Your citation is actually citing my citation. Specifically the 2008 DANMAP report, which is footnote #16. I have read primary literature such as the DANMAP reports. I prefer them to 2nd tier literature in summary reports like the House document you are citing. The numbers I've seen in other research place the impact on pig production at much higher than 1%, but the paper read was making estimates based on the lack of import restrictions that keep EU meat prices high by keeping US imports out. That economic effect would be much larger if Denmark had to compete with the US.
Furthermore, Denmark combined the growth promotion ban with comprehensive program for reforming prescribing practices in human medicine. The effect of these two programs is hopelessly confounded because they began at the same time. Here in the US there is talk of the growth promoters ban, but little real work being done to track and reform human prescribing practices. My personal assessment, based on the primary literature is that much of the reductions in enterococci (a probiotic bacterium) resistance is due to the human side of that equation. There is also the point that only a single class of bacterium showed reduced resistance levels. What about the many other relevant classes? I'm not saying it didn't have an effect, but do the negative outweigh the positives? You apparently do, but I do not.
So, stop making things up and start getting the facts.
I made nothing up. Keep on topic when debating, if you are going to accuse of of fabrication or lying I would appreciate it if you could point to where exactly my lies are so that I can defend myself against your false accusations.
Bacteria do travel from people to animals don't they?
That's the reason for the strict biosecurity rules. Broadly, bacteria that colonize the gut can be broken into 3 categories. Those that can permanently colonize the gut, those that can temporarily colonize the gut, and those that are only present long enough to pass through. Most of the bacteria in the first category for pigs belong to the second or third (mostly the third) category for humans. There is some overlap, but most don't.
I was thinking that combination treatments would also reduce the likelihood of resistant strains.
That's the whole problem with Multiple Resistant Staph Aureus (MRSA). They contain resistance elements to several different antibiotics, making them that much harder to kill with antibiotics. Unfortunately, the resistance genes are frequently present on mobile elements that can be transferred from one bacterium to a completely unrelated bacterium. In the case of MRSA, one bacterium has collected resistance genes against a whole host of antibiotics, so that if someone who is immune compromised gets a simple Staph infection at the hospital, they are suddenly in far more danger than would be expected normally.
Bacteriophages are promising, but they are notoriously difficult to grow. By definition they require culturing on the bacteria they are intended to fight and are very specific in their target. Their is no such thing as a broad-specturm bacteriophage that I'm aware of. Some phages only act on specific subtypes of a given bacterial species and not others within the same specie. It's very frustrating and underlies the unique value of antibiotics.
I'm interested in what effect this'll have on the University system in MN. I work for the UMN and we recently (like in the last 2 months) switched to googles cloud services. If we can't communicate effectively with the state, one of us is going to be pressured to change. I wonder who'll be doing the changing:(
I completely agree. However, society is only dealing with one. It is too politically dangerous to try and address the other obvious cause. Also, most of the suggested mitigation strategies are "Copy the EU" without bothering to notice that the EU approach is largely a failure at achieving it's original goals. A more nuanced approach is necessary, but is not even being considered (just look at Congresswoman Slaughter's and former senator Kennedy's proposals).
Maybe we should be looking at what makes so many animals sick to begin with
you say this as if it's a new idea. Animals, just like people, will always get sick unless you have gnotobiotic animals which is completely unfeasible outside of tightly controlled (and ridiculously expensive) laboratory situations. There are a lot of researchers and companies who's whole job is to develop new disease prevention strategies. It is cheaper to keep a pig healthy than it is to restore health to an already sick pig. This is one place where Human medicine could learn a thing or two in the US. The current health insurance system has no mechanism to foster disease prevention as opposed to disease treatment because it is too focused on the cost of each procedure and not on the total cost of providing health care of each patient under each scenario. Farmers on the other hand do because they make their money off of the pigs directly, there is no middle man, which is why they are so in favor of low dose antimicrobials in the nursery phase.
It takes enormous amounts of food and energy (and fossil fuels) to raise nine billion animals, and they are going to produce an enormous amount of waste, no matter how they're raised.
It also takes enormous amounts of land, fertilizer, and fossil fuels to raise cereal grains. People need to eat, if they aren't eating meat then they'll be eating something else. Much of the beef raised in the west is raised on land that would make very poor cropland. It's using land that could not reasonably used for anything else. The worlds problems won't be solved by eliminating or even significantly reducing animal agriculture. That would only create a new host of problems
The primary solution is that Americans simply need to drastically reduce meat consumption (on average, we each ate over 250 lbs of cow, chicken, and pig in 2005
That works out to less than a pound a day (~0.68 lbs). Large numbers have a way of being misinterpreted, it helps to put them in perspective.
Policies regarding antibiotics and so on are just band-aids, and probably mostly useless, as you point out.
That was not my point. Not all policies are pointless, only the ones that have the most support. I was a supporter of the EU ban, but the evidence is not on it's side. That doesn't mean that are no better policies possible.
The problem seems to be that raising (and killing) nine billion animals per year is always going to be messy, inefficient, cruel, and bad for the environment. It's the law of truly large numbers again.
This opinion is probably best explained by your status as an "outsider". None of the slaughtered animal goes to waste, nor does any of the "Waste" for that matter. Manure/litter is used as fertilizer to help grow the crops that the animals eat. Meat and Bone meal and Offal are ground up and fed back to recycle the high quality protein other high quality nutrients. Cattle hides go for leather, poultry feathers can be made into animal feed, etc. At a recent meeting in MN that I attended there was an environmental research presenting data that acre for acre more P and N run of from municipal storm drains than from nearby corn and soy fields. That means the local suburbs are worse for the environment than the farms using chemical and manure based fertilizers. All human activity
I was a Junior in college the year that Mad Cow was getting it's most coverage. They were burning cattle all across Europe and the US was refusing to accept imports from anyone still trading with Europe. As an Animal Science student, it got a lot of coverage in just about every relevant class. I probably know far more about Mad Cow than most people. Try reading this paragraph again (or for the first time if you missed it before) and maybe you'll see the point I was trying (apparently unsuccessfully) to make:
Prion diseases were not understood before mad cow, despite the long existence of scrapie in sheep. Sheep meat and bone meal had been fed to cattle for generations before mad cow happened. It may be obvious to you, the layman, after the fact, but no one really saw mad cow coming. Protein is protein as far as nutrition is concerned and animal protein contains a much better ratio of the individual amino acids that make up protein than plant feedstuffs.
Scrapie and Mad Cow are both prion diseases. The scientific term is transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). Prion diseases are the only known form of disease by which a protein can propagate itself. That is very significant. Until it was known that was possible it was impossible to predict that feeding sheep meat and bone meal to cows could cause the development of a new disease. As I stated before the feeding of sheep meat and bone meal to cattle went on for decades prior to mad cow. It was only after the processing involved in manufacturing sheep MBM changed that the scrapie prion survived to infect cattle. My criticism of your post was not a denial of mad cow, only your assertion that it was a predictable outcome.
I was also criticizing your assertion that it never would have happened without human intervention. Prion diseases can be spread without consumption of contaminated meat. We don't fully understand how prions work, or how eating non-nervous tissues can result in it's transmission. (my old next door neighbor has variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease contracted from eating deer meat). Chronic Wasting Disease (TSE in wild deer and elk) is a serious concern to hunters, and many states require the heads of hunted animals be sent in for inspection before any of the meat can be consumed. Wasting disease in wild deer has been show to increase as population density increases indicating a non-carnivorous transmission route.
First, reading the headlines from a google search is not the same as actually reading the articles. From page 23 of the 2008 DANMAP report (the official report from Denmark on their antibiotic control policy):
During 2001 through 2008, the overall antimicrobial consumption in the pig production increased by 19% (24%, when adjusted for increasing export, see chapter on antimicrobial use), measured in ADDkg per pig produced. This increase was primarily associated with an increasing consumption of tetracyclines for oral use. From 2003 through 2008, the consumption of tetracyclines increased by 118 % per weaning pig and 60% per finisher pig. In 2008, the consumption of tetracyclines in weaning pigs comprised 50% of the overall consumption of tetracyclines in pigs, while the consumption in finishers amounted to 37%.
Use of antibiotics has actually gone up in Denmark. That is because of the increased incidences of disease outbreak are inevitable in the wake of the ban. Antibiotics are given for fewer number of day, but in much higher concentrations for a net higher consumption per pig produced. Most articles touting the success of the Danish experience are from earlier on, when antibiotic use levels were dropping off and active disease outbreaks hadn't started to rise yet. There was a lag that has now caught up.
As to the claim of no effect on production, I can't find a citation yet, but I've seen presentation at several scientific meetings over the last 8 years on the strategies that the Danes have tried (for the most part unsuccessfully) to mitigate the increased post-weaning mortality, decreased growth performance and feed efficiency in the nursery, and increased variability in carcass quality/size at slaughter. Whole sections at regional and national animal science meetings have been devoted to presentations on potential alternative to antimicrobials in the nursery (Prebiotics, Probiotics, Essential Oils, organic acids, direct fed microbials, in feed Antibodies, new vaccines, modified weaning age, etc.). Unfortunately, the majority of them are only marginally effective (either low effect, or inconsistent effect).
