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Farm Workers Carry Drug-Resistant Staph Despite Partial FDA Antibiotics Ban
An anonymous reader writes "New research out of the University of North Carolina now shows factory farm workers actually carry drug-resistant staph. Europe has long ago banned the use of antibiotics in livestock, but the FDA remains behind the curve with a partial ban. Thanks to large industrial farming operations, we all remain continuously at risk as our last line of antibiotics is wasted on animals."
We kinda deserve to get wiped out at this point.
So, if you don't want to get MRSA while in the hospital, you should pick one that does not have many farm hands as patients?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Y'know, evolution being the path by which this happened, and americans being unable to blame it because that would aknowledge its existence.
I guess it will get blamed on socialism, Obama, terrorists er something.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
make sure s/he is organically certified. :)
"Europe has long ago banned the use of antibiotics in livestock, but the FDA remains behind the curve with a partial ban."
So... you have a corresponding European study that shows that the conclusions are correct by proving their factor farm workers *son't* carry drug resistant staph? Or is this another case of "correlation is not causation"?
Obviously not. Balmer crams his dick up their ass every night. Every one of them.
Nobody wanted to receive debit cards with those ridiculous withdrawal fee's, and Balmer was the only other payment option.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Sad, because the EU may had imposed the ban for nothing: unless they also impose a quarantine against anything/anyone coming from outside, the drug-resistant staph will get into EU (directly from US or via other routes).
One wonders: would this staph strain they bred qualify to WMD?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Contrary to what it say above, antibiotics are not completely banned in Europe for preemptive use in farm animal production. However, there is a list of approved antibiotics for such uses, and relevance of the antibiotics for human medicine is a factor in the rules.
Here is a link to the Danish treatment guidelines: http://www.foedevarestyrelsen.dk/english/SiteCollectionDocuments/25_PDF_word_filer%20til%20download/05kontor/Behandlingsvejledning_2011_engelsk.xls (warning: Excel). In column J there is a ranking of relevance to human medicine.
Troll, not spammer.
The most obvious part: "search for next week's lottery numbers and emerge as a millionaire!"
You really think Microsoft is going to claim their search engine can find the lottery numbers, and claim it on Slashdot of all places? You are too much of a sucker.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I disagree!
His face will be white when it happens. Well, technically, it's his SKULL, but his face was on it and it's nowhere else now, so near enough.
Do you know what the problem is?
Stupid fuckers used to get themselves killed. This isn't allowed any more and so the morons and the greedy morons will take everyone else with them. Being morons, they won't think it will happen to them until it does, and when it does, because it's not allowed to let nature take its course with morons, they'll yell and scream and pout to get fixed up at the expense of everyone else.
You really think Microsoft is going to claim their search engine can find the lottery numbers, and claim it on Slashdot of all places?
Why not? They lie and cheat about everything else.
"Microsoft's browser benchmark cheats, gives IE 11 speed crown
http://news.en.softonic.com/microsofts-browser-benchmark-cheats-gives-ie-11-speed-crown
It's what's for dinner!
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Antibiotic drugs cause drug-resistant staph.
They have adapted to the problem and, since they don't require expensive infrastructure to live and multiply like they do (unlike humans now), they are much more successful at it.
To think that farm workers provided a vital clue to eradicating smallpox, when Jenner (and others) noticed that after infection with the less dangerous 'cowpox' they were effectively immune.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner
Mankind's ability to abuse and abase the scientific gifts of such great men is seemingly limitless.
My fear: The web turning out to be a dream after all and finding myself back in back-office....blah, blah, blah
My dream - a Slashdot not over-run by morons.... Hey!, what the fuck, where did everyone go? (and how come I am not on Slashdot anymore? (Oh wait....)
So feed the cattle some garlic, or whatever derivative agrees with a ruminant's digestive system. The allistatin in the cloves is an antibiotic, and a broad spectrum one at that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allistatin
Now, whether anyone wants to be around cattle after being force fed garlic is another matter...the smell will probably be quite frightful.
I am John Hurt.
No, because you just said I'd be a vegan.
Now if everybody else turned vegan and I did not, the answer would be yes!
I think it was Feynman who said, paraphrasing from memory, when someone says "Evidence for this is lacking" you should ask yourself: Has anyone looked?
"- Bacteria don't "want" anything."
How do you know that?
Do you talk to them?
"- I've never seen or heard of a "Bacteria not welcome here" sign."
Please Wash Your Hands.
"- The organism bacteria does not adapt"
Bacteria are a clade, *A Bacterium* is an organism.
I can say most healthcare professionals carry MRSA. Not that MRSA is any more virulent that regular staph, it's only more resistant to some antibiotics. You just need Vanc or some some newer antibiotic to treat it. Many contagions will not harm an otherwise healthy individual.
i mean, youve got two choices.
mass outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, including flu pandemics
or just quit eating meat
the human race - wiped out becuase people enjoyed hamburgers.
Cattle will have impressive weight gains when you feed them (heavily subsidized) corn. Until it starts to kill them, as their digestive system didn't evolve (there's that word again) to process an industrialized grain. But you can stave off that death for a while with heavy doses of antibiotics. Just long enough to get them to the slaughterhouse.
Bon Appetit.
Senator Feinstein, yesterday, proposed the Preventing Antibiotic Resistance Act of 2013 specifically designed to stop low-dose antibiotic use in animals (used primarily to increase slaughter weights and NOT used for actual therapy). Check it out.
