anything except that you are like those fools who don't vaccinate their children for fear of autism or the tribesmen who think a camera picture takes a piece of your soul: you don't understand it, so you fear it. you don't understand DNA, so your position is simply the position of fear and ignorance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Uh, why not?
Splicing in gene sequences from various places, how the hell can you say that this stuff won't poison you? That reads like unscientific garbage to me.
There's no need to fear this stuff like th epost you replied to, but there's every need to research it properly and make sure that modification X doesn't also introduce slow-acting carcinogen Y into your magic desert-growing vitamin-A wheat.
Yes, there are a lot of luddites and plain liars out there when you talk about GMO. There are others like me who are genuinely concerned about this stuff having unintended consequences and genetic drift into non-GMO crops or even wild populations. Not to mention that the actions of Monsanto in this area have been utterly despicable, but that's less to do with the tech and more to do with corporate ethics.
I may be quite drunk, but I know in my heart that I'm right. This is a thermodynamic phenomenon. You don't know when/how/how long it will take for the bug to make a leap, but IT WILL. There really is no safe method. Just stopgaps. Good luck, Humanity.
Just to clear up my own use of language here, by -
"how the hell can you say that this stuff won't poison you?"
I meant -
"how the hell can you say that this stuff can't poison you?"
Because the meaning I was trying to convey was that it's silly to say it can't poison you, unless there's some magic going on that I don't know about, I'm sure it could if genes for belladonna toxin generation were put into a food crop, to give a silly example.
Instead of eating pigs (which is discouraged in the Bible because supposedly they carry nasty diseases and bacteria), we should all just eat cans of beans. Bush makes a nice vegetarian version, and Heinz makes an excellent vegetarian (but British) version. All we need in addition to that is maybe some oil (for fat), a multivitamin, lots of water, and some B12 (which is the main reason we eat animals).
A nice side effect of eating the same food every day is that we will also tend to not get very fat as most normal people get sick of eating the same crap every day.
The other school of thought looks at the social and political consequences of putting the power to genetically engineer crops in the hands of organisations like Monsanto. I'm in support of research into this area, but the prospect of widespread deployment makes me rather nervous.
Especially when we pump our livestock full of them whether they need it or not. It's a breeding ground for drug-resistant bacteria.
It also makes the species weaker because sick and defective animals don't die off, and instead are used to procreate offspring.
It's not even a political issue. It's just common sense.
Darnedest thing is though, what hasn't been done is for someone to propose a plausible mechanism as to why GE crops would be dangerous. We know the genes inserted (cry genes, epsps, bar, nptII, PRSV/CMV coat protein genes) are safe, but for all the cries of 'what might happen' no one has explained what in GE crops allegedly hurts you, how it is produced, its mode of action, ect.
Actually there is a mechanism. One of the big companies tried to insert a gene into brazil nuts (either BT or herbicide resistance) and found out that it produced an unexpected immune response because of the way the protein was folded. They abandoned the project, and wrote an article about it in the New England Journal of Medicine, which I read. That's the poster child of the anti-GM movement.
I'm not particularly worried about GM food. I eat GM cornflakes every day (as I found out afterwards). I couldn't avoid GM food if I wanted to. And I do get annoyed when I see the truly stupid arguments against GM food by political science majors who never took a biology course.
But give the critics their due. We in the US turned our entire corn and soybean production into GM crops without notifying consumers about it, and without letting them make their own decisions as consumers who supposedly rule this wonderful free market. There was no labeling and food processors weren't even allowed to sell their food as GM-free for years. Monsanto may believe in a lot of things but they certainly don't believe in a free market.
You can't even get GM-free food in this country any more because the GM strains have contaminated everything else, and when the food companies try to sell grains to Europe, where there are restrictive laws, they're forced to go to the international trade commission and ask (or rather demand) that they be allowed to define food with no more than 1%, or 0.1% (or whatever) GM food as GM-free.
You believe in science? The scientific method says that you have to take your hypotheses and beliefs, and subject them to confirmation in the real world. If you believe that GM food is safe, you have to prove it with data. That's not as easy as you make it out to be. It's not enough to feed a hundred mice for 6 months and see if any of them keels over. It's not even enough to feed 300 million Americans GM corn and soybeans for 20 years and see if any of them keels over, as we did. It is actually impossible to prove generically that GM food is safe. You have to take each specific food.
Let's suppose you're really, really smart and you thought really, really hard, and you couldn't think of a plausible mechanism by which GM food can do harm. That doesn't mean there isn't one. Nobody would have thought that inserting a BT gene into brazil nuts would produce an immune reaction, but it happened.