Finally, your opinions are not sufficient to refute the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, been shown by other researchers in the field, or have read in the official reports (as opposed to headlines of google searches or 1 page summaries of a 100+ page report). I've more than done the necessary due diligence necessary for an informed decision. You apparently have not.
Most of my recent experience is with pigs, and broiler chickens, but I did work on a couple of small to medium sized dairies as an undergraduate. On intensive dairies, the cows live in a free stall barn usually. They consist of 1 or 2 ally's flanked by rows of stalls. The stalls are elevated about a foot or 2 above the floor, are padded (ground up tires cover with thick canvas and fresh wood shavings replaced periodically), and allow the cows to comfortably lie down without laying in shit. On one wall is a headlock system where the cows can poke their heads through to reach the feed. The headlocks prevent one cow from pushing another cow away from the feeder, and can be set to hold the cows in place when they need medical treatment. At the end of the ally's is a large open space that lead to the milking parlor (of which there are multiple designs, each with benefits and drawbacks of their own) which they enter for milking. They are fed and milked 2 to 3 times a day. Dry cows and replacement heifers are kept separate from the milking animals because their nutritional needs are so different so they just have a free stall barn without the milking parlor.
Beef can be raised out on the range, in free stall barns, or in feedlots. I have little direct experience there, so I can't tell you much more detail. However, I can be certain that their conditions are not as abhorent as most people believe because the stress of poor environment inhibits animal growth, production, and quality. Bad farmers put themselves out of business the next time prices drop.
the majority of links I posted were news stories, not the activist links
And news reporters are known for accurately portraying science to the layman? Try reading The Guardian's Bad Science. Dr. Ben Goldacre is both a physician and a scientists and he does an excellent job of pointing out this weakness in the press.
The Johns Hopkins study is very concerning. It is good evidence that animal agriculture can contribute. As I've stated previously (multiple times) I'm not arguing that animal agriculture does not contribute. I'm debating the relative importance. Is agriculture responsible for half? 75%? 25%? No one can say for sure, but they are treating agriculture as the primary cause. As I stated previously I've seen models that suggest the time between introduction of an novel antibiotic and the 1st appearance of resistance in humans is shortened by antibiotic use in livestock. That would support the existence of a ban. However, the models also show that once the resistance elements move from the animal to human population, the human-to-human transmission far out stripes the animal-to-human transmission rate. The implications of this is that after antibiotic resistance appears in the human population, the contribution of animal agriculture becomes negligible. I'm in favor of a temporary ban on any new antibiotics. Give them as long as possible before resistance develops, but once the horse is out of the barn let livestock use them. It preserves them for humans up to several years longer, but does not deny them to agriculture after the ban would become unhelpful.
Plenty of evidence exists that the 2005 study is not accurate. In 1983, Langlois et al. reported only a 50% reduction in tetracycline resistance isolates from pigs that have not been exposed to ANY antibiotics for 126 months (10.5 years). They didn't even use antibiotics to treat diseases. Any pig on that farm that was sick was removed from the herd. A decade of complete naivety to antibiotics was only capable of reducing the resistance to half of it's earlier levels. The animals in the EU (including Denmark) are still administered antibiotics for disease outbreaks. From the most recent DANMAP document (2008):
During 2001 through 2008, the overall antimicrobial consumption in the pig production increased by 19% (24%, when adjusted for increasing export, see chapter on antimicrobial use), measured in ADDkg per pig produced. This increase was primarily associated with an increasing consumption of tetracyclines for oral use. From 2003 through 2008, the consumption of tetracyclines increased by 118 % per weaning pig and 60% per finisher pig. In 2008, the consumption of tetracyclines in weaning pigs comprised 50% of the overall consumption of tetracyclines in pigs, while the consumption in finishers amounted to 37%.
The ban has just resulted in a shift of the intended purpose of administration from disease prevention and growth promotion to disease treatment, while simultaneously increasing the total antibiotics administered. The ban was well intentioned, and I think a partial ban (excluding the fragile nursery period in pigs) would be far more effective at reducing total antibiotic use and resistance than the current blanket ban does.
You're arguing that the people criticizing factory farming have a vested interest in selling FUD, as if the industry doesn't have a vested interest in the status quo and deregulation.
The difference is that I point out my own potential conflict of interest. As a researcher, a ban would be good for me. It would result in a rash of research grants being put out looking for solutions to the problems caused by the ban (increased weaning mortality, reduced growth performance and feed efficiency, etc.). It would be bad for my industry, but not the end of the world (as is evident by the continued existence of signifi
Obviously, you are ignorant of some very basic facts about American eating habits and economics: Americans eat too much meat and too little high quality vegetables, meat prices are too low, and decreasing meat prices further will cause even more meat to be consumed. We need fewer meat producers, more producers of more variety of high quality vegetables, and meat prices need to go up.
American eating habits on average should probably change. I never said otherwise, but those eating habits are not completely driven by supply. They are driven by the natural human tendency to prefer meat protein over vegetable and fruit protein. Throughout the world as peoples income increases, their demand for high quality meat protein increases.
That would not even be a problem if it were not for the fact that American's have switched from largely physical jobs, to desk jobs. Michael Phelps was said to consume 20,000 Calories a day, or 10 times what is suggested for normal people because he actually burned all of those calories in a single day. Many Americans lead sedentary lives and do not burn even the 2,000 that is considered the average (my father in law is a good example).
Nutritionally speaking, animal protein is the most digestibility, and balanced of all protein sources (eggs are considered the ideal protein). For those in the lowest income brackets, cheap meat is the difference between being malnourished and meeting their minimum requirements for protein. That the wealthy decide to consume even more meat instead of more fruits and vegetables is their decision, and they will ultimately pay the consequences for their purchasing decisions. You have every right to disapprove, but I'd rather ensure that the poor are not malnourished than whether or not the wealthy eat themselves into early graves.
Furthermore, nobody knows what the largest contributor to antibiotic resistance is.
I agree that it hasn't been quantified, but I can construct some pretty good arguments for why human medical abuses of antibiotics are more relevant to human antibiotic resistance than animal antibiotic uses. I'd rather the research be done to quantify, but it isn't being done (I actually have a grant proposal that I'll be submitting in November that will help quantify agricultures contribution).
Since industrial meat production is bad for so many other reasons, reducing it is a good idea anyway.
Pure, unadulterated opinion based largely on misconceptions and ignorance. Industrial meat production is not bad for the animals, the environment, or consumers.
Antibiotics are available under prescription, and doctors are supposed to prescribe them only when necessary, based on their judgment.
That judgement factor is the real issue. It is a well known fact that if you pester the doctor you can get antibiotics even if he's not sure whether or not your illness is bacterial in nature. They are often used to quite those patients that have a tendency toward hypochondria. Furthermore, most patients don't pay directly for their antibiotics, so the costs associated with unnecessary medication is relatively minor (the cost of the co-pay). For farmers, they pay the full price every time. That means if they are not getting a boost in performance, they will not use them. Not only that, if the boost is not sufficient to counter the costs of the antibiotics, it'll be in their best interest to not use them. The farmer has the financial viability of his business at stake when deciding whether or not to use antibiotics. The average patient has only $10 to 20 worth of co-pay, and the doctor has no real strong incentive not to give antibiotics to troublesome patients.
How specifically do you want to change the law to reduce their abuse further?
I'd like to see culture work or some other sort of verification become mandatory in cases where the illn
If this is true then I don't see the problem. Just one month of prophylactic use? My understanding is that they were used for growth enhancement until they were fully grown adults.
It is legal to use them longer, and on older farms they can continue to improve feed efficiency. Most antibiotics have a mandatory withdrawal period so that they are out of the animals system before slaughter that allows for use up to a month before going to market. However, most farms pull them after the nursery phase because the added efficiency is not worth the cost.
You realize that argument could just as easily be applied toward prophylactic antibiotic use in the human population. Would you advocate selling antibiotics over the counter and recommending that people take them daily for their entire lives to prevent infection?
Yes I do see that. I pointed out in a different post that human prescribing practices are probably a much larger contributor to the problem of antibiotic resistance. However, the relative importance of either source has never been quantified. It is too complex, expensive, and prone to interpretation. The difference between agriculture and making antibiotics available over the counter is that producers have a personal incentive not to abuse them. They cost money that the producer doesn't want to spend unless it'll be guaranteed to save/make him money. People would have a personal incentive to abuse them. Abuse is more likely to have no personal negative effect outside of their cost, and most people are willing to waste a lot of money to be healthier.
I've never denied that the problem exists, or that animal agriculture is a contributing factor. However, the contribution of animal agriculture has not actually been quantified, and the models I've seen show it to have a much smaller contribution than human prescribing practices.
People die when any industry cuts corners. What is needed is a little perspective. The average American consumes large quantities of animal protein a year with only a small percentage EVER getting sick. We have the cleanest and healthiest food supply in the world. I agree that it can be better. It can always be better. Even one death a decade is too many, but that doesn't negate the improvements that have been made as a result of the green revolution.