It's worth pointing out that the actual research in PLOS ONE that the summary links to is specifically drawing a comparison between farm workers in antibiotic free farms and industrial farms. Industrial farms are kind of screwing us over.
"Who says we are applying them randomly to livestock?"
Who says we aren't?
"Antibiotics cost money"
And minor illnesses reduce the accelerated growth that intensive animal farming is trying to do. Which loses money. Applying selectively takes time and effort and that costs money. Mindlessly mass-vaccinating is simple.
Your thinking is far far FAR too narrow. Stretch your thinking brain.
Or did you mean "for a long period of time" when you said "for any amount of time"?
Because you need to check what time they are fast-fed corn and how long they take to die on such a diet, and how much extra weight on the hoof they put on during that time. If you feed your cow 100kg of corn in a week, it may die in a fortnight, but as long as you get it to market within that week difference, you're ahead of the game.
And if applying antibiotics to otherwise healthy cows (i.e. cows that would be healthy if you hadn't poured 100kg of corn down their gullet for a week) makes the period you can feed them corn extend to 10 days with that same one week period before death, you can give them 150kg of corn, increasing your profit by 50kg and the difference between the cost of 50kg of corn and the antibiotics and the price of a cow that much heavier.
At this point, they love the stuff.
Is most of the meat going to the meat section of the supermarket, to tacobell and wendys? Or does it just go everywhere.
Thanks to large industrial farming operations, we all remain continuously at risk as our last line of antibiotics is wasted on animals.
I got news for ya buddy, this is because of the medical industries blatant abuse of antibiotics in humans that has caused this, and even if they used antibiotics in the most urgent or dire of situations this will still come back to bite the human race. I cant give a citation over the numbers of humans vs animals or livestock, but humans are in the lead by a wide margin when it comes to abuse of antibiotics..
This whole fear of drug-resistant bacteria being "caused" by antibiotics has never had any validity, and this proves it. Evolution doesn't work that way. People who think something intentionally evolves as a response to its environment have got it entirely wrong. Drug-resistant bacteria don't get caused by drugs, they happen all the time anyway, and are merely selected (ie. natural selection) by the presence of drugs. Once out of the influence of antibiotics, they lose out to the normal strains, and the bacteria as a whole revert to their normal non-resistant form. If that weren't the case, any given bacterium would have already developed and kept drug-resistant traits.
The short of it is this: if you look at billions of bacteria, you're going to find one that is resistant to antibiotics, even if it has never been exposed to antibiotics at all. That's what this "research" shows.
But lets forget that for the moment.
The issue isn't that denying evolution means denying bacteria evolve, though there are many who do, and refuse medication because praying to god will fix it unless he has a Greater Plan for it.
The issue is that if you deny macro evolution, you deny micro evolution but even the retards know that isn't going to fly, so pretend that they are able to do both.
Engage in practices which are proven to eventually cause a trillion dollar worldwide public health crisis
Same practices make you marginally more money.. enough for another yacht for you and 100k a year preschool for each of your lobbyists' children , a bunch of plus 40k a month alimony payments all around...
No missing step!
Profit !
The FDA is cock sucking bitch boy of corporate interest. This is what happens when you vote in people who hate government- they stock the government with people determined to undermine the mission of government.
It's the revolving door from industry to the government Once you've worked in the government, you should be forbidden from working in industry for a decade. You can live on a "thanks for serving your nation" pension. Anyone who doesn't like the sound of that is the problem in the first place.
Do something, and keep taking advantage of it ad nauseam until not only is it no longer helpful, but it leaves us in a much worse place than whence we began. Yes, this is one way to learn, but god forbid we could exercise a little foresight and respect for those things which we don't understand which we perceive as "awful".
I remember reading an article where they've never really traced a drug-resistant strain as having come from preventative antibiotic use, that the biggest source of resistant strains is people failing to take the full course of their antibiotics.
The theory espoused was that preventative doses of antibiotics, being below that of clinical treatment, are enough to 'disadvantage' targeted bacteria such that immune systems did most of the heavy lifting, preventing infections from taking hold. But at the same time the lower doses don't trigger the major evolution steps to become immune to the antibiotic, as the evolutionary pressure isn't there.
It was also mentioned in the study that antibiotic use tended to be stable whether they used antibiotics as a preventative or not - Therapeutic doses are far higher, thus the additional occasional need to actually treat the cattle with full up antibiotic courses to treat actual illness evens out(within error of margin) total average use. It's just in sharp spikes rather than being even.
All this being said, if you're going to be dosing cattle with antibiotics to help them grow faster, you should probably stick to the older drugs, not 'front line' antibiotics intended for patients with resistant strains.
I don't read AC A human right
Yep, we will be forced to sell diseased animals on the market as we have a ban on antibiotics. Everyone likes it when an animal is forced to suffer from disease. Without antibiotics, you leave the animal suffer, allow the disease to run its course, and hope the animal doesn't die.
Oh wait. We can't sell diseased animals on the market. Funny how a lack of effective countermeasures can shut down the whole industry.
What we need is more effective disease treatment, not zero disease treatment.
Your wall-o-text doesn't say that mass vacination isn't being done. It doesn't even address my assertion that the risk of infection carries an expectation of drop in weight sizes of a herd of cows and that will reduce the value.