I don't care how smart you are -- you don't understand the human immune system well enough to predict what can go wrong, because nobody understands the human immune system well enough to predict what can go wrong. That's why that contract lab in England injected a half dozen test subjects with a new drug that caused an unexpected autoimmune reaction and caused one kid to lose his fingers a few years ago. I was taught that proteins were all destroyed in the digestive system, but then I saw in the New Scientist that some of them do survive. What can they do?
I went to a meeting where a scientist from the Natural Resourced Defense Fund made the case that GM foods might cause unexpected immune reactions. I thought it was bullshit. Then I found out about the brazil nuts. What other totally unexpected problems could we have? You don't know. They've got a point.
I will stipulate that Jeremy Rifkin is an idiot, and if we listened to him in 1984 we wouldn't have been able to develop T cell growth factor, we wouldn't have developed a test for AIDS, and we wouldn't have developed treatments for AIDS. We wouldn't have sequenced the human genome, we wouldn't have developed imatinib and CML would st
. Darnedest thing is though, what hasn't been done is for someone to propose a plausible mechanism as to why GE crops would be dangerous.
The modified proteins that are created by the GM process (and after digestion) many contain end and side chains that may have some other function in the human body or are not processed correctly. Like the way insecticides mimic hormones or people have allergies to things like peanuts (bizarrely, we never heard of that in the 1970's).
Population may be increasing, but farmland is actually being *taken out of product* due to increased levels of productivity. At least in the USA and Europe. Other parts of the world, farmland and woodland is being overused to the point of biological exhaustion.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Farmers are a resourceful bunch.
It takes a lot of capital to run a farm - and if there is a way to save money and produce food, they jump on board.
Increasingly in US and EUROPE farms have moved from the quaint red barn with rolling hills to industrialized production where a bean counter sits behind a desk making potentially risky decisions - and this includes not only meat and poultry, but milk, eggs and even row crops like corn, wheat and produce.
Today, you take your life into your own hands eating a raw ANYTHING in America. Profit motive drives all decisions.
Such concepts as "common sense" have no place in big agriculture.
Take for instance, your toilet waste. What happens when you flush? It goes to sewer treatment plant, gets "treated", dewatered and is placed on a truck and shipped to a local farm field.
Common sense says that you shouldnt eat food grown in your own waste. Common sense has no place in Big Agriculture.
Food Rights Network - Toxic sludge is good for you video
What is Sludge?
Look for the "Certified USDA Organic" green label or grow it yourself - its your only protection.
The general principle has been known for many many years. I worked in a lab in the 1980's that was doing ressearch on the use of antibiotics in feed because we knew it would lead to resistence being spread given the prevalence of the genes on plasmids. It's obvious to any microbiologist.
The antibiotic companies sell the bulk of their product ( and manufacture it cheaply ) to agriculture. The large agribusinesses whose cost cutting 'efficiencies' would fail disasterously without it run the Dept of Ag in the US and Ag committees in US Congress.
This does relate to the GMO issue, as I see it.
The problem with GMOs is not instrinsically about GMOs it is about the process that is used to mange them. As long as those responsible for regulating GMOs have a primary financial interest in them ( including regulatory capture ) then GMOs are not safe. We cannot trust that the sane decision will be made based on environmental / scientific reasons if money is the overriding factor. There is no reversal of the damage possible in such a case.
Nope - human sewage in all products in USA food; its not just antibiotics
PR wins the Sewage battle
then go hide in your closet. GMO is going on every day, for billions of years. it's called mother nature
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nice, see your tone hasn't changed in the last decade.
You don't see a difference between evolution (including directed evolution by human selection, and DNA insertion via micro-organisms) and direct human manipulation of the plant genome as different phenomena?
Interesting.
How the hell is this crap modded up? It doesn't just seem paranoid, it is paranoid.
You need to get some help, dude. It's called germophobia. Do you seriously avoid going out to eat because you're that afraid of germs? Hepatitis C?! I'll bet you've got quite the social life!
I'm not saying it doesn't happen and I have absolutely no numbers to back this up, but I have a feeling you're much more likely to get in a serious car accident on the way to the restaurant than you are to get hepatitis C!
I stopped using antibiotic soaps. I avoid them. I always check to make sure that triclosan isn't in any hand soaps I buy. I find these "hand sanitizers" popping up and the people who use them obsessively yet still seem to get sick for months on end every winter just completely absurd.