Most of those going on and on about how bad things are have a book to sell you, a website they want you to visit, or a charity that they have a vested interest in. Fear mongers will always exist and spread FUD for personal gain. It is easier to spread FUD about an industry on which we all depend, have little direct contact, and don't understand.
real problems do not have simple solutions and misrepresenting the problem makes finding those solutions even more difficult. I watched part of Food, Inc, and it is full of half truths and misrepresentations. The same goes for the articles I've read by Michael Pollan. The factory farming page on wikipedia is completely unreliable, as is any wikipedia page covering a controversial issue. The moderators have biases and are not very good at keeping those biases out of the articles. I've read several of the DANMAP reports and they don't hide the fact that the stated goals (reduced antibiotic use and reduced antibiotic resistance in humans) have not been met, even after all of these years. Unfortunately, the majority of what I read outside of journal articles take proposed links and correlations as fact and the more those overstatements get repeated, the harder it is to make people see that they are overstatements.
If you really want a back and forth, you're going to need to pick a topic and claim. A wall of links is the digital equivalent to sending a pallet of legal boxes over in response to a subpoena for a single document. I don't answer FUD professionally, and my wife is not too appreciative of the time I already spend on/. in the evenings.
Firstly, many animals don't care about shit. The don't know that it's filled with bacteria. I worked on a dairy that pastured their cows over the summer on a large field. I would have to go bring them in to the barn to milk and then turn them back out when I was done. Very frequently they would come into the barn with shit on themselves despite spending 10 hours in a large field full of grass with more than enough space to spread out and keep clean. I currently work with pigs, and while they will designate one end of a pen for defecation, they will urinate where ever they are, including on top of each other, no matter what the stocking density.
Anthropomorphism is the conferring of human traits on animals. That is frequently thought to mean Mickey mouse and Donald Duck, but it also refers to the projection of human reactions and thought processes onto animals. If you want to understand animal welfare, the first thing is to understand that a pig does not care about the same things that you do. What stresses you out does not necessarily stress out animals.
I won't argue that there aren't gains to be made. My group does a lot of research into sow welfare with the goal of improving it based on scientifically sound research as opposed to emotionally based guesswork. I also take umbrage with some of the common practices in the broiler and layer markets. A good example of sound welfare research from my Alma Mater is the work of Dr. Bill Muir at Purdue, who developed a strain of Kinder Gentler Birds that are selected as a group for better welfare while still maintaining competitive production levels.
There are those that don't respect the animals. The trucker that loaded our last batch of pigs was one, but they are the exception not the rule. I've spent 8 years in the midwest and 10 years in animal agriculture and the good guys far outnumber the morons that don't care. I've noticed that the morons tend to leave the industry much faster than those that do care.
No it doesn't. Modern farms, and the research farm I'm describing, have strict bio-security measures. For example, anyone entering the farm must take a shower and change into work clothes that don't leave the farm. They then shower out when they leave and put their street clothes back on. Anyone with exposure to animals from other farms within a certain period of time are prohibited from visiting the farm.
Sometimes a single antibiotic resistance gene can confer resistance to multiple antibiotics. An example is a generic outwardly directed pump that can remove the antibiotic before it has a chance to act. It was discovered that it works with multiple antibiotic substrates so use of any of the relevant antibiotics supports resistance to all of them. It is also important to remember that many classes of antibiotics were first discovered in bacteria and molds. Some bacteria produce their own antibiotics to attach others and increase their own survivability.
I was not trying to give an exhaustive list of the flaws in the organic requirements. I was only trying to point to one of the flaws I find most personally relevant. If you want a larger list, I have other posts in this thread that may help
Obviously you are the one that does not understand how agriculture works. When hog prices are low, farmers cull more sows thus resulting in fewer piglets and reduced supply. There is a lag period between the culled sows and the reduced number of hogs going to market of roughly 9 to 12 months. Earlier this year supply finally caught up with demand for the first time in over 18 months. Before March the average pig was sold for less than the priced of raising it, and farmers had to eat those costs. Lowering the price of animal production does not lead to more pigs unless it also leads to lower prices at the supermarket, which ultimately spur demand. Low prices at the supermarket without reductions in input costs leads to a lot of unprofitable (usually smaller) farms going bankrupt. This general trend is why American agriculture has moved away from small farms with maybe 2 or 3 sows and a couple dozen pigs, to large commercial scale operations with hundreds of sows and thousands of pigs. They make more money in the good times and they lose less money in the lean times due to higher efficiency.
Deliberately choosing inefficient production methods often is a good thing in itself even if it has no effect on the quality of the product.
Complete and utter bullshit! Inefficiency leads to greater risk of environmental pollution, greater GHG emissions, lost money, less grain for export to countries that cannot feed themselves, more land used for crop production and thus denied for other uses (wildlife, parks, homes, etc.). If you acknowledge that organic is less efficient (an that really is undeniable), then you have to face the reality that it is not green. For some that is fine, but if I were to claim membership in either camp it would be the green camp. There is a limited amount of land for raising crops and animals, there are a limited number of people willing to work with animals, but there is an almost unlimited demand for food. Some estimates expect a doubling of global demand for food in the next 50 years. How do you produce twice as much food if you throw out the last 50 years of efficiency gains at the same time.
[sarcasm]Yes, that is exactly what I said. I want everyone with a compromised immune system to die off. Furthermore, I'm a fan of eugenics and think that antibiotic resistance is the best way to thin the herd.[/sarcasm]
My point, which you'd have to be an idiot to have actually missed, was that these superbugs are not a threat to everyone all of the time. As others have also pointed out, antibiotic resistance does not confer increased virulence. Everyone seem to believe that MRSA will kill anyone that has it, but most carriers of MRSA don't even know it and clear it without ever having a problem.
As to the long list of possible bacterial infections, no shit sherlock. We all know that antibiotics are a godsend for modern medicine and any loss in their efficacy is cause for concern. Stating the obvious does not make any of your other arguments more valid, nor does it invalidate any of mine. I acknowledge that animal agriculture is a contributing factor. However, it is a smaller contributor being scapegoated while the single largest contributor is largely given a free pass. Human abuse of antibiotics in Humans is far more culpable, but because it is politically dangerous to try and reform human prescribing practices no one will touch it.
No antibiotic is 100% lethal. Even when massive supra-theraputic doses are given, antibiotics cannot kill all microbes under real world conditions. That's why if someone is irradiated to treat bone cancer they cannot simply be given antibiotics if they contract an infection prior to the bone marrow transplant. Antibiotics help the immune system, they don't replace it.
The point you raise is one of relative strength. The current popular belief is that low doses of antibiotics provide a continuous selective pressure over a long period of time, thus increasing the horizontal transmission of antibiotic resistance elements. The situation in the EU is one where higher doses kill off more than just the offending bacteria, but are (supposedly) more sporadic. One possible problem I see with the EU approach is that the higher doses kill off more of the competitors, thus allowing the resistant bugs a chance to expand into the ecological niches in the intestine vacated by susceptible populations. Which is worse in the long run? I don't know, but no one appears to be even considering the later other than a handful of vocal, and thus ignored, critics of the EU ban.
Personally, I think that the selective pressure provided by low doses is not as dangerous as the selective pressure provided by periodic high doses. I could be wrong, but no one has done the necessary research to show either way. That's the real kicker about this whole debate. The science necessary to answer this question is so difficult, expensive and complex that only small parts of it have been done. The importance of this issues is such that decisions need to be made even though the science is not complete. Furthermore, the usefulness of the potential fear that this issue raises has been used by both the well meaning and the unscrupled to forward political agenda's unrelated to the problem (Protective import bans in the EU, the "organic" movement in the US, etc.)
I have to point out that as a member of animal agriculture, I don't agree that "terrible pollution" and "extreme cruelty" are the problem most people think they are. I can't find the article now, but the Journal of Dairy Science recently published some research point to the environmental footprint of modern agriculture, that of say 50 years ago, and what it would be under various possible alternate conditions, and modern agriculture came out pretty damn good. Modern animal production facilities are far more efficient than the small farms from the romanticized "Good Old Days". We have better genetics, better economies of scale that allow for the employment of specialists (such as myself) who can focus on one area and do a far better job than a "Jack of all Trades" type required by smaller farms.
I'm not forgetting anything. I live in Minnesota, and work for the University here. My office is just down the road from UMN's largest swine research facility. We do a lot of work into animal welfare (mostly sows), production, nutrition (my specialty) and I have a grant proposal under construction to look at tracing in feed antibiotics and their residues and resistance genes in meat, manure, and on fields. I have a far better picture in my mind of what animal agriculture is and isn't than you do. As I seem to have to point out ad naseum stressed animals do not grow efficiently, they cost more, die more frequently, and result in lower quality meat, milk and eggs. If conditions on farms were as bad as you believe, then a small handful of motivated farmers would be able to drive everyone else out of business in only a few years. The fact is that most animals in large farms are healthier than any of their predecessors here or anywhere else in the world. That is part of the reason why they grow so much faster and more efficiently than there predecessors.
As to your criticism of my "less than 1%" argument, the chances of a non-farmer coming into contact with someone that has 1st hand contact with animal agriculture is much lower than their chances of coming into contact with someone that has 1st hand exposure to bugs from a hospital (where superbugs are endemic). As I believe I indicated before, I'm not arguing that animals are not contributing, but that they are being disproportionately blamed for the problem. I've seen some pretty interesting models that suggest animal ag reduces the time to first detection of resistance genes in the human population, but that once the genes are in human bugs, the animal contribution to spread is negligible compared to the contribution of Human-to-Human transmission.
The 1% argument is also relevant in another sense. It illustrates how different the current situation is from several generations ago. That other 99% only learn about agriculture from the outside making it easier for the kind of misconceptions you are using as arguments to spread and be believed without refutation. If you need to have 100 people in a room before someone is present that can refute your FUD, what is the likely hood that it will be refuted at all?
Your first sentence is correct. The second paragraph is only tangentially related to the truth. The third is a fairy tale.
Low dose antibiotics reduce total bacterial populations in the gut. Half of all immune cells are located in the gut. Small reductions in bacterial load can decrease the growth of the gut associated immune system, which gets first choice for the use of any absorbed nutrients/energy. Therefore, antibiotics allow the animal to use less of what it eats to grow immune tissues and more for growing meat/bone/etc. Normally antibiotics only improve growth performance in very young animals (newly weaned piglets for example), in all other stages of production the antibiotics improve feed efficiency without significantly affecting rate of gain (less nutrients consumed for the same amount of tissue deposited).
I've worked on dairy farms, both large and small, I've seen cattle standing in their own cow pies in the middle of a grassy field. Cows don't care, or even notice their own feces. Pigs will usually pick one spot in their pen for defecation that is away from the feed and water, but they will urinate wherever they are standing regardless of pen size, flooring type, etc. That being said, I worked with a pig that insisted on defecating in his own feeder and then eating it. Made my job of getting a fecal sample virtually impossible.
Prion diseases were not understood before mad cow, despite the long existence of scrapie in sheep. Sheep meat and bone meal had been fed to cattle for generations before mad cow happened. It may be obvious to you, the layman, after the fact, but no one really saw mad cow coming. Protein is protein as far as nutrition is concerned and animal protein contains a much better ratio of the individual amino acids that make up protein than plant feedstuffs. As to the eating of a carcass, cows are incredibly curious. I've had to take a dead rat away from a cow that kept walking over and licking it. She may not have ended up eating it, but who knows. Hell, if you leave a junked car in a dairy pen they will lick all of the motor oil off of it simply out of curiosity.
No, small scale farming had problems related to animal nutrition, "Jack of all trades and master of None", inherent inefficiencies related to economies of scale, etc. I remember seeing horrific pictures of animals with vitamin and mineral deficiencies that hale fro the "Good Old Days" of small hold farming. Getting larger means that a farm can afford to hire specialists. I've spend the last 8 years studying animal nutrition and I can't imagine how a farmer would be able to get all that information and dealing with the day-to-day problems of running a farm for profit. Sure, anyone can throw some corn and soy into a mixer with some oil and a trace mineral supplement, but without the appropriate tools and training, they will either formulate diets too rich (thus wasting what little profit they would otherwise make on expensive shit) or too poor (thus short changing their animals and leaving money on the table). The "Good Old Days" are a fantasy, no matter what area or field you are discussing. It is human nature to romanticize time long past by forgetting or downplaying the negatives and focusing only on the supposed positives.
Small scale farming is not sustainable. It can't be, smaller farms use more energy per unit of product due to all sorts of small things that add up. That's why most small farms have either gone out of business or found a gimmick like the Organic and Local Foods movements. They get a premium for doing things inefficiently. The only problem is that if that premium persists, then the large operations will cater to that market and once again drive the smaller operations out. One has almost nothing to do with the other, except that smaller operations can change direction faster to get in on the ground floor with the next gimmick, assuming it comes along before they are forced out of business by their own inefficiencies.
Doesn't work that way. There is a lot of evidence that our previous assumption that resistance genes have a metabolic costs when not in use is incorrect. There is a research farm in the US that hasn't used any antibiotics for over 50 years and the levels of antibiotic resistance in the herd have not gone down in the intervening decades. Either they haven't waited long enough, or our assumption is wrong.
So, you believe that spending a couple of seconds looking at cows while you speed past them at 70 MPH enables you to get a good picture of the animal's welfare? A proper animal welfare audit take hours and needs to be conducted by trained professionals, not some motorist on his way to somewhere else. Bad farms exist, but that can't be ascertained while driving past without any knowledge of what are meaningful metrics and what are irrelevant to the cow. If anything, captialism is the cows best friend. Sick, injured, stressed (including heat stress) cows don't grow as fast as healthy, uninjured, and unstressed cows. Slower growing animals consume more total feed, and frequently have lower value carcasses due to the negative effects that chronic stress has on body tissues. Those farmers that ignore the welfare of their animals will be less profitable than their peers, and will eventually be run out of business by the economics inherent in capitalism.
GM animals are not to my knowledge on the market anywhere in the US or Europe. The only GM animal I know of that is even under consideration is a Canadian strain of pig with a phytase gene from the mold Aspergillus niger expressed in the saliva so as to enable the pig to utilize dietary phosphorus with almost complete efficiency. The pig has not yet been approved, and even after it is, it won't reach very many kitchen tables for a long time. The strain of pigs has been isolated from all of the genetic improvements made in swine since it's initial creation. While it may digest Phosphorus almost completely, it is not commercially competitive due to the lower performance relative to un-modified commercial pig lines. They'll have to cross them with faster growing animals to become competitive. They will also most likely be incredibly expensive for farmers to buy, either gilts or semen due to their high cost of development and limited population. I know of no other GM animals that are being considered for approval, never mind any that are already approved. Have you come across some that I've missed? I did my MS in phosphorus nutrition, so I came across these pigs 8 years ago or so during my lit review, but it's possible there are other GM pigs that I'm unaware of outside of my discipline.
As to the value of this particular GM. The modification can only be considered beneficial. The primary storage form of P in plants is phytic acid, in which 6 P molecules are attached to a benzene ring. This form of P is virtually indigestibly by non-ruminant animals (pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys, horses, humans, etc.) so rock phosphates are added to bring the digestible P content of the feed up to the animals requirement. This frequently doubles the total P content of the feed, with the undigested P ending up in the manure and potentially in local surface and ground water. The phytase enzyme secreted in the saliva of these GM pigs can degrade phytic acid, rendering all of the P in the diet digestible. This results in a dramatic reduction in P excretion and virtually eliminates the need for non-renewable rock phosphates in pig diets. I for one would love to eat this particular GM pig due to the importance of P balance on the environment.
Organic production prohibits not only the use of such useful strain of pigs, but it also prohibits the use of in-feed enzymes such as the commercially available phytase enzyme preparations. They don't liberate 100% of the P like the GM pigs, but they can increase P digestibility cost effectively enough that they are cheaper than rock-phosphates. Don't even get me started on the other inefficiencies that are required for organic production and are a net negative on the environment and welfare of the pig.
Organic is an idea that is filled with emotional meaning, and almost none of it's restrictions are actually good for consumers, the environment, or the animals. I'm always amazed at how many "Greenies" support the inherently inefficient Organic movement as if they were remotely compatible with each other. Green requires maximal efficiency to minimize waste and environmental impact. Organic severely, and arbitrarily, limits efficiency for an intangible idea about "the good old days" and is a tax on the well meaning, but ignorant wealthy.
P.S. Super-bugs are only a problem for someone with a compromised immune system. Neither the acquired or innate immune systems use antibiotics to fight infection, so the superbugs are just as susceptible to those systems as their non-resistant peers. Doesn't help if your 90 year old Grandmother gets MRSA, but the majority of the population is healthy enough to clear it without even noticing they were infected.
Reductions in consumption might make American more healthy from a cardiovascular stand point, but it would be irrelevant in the context of this topic. Also, I think that the "Fast Food Nation" image of Americans is over rated. I eat fast food maybe once a month, usually as an alternative to skipping a meal. Most people I know use fast food similarly. Maybe my experience is not typical, but it seems like a popular meme that has been over-represented.
"Factory Farming" is a misnomer intentionally created by animal rights and vegan groups to make animal agriculture appear heartless and opportunistic. As someone with a PhD in Animal Science, I'd love to correct any misperceptions you have about modern agricultural practices. However, all I see are vitriolic FUD masquerading as an argument. Large farms work because of economies of scale. They allow specialization. On a small farm with one farmer and a couple of hired hands (I used to work on several Dairies in MA and CT that fit this description), the farmer has to be an expert on everything or contract the different jobs out. There simply aren't enough hours in the day for that farmer to keep up with everything simultaneously. On larger operations, there is enough profit that individual employees can be specialized. Some are even big enough to have an onsite veterinarian who's sole task is caring for the animals in that farm system. Specialists can spend more time on a single task, and are thus more likely to do that task better than one man trying to do 12 task with insufficient time. Modern farms are large because of the small profits generated by each animal make smaller farms uneconomical. That's the reason, not because farmers don't care about their animals.
Be careful who you take at face value. Does the animal rights activist disapprove of modern practices because they are bad, or because they can be misrepresented as a tool for their political agenda (ie no animal agriculture anywhere)? Is this person a Vegan because of what they learned about how dairy cows are raised, or did they make an emotional decision to become vegan and then decide to come up with post-hoc justifications for that decision? I am part of the modern agricultural system. I do research at a major land grant college into animal agriculture. I grew up in the suburbs and didn't handle my first cow until I was 20, pig until I was 21 and chicken until I was 22. I was not raised in an agricultural community, I learned about it from the outside like 99% of Americans. But unlike most vegans or animal rights activists, I listened to the reasons before passing judgement and it makes a world of difference. I'd suggest trying it sometime.