My body is covered by billions of microbes right now, and there are probably trillions all in all swimming around inside me. I've never felt better and my complexion has never been better.
Your immune system needs to be exposed to germs. Then the next time everyone else is rushing to Walgreens in some OMG BIRD MAN BEAR PIG FLU hysteria for their good little citizen vaccine and still getting sick anyway and being miserable for weeks, then you'll be the one who for some reason only gets sick once a blue moon and maybe for 2 days tops!
Good grief. Undoing a mod to reply because your post is just sheer paranoid lunacy, and I am absolutely sick of seeing paranoid lunacy being passed off as reasonable. It's called diminishing returns and sometimes simply just not knowing why things work and turning to superstition and self-fulfilling prophecies.
I'd agree about hospitals, though, just because of the massive derp of all the hypochondriacs who run to the ER every time they've got the sniffles.
Cheers
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
mankind is going to pursue this technology, no matter what you think or do. you don't stop mankind's technological progress. the same technology that can make better pipes for irrigation can be used to make better guns for killing
so what you do is you don't stand against GMO, because it can make wheat grow in the desert or put vitamin a in crops where the local diet is deficient in that
what you do is stand against the BAD THINGS that the new technology can do: create ecosystem destroying organisms or crops that depend upon pesticides
don't stand against the technology. a fool's errand. because the technology can do good, and will get used no matter what you think. stand against the bad things a new technology can do. a better more fruitful use of your time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So sensible people speak up with concerns about whether the guns are being sold to third-world warlords.
Who was standing against that? I was calling the poster I replied to on the ridiculous assertion that GMOs can't possibly poison anyone.
Which is exactly what I was doing, talking about the evil done by monsanto here, and the possibilities of unintended consequences if/when genetic material from this stuff spreads.
You could say that about anything, to the extent it would be pointless to stand against anything as soon as someone else says that it will be so, so forget about it.
Which is exactly what I was doing.
None of which answers my question about whether you can distinguish between direct, human manipulation of DNA and the various natural and guided phenomena that constitute food-crop evolution to date. But never mind eh. I don't think we fundamentally disagree, but I'm not going to throw away my attitude of caution towards both the open planting of this stuff, and eating it.
what we need, is less people on this planet. and unfortunately, this will come via grief rather than sensible planning. it's not that we don't see the tragedy coming, it is that we are helpless to convince anyone to change their short-sighted thinking to prevent the inevitable. you don't need to grow crops in the desert unless there are too many people in the desert already. so don't worry about the dangers here, mother nature has it all figured out. mankind has created a natural imbalance of population that will be corrected in the natural way. painfully and tragically. despite the better wisdom of folks such as yourself. because no one will listen to you, because no one wants to sacrifice the minor short term gains for the sake of some nebulous long term worry. that really isn't so nebulous, as we approach 8 billion people
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"researchers have discovered another way methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics"
It stands to reason that if you kill off roughly 90% of the bacteria, the remaining sample will have increased resistance to the antibiotic.
AccountKiller
First of all this is old news. It shouldn't be up on the front page.
Second of all, you can vote with your wallet against this. Just buy all natural pastured pork instead of the factory farmed pork. When the pigs are raised out on pasture using managed rotational grazing they don't have any need for antibiotics in their feed to stay healthy. This results in healthier meat for you so you stay healthier.
If you care, support your local pasture based farmers. Yes, it will cost more than the government subsidized factory farmed anti-biotic laced crap. Because it is better.
That's right, because Twinkies are made with beef tallow. ;)
But yes, you are correct, that a large portion of why I'm healthy is because I am pretty careful about what I eat and I exercise all the time.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I have no trouble taking people who use the word "shit" seriously.
Yes, well you remind me of those yerkoffs who used to drink DDT on TV. Yes, Im am that old.
Sorry for my premature reply. /. extravaganza.
I agree with the above quote, right down to "the most significant breakthrough" -->
The topic requires a forum format, a good week to define the various strands of the arguments, a few extraordinarily objective moderators to shuffle the input into proper categories, and another month to agonise through al the permutations.
Don't you think.
We don't seriously think we can do this justice in a one day
Do We?
Because a lot of those results show no such thing. They are spurious hits for that search string. I didn't read past the first half dozen, but it appears only the first two discuss the contribution of antibiotics in animal feed to antibiotic resistance. I didn't read the papers (just their abstracts) so I don't know if those pests also infect humans. But you are certainly wrong that "A quick Pubmed search [nih.gov] turns up a whole lot of papers indicating that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is a major contributor the rise of resistant strains." Not your search, anyway.