Conventional wisdom agrees with you, but the evidence does not. Denmark has had a ban on growth promoting antibiotics for almost a decade now, with the rest of the EU having followed suit only a couple of years later. Several antibiotics that have been approved for use the US were never approved for use in the EU for agriculture. However, they were approved for use in humans. DANMAP is the danish antibiotic use and resistance tracking program that was developed to ensure compliance and track the ban's effect. I can't remember off the top of my head, but for several of those antibiotics that were never approved for animals, but were in humans, the resistance levels are higher in Denmark, then they are in the US where agriculture has been using them alongside human medicine. It appears as though many antibiotic resistance genes have no negative value in the absence of selective pressure, which goes a long way toward explaining the generally higher resistance levels in some EU member nations relative to the US.
This is a very important and complex issue, and FUD articles like the IBTimes one are not helpful. They stir up the general populace to act without considering the evidence that already exists. The EU ban has not been effective at its stated goal of reducing resistance prevalence in the human population. I think that a ban that excludes the nursery phase would be more appropriate if not a complete repeal of the ban. But that's just based on my own interpretation of the scientific literature (as opposed to the financial literature, or populist literature). You can agree with me or not, it won't affect my research.
I don't know about geekoid, but I have a PhD in Animal Agriculture and am a researcher in the field, and I'd say that his comments are spot on. He is correct that despite all of the actions taken place, and all the attention in the media, the causal connection between low dose antibiotics in agriculture and the rise of "Super bugs" in humans is largely circumstantial. I understand the EU's decision a decade ago to be cautious in the absence of a complete mechanistic explanation, but in the last decade little has been done to do the necessary legwork to justify the ban post-hoc
An interesting point is that the MRSA levels in EU member nation hospitals is on average higher than that in US hospitals, despite the continuing use of low-dose antibiotics in US animal production, but not the Europe. The Europeans place the blame on livestock imported from non-EU countries, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If 20% of your pigs come from outside the EU, and the baseline MRSA levels are low, then they should still be lower than the levels in a country where 100% of the pigs get antibiotics in the nursery at the very least.
I'm of the opinion that animal ag does contribute, but that the relative significance of animal production is overblown. The largest contributor IMHO is human medicine. Everyone goes to the hospital eventually and "Super bugs" are endemic to large hospitals. Once they move in and set up shop, they never get completely eliminated, thus casually contaminating a percentage of the people that go to that hospital. As geekoid pointed out, super bugs are not necessarily virulent, they are just difficult to treat with antibiotics. Your own innate and acquired immune systems are just as effective as they would be without the antibiotic resistance gene, because your own immune system does not use antibiotics. That means you can visit a sick uncle in the hospital, pick up MRSA and be a carrier for anywhere from hours, to the rest of your life. You then go back out into the community and occasionally infect those you interact with in the community. That seems like a far more probable vector than antibiotic use in pigs, with whom most people never come into direct contact with unless it is already been cleaned, kill, cut-up, and cooked.
Maybe this makes me a bit of a conspiracy nut, but I think that the reason animal agriculture is being scapegoated is the strength of the human medicine lobby and the conventional misconception that MD are scientists. Human medicine is a multi-billion dollar a year industry and they want to preserve this valuable tool. They are all to familiar with the difficulty associated with trying to regulate prescribing practices without people accusing them of letting the sick die, death committee's etc., and so they try to prolong the efficacy of antibiotics by attaching every other contributing source of antibiotic resistance. Agriculture is convenient because less than 1% of the population has any direct contact with it, and it's easy to vilify something people don't understand. I don't even think it's anything that malicious, just trying to do the best for their patients without having to address some fundamental flaws in their prescribing practices.
When they start placing the blame on agriculture, everyone believes them because of all of their medical training and the cultural norm to defer to "Doctors". However, MD's are not scientists for the most part. Some are, but the vast majority have no idea what is involved in performing rigorous research, how to calculate and interpret a P value, or the difference between correlation and causation. They mean well, but they are not actually helping. Throw in a politicians need to "look busy" around election time and you have a recipe for remedies that don't address the problem and can occasionally make the problem worse.
is the International Business Times an authority on anything. I'd never even heard from them before today.
Additionally, as someone with a doctorate in animal science and a researcher in the field, I have to say that the case against animal agriculture is overstated. No one will argue that they don't contribute, but the relative importance of antibiotic use in animals (that less than 1% of the population ever come into contact with while they are alive) relative to that of rampant, large-dose, antibiotic abuses in hospitals (You know where all of those sick people hang out, transferring infections back and forth) has never been ascertained empirically.
First, the vast majority of the bacterial species that live in livestock are not capable of living in people. Therefore, the rate of resistance transfer from animal bacteria to human bacteria is relatively low. Evidence exists that these species can, and do transfer resistance gene between eachother. However, the majority of the evidence is "Resistance gene A is present in pig bacteria and human bacteria, and genes are essentially identical, therefore the gene came from animals!" This of course, completely ignores the possiblity that the gene arose to prominence in the human population and then was transferred to a pig via a farm worker that was a carrier. Talk about placing the cart in front of horse.
Second, low levels of antibiotic use in the swine industry is usually only during the first month after weaning. Pigs are weaned at between 18 and 24 days on most farms in order to prevent the sow (aka "Mom") from transmitting certain diseases to the piglets that have little effect on adult animals, but can kill piglets very easily. At this age the maternal antibodies from the colostrum are starting to wear off, but the piglets own acquired immune system is not completely up to the task. Therefore the antibiotics buy the piglets time by reducing the overall microbial load in the intestine, and coincidentally increasing the efficiency of feed utilization (which is good for the environment). Many farms then discontinue the use of prophylactic, or growth promoting antibiotics because antibiotics cost money and feed costs can account for 60-70% of total production overhead. Expensive feed can drive you out of business in a hurry.
Third, to all those bragging about being from the EU, where there is a total ban on prophylactic antibiotics a word of caution. The total amount of antibiotics used in EU agriculture is not actually lower than it was before the ban. The difference is that instead of giving antibiotics to prevent infection, and improve production they are now given to tread disease outbreaks that wouldn't of otherwise happened and to try and minimize reductions in production. Also, the antibiotics of most relevance to human medicine are not routinely used for growth promotion, but they are used to treat disease outbreaks. So, the total tonnage of antibiotics being administered has not really gone down (it did until they banned them in the nursery which was the last phase of the ban), and the antibiotics being used are MORE likely to also be used in human medicine. Bravo, talk about unintended consequences!
Finally, I fail to see how this made the front page here. It is not the usual fare of geek (no computers anywhere), it is not actually news (this controversy has been around for at least a decade), this article contributed nothing new to the discussion (restates already rampant FUD), and the IBTimes are not exactly the NYTimes or LATimes. The only thing I can see in its favor is that it lets the ignorant "Organic" group say I told you so without any real technical points for those few of us in the field to respond to. The original article is link-bait, plain and simple and/. fell for it.
Exactly!! This isn't Big Brother for your phone, but LowJack for your phone. I'd prefer it if my stolen phone is made useless to whomever stole it. It might help deter people from stealing it in the first place. No point in stealing something if you can't turn around and sell it because it has become a fancy paper weight.
I bet my sister wishes this had been implemented for laptops already, seeing as some douchebag broke into her car and stole her 1 year old laptop containging all of the data from her masters degree. She lives in Manhattan, she'll never see that laptop or the unbacked-up data again.
P.S. This entire thread is based on a blanatant misrepresentation of what the patent is for. I can understand not reading the patent, but it appears as though Mr. "Annonymous Reader" didn't even read the article that he submitted. OTOH, I find it more likely that someone with a/. account inentionally trolled the entire site using an anonymous submission guaranteed to start a flame war between the "Apple = Devil" folks and those who actually RTFA. Bravo anonymous douchebag!
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Furthermore, Denmark combined the growth promotion ban with comprehensive program for reforming prescribing practices in human medicine. The effect of these two programs is hopelessly confounded because they began at the same time. Here in the US there is talk of the growth promoters ban, but little real work being done to track and reform human prescribing practices. My personal assessment, based on the primary literature is that much of the reductions in enterococci (a probiotic bacterium) resistance is due to the human side of that equation. There is also the point that only a single class of bacterium showed reduced resistance levels. What about the many other relevant classes? I'm not saying it didn't have an effect, but do the negative outweigh the positives? You apparently do, but I do not.
So, stop making things up and start getting the facts.
I made nothing up. Keep on topic when debating, if you are going to accuse of of fabrication or lying I would appreciate it if you could point to where exactly my lies are so that I can defend myself against your false accusations.
Bacteria do travel from people to animals don't they?
That's the reason for the strict biosecurity rules. Broadly, bacteria that colonize the gut can be broken into 3 categories. Those that can permanently colonize the gut, those that can temporarily colonize the gut, and those that are only present long enough to pass through. Most of the bacteria in the first category for pigs belong to the second or third (mostly the third) category for humans. There is some overlap, but most don't.
I was thinking that combination treatments would also reduce the likelihood of resistant strains.
That's the whole problem with Multiple Resistant Staph Aureus (MRSA). They contain resistance elements to several different antibiotics, making them that much harder to kill with antibiotics. Unfortunately, the resistance genes are frequently present on mobile elements that can be transferred from one bacterium to a completely unrelated bacterium. In the case of MRSA, one bacterium has collected resistance genes against a whole host of antibiotics, so that if someone who is immune compromised gets a simple Staph infection at the hospital, they are suddenly in far more danger than would be expected normally.
Bacteriophages are promising, but they are notoriously difficult to grow. By definition they require culturing on the bacteria they are intended to fight and are very specific in their target. Their is no such thing as a broad-specturm bacteriophage that I'm aware of. Some phages only act on specific subtypes of a given bacterial species and not others within the same specie. It's very frustrating and underlies the unique value of antibiotics.
I'm interested in what effect this'll have on the University system in MN. I work for the UMN and we recently (like in the last 2 months) switched to googles cloud services. If we can't communicate effectively with the state, one of us is going to be pressured to change. I wonder who'll be doing the changing :(
Society has to deal with both problems.
I completely agree. However, society is only dealing with one. It is too politically dangerous to try and address the other obvious cause. Also, most of the suggested mitigation strategies are "Copy the EU" without bothering to notice that the EU approach is largely a failure at achieving it's original goals. A more nuanced approach is necessary, but is not even being considered (just look at Congresswoman Slaughter's and former senator Kennedy's proposals).
Maybe we should be looking at what makes so many animals sick to begin with
you say this as if it's a new idea. Animals, just like people, will always get sick unless you have gnotobiotic animals which is completely unfeasible outside of tightly controlled (and ridiculously expensive) laboratory situations. There are a lot of researchers and companies who's whole job is to develop new disease prevention strategies. It is cheaper to keep a pig healthy than it is to restore health to an already sick pig. This is one place where Human medicine could learn a thing or two in the US. The current health insurance system has no mechanism to foster disease prevention as opposed to disease treatment because it is too focused on the cost of each procedure and not on the total cost of providing health care of each patient under each scenario. Farmers on the other hand do because they make their money off of the pigs directly, there is no middle man, which is why they are so in favor of low dose antimicrobials in the nursery phase.
It takes enormous amounts of food and energy (and fossil fuels) to raise nine billion animals, and they are going to produce an enormous amount of waste, no matter how they're raised.
It also takes enormous amounts of land, fertilizer, and fossil fuels to raise cereal grains. People need to eat, if they aren't eating meat then they'll be eating something else. Much of the beef raised in the west is raised on land that would make very poor cropland. It's using land that could not reasonably used for anything else. The worlds problems won't be solved by eliminating or even significantly reducing animal agriculture. That would only create a new host of problems
The primary solution is that Americans simply need to drastically reduce meat consumption (on average, we each ate over 250 lbs of cow, chicken, and pig in 2005
That works out to less than a pound a day (~0.68 lbs). Large numbers have a way of being misinterpreted, it helps to put them in perspective.
Policies regarding antibiotics and so on are just band-aids, and probably mostly useless, as you point out.
That was not my point. Not all policies are pointless, only the ones that have the most support. I was a supporter of the EU ban, but the evidence is not on it's side. That doesn't mean that are no better policies possible.
The problem seems to be that raising (and killing) nine billion animals per year is always going to be messy, inefficient, cruel, and bad for the environment. It's the law of truly large numbers again.
This opinion is probably best explained by your status as an "outsider". None of the slaughtered animal goes to waste, nor does any of the "Waste" for that matter. Manure/litter is used as fertilizer to help grow the crops that the animals eat. Meat and Bone meal and Offal are ground up and fed back to recycle the high quality protein other high quality nutrients. Cattle hides go for leather, poultry feathers can be made into animal feed, etc. At a recent meeting in MN that I attended there was an environmental research presenting data that acre for acre more P and N run of from municipal storm drains than from nearby corn and soy fields. That means the local suburbs are worse for the environment than the farms using chemical and manure based fertilizers. All human activity
What? You really didn't know
I was a Junior in college the year that Mad Cow was getting it's most coverage. They were burning cattle all across Europe and the US was refusing to accept imports from anyone still trading with Europe. As an Animal Science student, it got a lot of coverage in just about every relevant class. I probably know far more about Mad Cow than most people. Try reading this paragraph again (or for the first time if you missed it before) and maybe you'll see the point I was trying (apparently unsuccessfully) to make:
Prion diseases were not understood before mad cow, despite the long existence of scrapie in sheep. Sheep meat and bone meal had been fed to cattle for generations before mad cow happened. It may be obvious to you, the layman, after the fact, but no one really saw mad cow coming. Protein is protein as far as nutrition is concerned and animal protein contains a much better ratio of the individual amino acids that make up protein than plant feedstuffs.
Scrapie and Mad Cow are both prion diseases. The scientific term is transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). Prion diseases are the only known form of disease by which a protein can propagate itself. That is very significant. Until it was known that was possible it was impossible to predict that feeding sheep meat and bone meal to cows could cause the development of a new disease. As I stated before the feeding of sheep meat and bone meal to cattle went on for decades prior to mad cow. It was only after the processing involved in manufacturing sheep MBM changed that the scrapie prion survived to infect cattle. My criticism of your post was not a denial of mad cow, only your assertion that it was a predictable outcome.
I was also criticizing your assertion that it never would have happened without human intervention. Prion diseases can be spread without consumption of contaminated meat. We don't fully understand how prions work, or how eating non-nervous tissues can result in it's transmission. (my old next door neighbor has variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease contracted from eating deer meat). Chronic Wasting Disease (TSE in wild deer and elk) is a serious concern to hunters, and many states require the heads of hunted animals be sent in for inspection before any of the meat can be consumed. Wasting disease in wild deer has been show to increase as population density increases indicating a non-carnivorous transmission route.
During 2001 through 2008, the overall antimicrobial consumption in the pig production increased by 19% (24%, when adjusted for increasing export, see chapter on antimicrobial use), measured in ADDkg per pig produced. This increase was primarily associated with an increasing consumption of tetracyclines for oral use. From 2003 through 2008, the consumption of tetracyclines increased by 118 % per weaning pig and 60% per finisher pig. In 2008, the consumption of tetracyclines in weaning pigs comprised 50% of the overall consumption of tetracyclines in pigs, while the consumption in finishers amounted to 37%.
Use of antibiotics has actually gone up in Denmark. That is because of the increased incidences of disease outbreak are inevitable in the wake of the ban. Antibiotics are given for fewer number of day, but in much higher concentrations for a net higher consumption per pig produced. Most articles touting the success of the Danish experience are from earlier on, when antibiotic use levels were dropping off and active disease outbreaks hadn't started to rise yet. There was a lag that has now caught up.
As to the claim of no effect on production, I can't find a citation yet, but I've seen presentation at several scientific meetings over the last 8 years on the strategies that the Danes have tried (for the most part unsuccessfully) to mitigate the increased post-weaning mortality, decreased growth performance and feed efficiency in the nursery, and increased variability in carcass quality/size at slaughter. Whole sections at regional and national animal science meetings have been devoted to presentations on potential alternative to antimicrobials in the nursery (Prebiotics, Probiotics, Essential Oils, organic acids, direct fed microbials, in feed Antibodies, new vaccines, modified weaning age, etc.). Unfortunately, the majority of them are only marginally effective (either low effect, or inconsistent effect).
Finally, your opinions are not sufficient to refute the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, been shown by other researchers in the field, or have read in the official reports (as opposed to headlines of google searches or 1 page summaries of a 100+ page report). I've more than done the necessary due diligence necessary for an informed decision. You apparently have not.
Most of my recent experience is with pigs, and broiler chickens, but I did work on a couple of small to medium sized dairies as an undergraduate. On intensive dairies, the cows live in a free stall barn usually. They consist of 1 or 2 ally's flanked by rows of stalls. The stalls are elevated about a foot or 2 above the floor, are padded (ground up tires cover with thick canvas and fresh wood shavings replaced periodically), and allow the cows to comfortably lie down without laying in shit. On one wall is a headlock system where the cows can poke their heads through to reach the feed. The headlocks prevent one cow from pushing another cow away from the feeder, and can be set to hold the cows in place when they need medical treatment. At the end of the ally's is a large open space that lead to the milking parlor (of which there are multiple designs, each with benefits and drawbacks of their own) which they enter for milking. They are fed and milked 2 to 3 times a day. Dry cows and replacement heifers are kept separate from the milking animals because their nutritional needs are so different so they just have a free stall barn without the milking parlor.
Beef can be raised out on the range, in free stall barns, or in feedlots. I have little direct experience there, so I can't tell you much more detail. However, I can be certain that their conditions are not as abhorent as most people believe because the stress of poor environment inhibits animal growth, production, and quality. Bad farmers put themselves out of business the next time prices drop.
the majority of links I posted were news stories, not the activist links
And news reporters are known for accurately portraying science to the layman? Try reading The Guardian's Bad Science. Dr. Ben Goldacre is both a physician and a scientists and he does an excellent job of pointing out this weakness in the press.