46 & 2
OK, a reality check here folks. Take any of the "normal" human foodstuffs.these days: Wheat, rice, potatoes, carrots, celery, you name it, stay away from fruits and meats. Nuts as well for consistency.
Eat them raw, chew WELL. Note feces, gases, energy levels..
Now eat raw meat, fruits, insects, raw, gobble them down. You don't even need to chew raw meat or fruits Note feces, accompanying flatulences, sexual turgidities, kick ass attitudes
Then come back and tell me we are not adapted to eat meats, fruits, bugs.
I've done these various things because I have had to, so I know wherefrom I speak, on this limited topic at least.
-----douglas
Move over ZOMBIE apocalypse, there's a new player in town... Will we be brought down by the evil's of industrial agriculture? Has bringing affordable pork to the masses been worth the risk of creating the new plague? Stay tuned.......
None of the papers in that search show that antibiotics in animal feed contributes to resistance in humans. And exactly 4 of all the search results are new work showing a connection between antibiotics in animal feed and *changes* in animal pathogens - let alone resistance. Albeit, pathogens developing resistance from antibiotic doped feed is well known. I suppose PubMed just isn't the place to go looking. Anyway, you obviously did a quick search and didn't give more than a cursory glance at the results. So, to say it again, you are just wrong. That search doesn't turn up a whole lot of papers showing any such thing. Which is what makes the methicillin-resistant human st398 bug news.
46 & 2
having watched lots of nat geo wild lately (yes, i know, immense qualifications indeed), i've observed that there's nothing about human teeth that would indicate predation. my guess is any aliens that would examine our teeth alongside those of the rest of the animal world would conclude we are herbivores. even the tiniest chihuahuas (chihuahuae?) and domesticated house cats have more imposing, sharper flesh-rippers than homo sapiens.
another observation is that most predators eat their meat raw. a few delicacies aside, this is not how most humans eat their meat.
in direct relation to the article, the argument that humans "evolved" to eat meat boils down to, "well, we're better at it than gorillas." perhaps you can find a more convincing source?
I eat a vegan diet
Not this.
nice straw man. beardo's point was simply that you can be healthy as a vegan, not that you can not be healthy without being vegan. of course, maybe you're making the point that diet doesn't affect health?
. beardo's point was simply that you can be healthy as a vegan, not that you can not be healthy without being vegan.
I'm not sure that your reading of it is correct. You seem to argue that he's saying that he's healthy DESPITE being vegan.
I guess you can interpret his post like that.
His argument, as I read it, was that he is vegan, healthy, and that being vegan is in part a foundation of that health.
Seeing as HIS own follow up response didn't accuse me of straw men or other gross mischaracterizations of his argument, I'm not sure your reading is correct.
maybe you're making the point that diet doesn't affect health?
You do realize I explicitly wrote that "a healthy diet is important." in the post you are accusing me of making the point that diet doesn't affect health right? I'm pretty sure your going to have a tough time reconciling that without some pretty irrational leaps of logic.
. beardo's point was simply that you can be healthy as a vegan, not that you can not be healthy without being vegan.
I'm not sure that your reading of it is correct. You seem to argue that he's saying that he's healthy DESPITE being vegan.
that's not at all what i'm arguing. actually, that's what i think you're arguing. if neither of us are actually arguing that, then let's drop it.
I guess you can interpret his post like that.
His argument, as I read it, was that he is vegan, healthy, and that being vegan is in part a foundation of that health.
right. to which you replied "a diet need not be vegan to be healthy." well, he never contended the opposite or even close. he just said you CAN be vegan and perfectly healthy, not that you MUST be vegan to be healthy. from my understanding of the term "straw man" (take something someone didn't say and refute it easily), this is a perfect example.
Seeing as HIS own follow up response didn't accuse me of straw men or other gross mischaracterizations of his argument, I'm not sure your reading is correct.
just because he didn't call you out on it doesn't mean you didn't do it.
maybe you're making the point that diet doesn't affect health?
You do realize I explicitly wrote that "a healthy diet is important." in the post you are accusing me of making the point that diet doesn't affect health right? I'm pretty sure your going to have a tough time reconciling that without some pretty irrational leaps of logic.
well, you did write "a healthy diet is important," of course, but you also pretty plainly said a vegan diet did not contribute to his health ("not this"). i'm not sure i'm the one that needs to do any reconciling here.