The Johns Hopkins study is very concerning. It is good evidence that animal agriculture can contribute. As I've stated previously (multiple times) I'm not arguing that animal agriculture does not contribute. I'm debating the relative importance. Is agriculture responsible for half? 75%? 25%? No one can say for sure, but they are treating agriculture as the primary cause. As I stated previously I've seen models that suggest the time between introduction of an novel antibiotic and the 1st appearance of resistance in humans is shortened by antibiotic use in livestock. That would support the existence of a ban. However, the models also show that once the resistance elements move from the animal to human population, the human-to-human transmission far out stripes the animal-to-human transmission rate. The implications of this is that after antibiotic resistance appears in the human population, the contribution of animal agriculture becomes negligible. I'm in favor of a temporary ban on any new antibiotics. Give them as long as possible before resistance develops, but once the horse is out of the barn let livestock use them. It preserves them for humans up to several years longer, but does not deny them to agriculture after the ban would become unhelpful.
Plenty of evidence exists that the 2005 study is not accurate. In 1983, Langlois et al. reported only a 50% reduction in tetracycline resistance isolates from pigs that have not been exposed to ANY antibiotics for 126 months (10.5 years). They didn't even use antibiotics to treat diseases. Any pig on that farm that was sick was removed from the herd. A decade of complete naivety to antibiotics was only capable of reducing the resistance to half of it's earlier levels. The animals in the EU (including Denmark) are still administered antibiotics for disease outbreaks. From the most recent DANMAP document (2008):
During 2001 through 2008, the overall antimicrobial consumption in the pig production increased by 19% (24%, when adjusted for increasing export, see chapter on antimicrobial use), measured in ADDkg per pig produced. This increase was primarily associated with an increasing consumption of tetracyclines for oral use. From 2003 through 2008, the consumption of tetracyclines increased by 118 % per weaning pig and 60% per finisher pig. In 2008, the consumption of tetracyclines in weaning pigs comprised 50% of the overall consumption of tetracyclines in pigs, while the consumption in finishers amounted to 37%.
The ban has just resulted in a shift of the intended purpose of administration from disease prevention and growth promotion to disease treatment, while simultaneously increasing the total antibiotics administered. The ban was well intentioned, and I think a partial ban (excluding the fragile nursery period in pigs) would be far more effective at reducing total antibiotic use and resistance than the current blanket ban does.
You're arguing that the people criticizing factory farming have a vested interest in selling FUD, as if the industry doesn't have a vested interest in the status quo and deregulation.
The difference is that I point out my own potential conflict of interest. As a researcher, a ban would be good for me. It would result in a rash of research grants being put out looking for solutions to the problems caused by the ban (increased weaning mortality, reduced growth performance and feed efficiency, etc.). It would be bad for my industry, but not the end of the world (as is evident by the continued existence of signifi
Obviously, you are ignorant of some very basic facts about American eating habits and economics: Americans eat too much meat and too little high quality vegetables, meat prices are too low, and decreasing meat prices further will cause even more meat to be consumed. We need fewer meat producers, more producers of more variety of high quality vegetables, and meat prices need to go up.
American eating habits on average should probably change. I never said otherwise, but those eating habits are not completely driven by supply. They are driven by the natural human tendency to prefer meat protein over vegetable and fruit protein. Throughout the world as peoples income increases, their demand for high quality meat protein increases.
That would not even be a problem if it were not for the fact that American's have switched from largely physical jobs, to desk jobs. Michael Phelps was said to consume 20,000 Calories a day, or 10 times what is suggested for normal people because he actually burned all of those calories in a single day. Many Americans lead sedentary lives and do not burn even the 2,000 that is considered the average (my father in law is a good example).
Nutritionally speaking, animal protein is the most digestibility, and balanced of all protein sources (eggs are considered the ideal protein). For those in the lowest income brackets, cheap meat is the difference between being malnourished and meeting their minimum requirements for protein. That the wealthy decide to consume even more meat instead of more fruits and vegetables is their decision, and they will ultimately pay the consequences for their purchasing decisions. You have every right to disapprove, but I'd rather ensure that the poor are not malnourished than whether or not the wealthy eat themselves into early graves.
Furthermore, nobody knows what the largest contributor to antibiotic resistance is.
I agree that it hasn't been quantified, but I can construct some pretty good arguments for why human medical abuses of antibiotics are more relevant to human antibiotic resistance than animal antibiotic uses. I'd rather the research be done to quantify, but it isn't being done (I actually have a grant proposal that I'll be submitting in November that will help quantify agricultures contribution).
Since industrial meat production is bad for so many other reasons, reducing it is a good idea anyway.
Pure, unadulterated opinion based largely on misconceptions and ignorance. Industrial meat production is not bad for the animals, the environment, or consumers.
Antibiotics are available under prescription, and doctors are supposed to prescribe them only when necessary, based on their judgment.
That judgement factor is the real issue. It is a well known fact that if you pester the doctor you can get antibiotics even if he's not sure whether or not your illness is bacterial in nature. They are often used to quite those patients that have a tendency toward hypochondria. Furthermore, most patients don't pay directly for their antibiotics, so the costs associated with unnecessary medication is relatively minor (the cost of the co-pay). For farmers, they pay the full price every time. That means if they are not getting a boost in performance, they will not use them. Not only that, if the boost is not sufficient to counter the costs of the antibiotics, it'll be in their best interest to not use them. The farmer has the financial viability of his business at stake when deciding whether or not to use antibiotics. The average patient has only $10 to 20 worth of co-pay, and the doctor has no real strong incentive not to give antibiotics to troublesome patients.
How specifically do you want to change the law to reduce their abuse further?
I'd like to see culture work or some other sort of verification become mandatory in cases where the illn
If this is true then I don't see the problem. Just one month of prophylactic use? My understanding is that they were used for growth enhancement until they were fully grown adults.
It is legal to use them longer, and on older farms they can continue to improve feed efficiency. Most antibiotics have a mandatory withdrawal period so that they are out of the animals system before slaughter that allows for use up to a month before going to market. However, most farms pull them after the nursery phase because the added efficiency is not worth the cost.
You realize that argument could just as easily be applied toward prophylactic antibiotic use in the human population. Would you advocate selling antibiotics over the counter and recommending that people take them daily for their entire lives to prevent infection?
Yes I do see that. I pointed out in a different post that human prescribing practices are probably a much larger contributor to the problem of antibiotic resistance. However, the relative importance of either source has never been quantified. It is too complex, expensive, and prone to interpretation. The difference between agriculture and making antibiotics available over the counter is that producers have a personal incentive not to abuse them. They cost money that the producer doesn't want to spend unless it'll be guaranteed to save/make him money. People would have a personal incentive to abuse them. Abuse is more likely to have no personal negative effect outside of their cost, and most people are willing to waste a lot of money to be healthier.
I've never denied that the problem exists, or that animal agriculture is a contributing factor. However, the contribution of animal agriculture has not actually been quantified, and the models I've seen show it to have a much smaller contribution than human prescribing practices.
/. in the evenings.
People die when any industry cuts corners. What is needed is a little perspective. The average American consumes large quantities of animal protein a year with only a small percentage EVER getting sick. We have the cleanest and healthiest food supply in the world. I agree that it can be better. It can always be better. Even one death a decade is too many, but that doesn't negate the improvements that have been made as a result of the green revolution.
Most of those going on and on about how bad things are have a book to sell you, a website they want you to visit, or a charity that they have a vested interest in. Fear mongers will always exist and spread FUD for personal gain. It is easier to spread FUD about an industry on which we all depend, have little direct contact, and don't understand.
real problems do not have simple solutions and misrepresenting the problem makes finding those solutions even more difficult. I watched part of Food, Inc, and it is full of half truths and misrepresentations. The same goes for the articles I've read by Michael Pollan. The factory farming page on wikipedia is completely unreliable, as is any wikipedia page covering a controversial issue. The moderators have biases and are not very good at keeping those biases out of the articles. I've read several of the DANMAP reports and they don't hide the fact that the stated goals (reduced antibiotic use and reduced antibiotic resistance in humans) have not been met, even after all of these years. Unfortunately, the majority of what I read outside of journal articles take proposed links and correlations as fact and the more those overstatements get repeated, the harder it is to make people see that they are overstatements.
If you really want a back and forth, you're going to need to pick a topic and claim. A wall of links is the digital equivalent to sending a pallet of legal boxes over in response to a subpoena for a single document. I don't answer FUD professionally, and my wife is not too appreciative of the time I already spend on
Firstly, many animals don't care about shit. The don't know that it's filled with bacteria. I worked on a dairy that pastured their cows over the summer on a large field. I would have to go bring them in to the barn to milk and then turn them back out when I was done. Very frequently they would come into the barn with shit on themselves despite spending 10 hours in a large field full of grass with more than enough space to spread out and keep clean. I currently work with pigs, and while they will designate one end of a pen for defecation, they will urinate where ever they are, including on top of each other, no matter what the stocking density.
Anthropomorphism is the conferring of human traits on animals. That is frequently thought to mean Mickey mouse and Donald Duck, but it also refers to the projection of human reactions and thought processes onto animals. If you want to understand animal welfare, the first thing is to understand that a pig does not care about the same things that you do. What stresses you out does not necessarily stress out animals.
I won't argue that there aren't gains to be made. My group does a lot of research into sow welfare with the goal of improving it based on scientifically sound research as opposed to emotionally based guesswork. I also take umbrage with some of the common practices in the broiler and layer markets. A good example of sound welfare research from my Alma Mater is the work of Dr. Bill Muir at Purdue, who developed a strain of Kinder Gentler Birds that are selected as a group for better welfare while still maintaining competitive production levels.
There are those that don't respect the animals. The trucker that loaded our last batch of pigs was one, but they are the exception not the rule. I've spent 8 years in the midwest and 10 years in animal agriculture and the good guys far outnumber the morons that don't care. I've noticed that the morons tend to leave the industry much faster than those that do care.
No it doesn't. Modern farms, and the research farm I'm describing, have strict bio-security measures. For example, anyone entering the farm must take a shower and change into work clothes that don't leave the farm. They then shower out when they leave and put their street clothes back on. Anyone with exposure to animals from other farms within a certain period of time are prohibited from visiting the farm.
Sometimes a single antibiotic resistance gene can confer resistance to multiple antibiotics. An example is a generic outwardly directed pump that can remove the antibiotic before it has a chance to act. It was discovered that it works with multiple antibiotic substrates so use of any of the relevant antibiotics supports resistance to all of them. It is also important to remember that many classes of antibiotics were first discovered in bacteria and molds. Some bacteria produce their own antibiotics to attach others and increase their own survivability.
Obviously you are the one that does not understand how agriculture works. When hog prices are low, farmers cull more sows thus resulting in fewer piglets and reduced supply. There is a lag period between the culled sows and the reduced number of hogs going to market of roughly 9 to 12 months. Earlier this year supply finally caught up with demand for the first time in over 18 months. Before March the average pig was sold for less than the priced of raising it, and farmers had to eat those costs. Lowering the price of animal production does not lead to more pigs unless it also leads to lower prices at the supermarket, which ultimately spur demand. Low prices at the supermarket without reductions in input costs leads to a lot of unprofitable (usually smaller) farms going bankrupt. This general trend is why American agriculture has moved away from small farms with maybe 2 or 3 sows and a couple dozen pigs, to large commercial scale operations with hundreds of sows and thousands of pigs. They make more money in the good times and they lose less money in the lean times due to higher efficiency.
Deliberately choosing inefficient production methods often is a good thing in itself even if it has no effect on the quality of the product.
Complete and utter bullshit! Inefficiency leads to greater risk of environmental pollution, greater GHG emissions, lost money, less grain for export to countries that cannot feed themselves, more land used for crop production and thus denied for other uses (wildlife, parks, homes, etc.). If you acknowledge that organic is less efficient (an that really is undeniable), then you have to face the reality that it is not green. For some that is fine, but if I were to claim membership in either camp it would be the green camp. There is a limited amount of land for raising crops and animals, there are a limited number of people willing to work with animals, but there is an almost unlimited demand for food. Some estimates expect a doubling of global demand for food in the next 50 years. How do you produce twice as much food if you throw out the last 50 years of efficiency gains at the same time.
[sarcasm]Yes, that is exactly what I said. I want everyone with a compromised immune system to die off. Furthermore, I'm a fan of eugenics and think that antibiotic resistance is the best way to thin the herd.[/sarcasm]
My point, which you'd have to be an idiot to have actually missed, was that these superbugs are not a threat to everyone all of the time. As others have also pointed out, antibiotic resistance does not confer increased virulence. Everyone seem to believe that MRSA will kill anyone that has it, but most carriers of MRSA don't even know it and clear it without ever having a problem.
As to the long list of possible bacterial infections, no shit sherlock. We all know that antibiotics are a godsend for modern medicine and any loss in their efficacy is cause for concern. Stating the obvious does not make any of your other arguments more valid, nor does it invalidate any of mine. I acknowledge that animal agriculture is a contributing factor. However, it is a smaller contributor being scapegoated while the single largest contributor is largely given a free pass. Human abuse of antibiotics in Humans is far more culpable, but because it is politically dangerous to try and reform human prescribing practices no one will touch it.
No antibiotic is 100% lethal. Even when massive supra-theraputic doses are given, antibiotics cannot kill all microbes under real world conditions. That's why if someone is irradiated to treat bone cancer they cannot simply be given antibiotics if they contract an infection prior to the bone marrow transplant. Antibiotics help the immune system, they don't replace it.
The point you raise is one of relative strength. The current popular belief is that low doses of antibiotics provide a continuous selective pressure over a long period of time, thus increasing the horizontal transmission of antibiotic resistance elements. The situation in the EU is one where higher doses kill off more than just the offending bacteria, but are (supposedly) more sporadic. One possible problem I see with the EU approach is that the higher doses kill off more of the competitors, thus allowing the resistant bugs a chance to expand into the ecological niches in the intestine vacated by susceptible populations. Which is worse in the long run? I don't know, but no one appears to be even considering the later other than a handful of vocal, and thus ignored, critics of the EU ban.
Personally, I think that the selective pressure provided by low doses is not as dangerous as the selective pressure provided by periodic high doses. I could be wrong, but no one has done the necessary research to show either way. That's the real kicker about this whole debate. The science necessary to answer this question is so difficult, expensive and complex that only small parts of it have been done. The importance of this issues is such that decisions need to be made even though the science is not complete. Furthermore, the usefulness of the potential fear that this issue raises has been used by both the well meaning and the unscrupled to forward political agenda's unrelated to the problem (Protective import bans in the EU, the "organic" movement in the US, etc.)
I have to point out that as a member of animal agriculture, I don't agree that "terrible pollution" and "extreme cruelty" are the problem most people think they are. I can't find the article now, but the Journal of Dairy Science recently published some research point to the environmental footprint of modern agriculture, that of say 50 years ago, and what it would be under various possible alternate conditions, and modern agriculture came out pretty damn good. Modern animal production facilities are far more efficient than the small farms from the romanticized "Good Old Days". We have better genetics, better economies of scale that allow for the employment of specialists (such as myself) who can focus on one area and do a far better job than a "Jack of all Trades" type required by smaller farms.
I'm not forgetting anything. I live in Minnesota, and work for the University here. My office is just down the road from UMN's largest swine research facility. We do a lot of work into animal welfare (mostly sows), production, nutrition (my specialty) and I have a grant proposal under construction to look at tracing in feed antibiotics and their residues and resistance genes in meat, manure, and on fields. I have a far better picture in my mind of what animal agriculture is and isn't than you do. As I seem to have to point out ad naseum stressed animals do not grow efficiently, they cost more, die more frequently, and result in lower quality meat, milk and eggs. If conditions on farms were as bad as you believe, then a small handful of motivated farmers would be able to drive everyone else out of business in only a few years. The fact is that most animals in large farms are healthier than any of their predecessors here or anywhere else in the world. That is part of the reason why they grow so much faster and more efficiently than there predecessors.
As to your criticism of my "less than 1%" argument, the chances of a non-farmer coming into contact with someone that has 1st hand contact with animal agriculture is much lower than their chances of coming into contact with someone that has 1st hand exposure to bugs from a hospital (where superbugs are endemic). As I believe I indicated before, I'm not arguing that animals are not contributing, but that they are being disproportionately blamed for the problem. I've seen some pretty interesting models that suggest animal ag reduces the time to first detection of resistance genes in the human population, but that once the genes are in human bugs, the animal contribution to spread is negligible compared to the contribution of Human-to-Human transmission.
The 1% argument is also relevant in another sense. It illustrates how different the current situation is from several generations ago. That other 99% only learn about agriculture from the outside making it easier for the kind of misconceptions you are using as arguments to spread and be believed without refutation. If you need to have 100 people in a room before someone is present that can refute your FUD, what is the likely hood that it will be refuted at all?
Your first sentence is correct. The second paragraph is only tangentially related to the truth. The third is a fairy tale.
Low dose antibiotics reduce total bacterial populations in the gut. Half of all immune cells are located in the gut. Small reductions in bacterial load can decrease the growth of the gut associated immune system, which gets first choice for the use of any absorbed nutrients/energy. Therefore, antibiotics allow the animal to use less of what it eats to grow immune tissues and more for growing meat/bone/etc. Normally antibiotics only improve growth performance in very young animals (newly weaned piglets for example), in all other stages of production the antibiotics improve feed efficiency without significantly affecting rate of gain (less nutrients consumed for the same amount of tissue deposited).
I've worked on dairy farms, both large and small, I've seen cattle standing in their own cow pies in the middle of a grassy field. Cows don't care, or even notice their own feces. Pigs will usually pick one spot in their pen for defecation that is away from the feed and water, but they will urinate wherever they are standing regardless of pen size, flooring type, etc. That being said, I worked with a pig that insisted on defecating in his own feeder and then eating it. Made my job of getting a fecal sample virtually impossible.
Prion diseases were not understood before mad cow, despite the long existence of scrapie in sheep. Sheep meat and bone meal had been fed to cattle for generations before mad cow happened. It may be obvious to you, the layman, after the fact, but no one really saw mad cow coming. Protein is protein as far as nutrition is concerned and animal protein contains a much better ratio of the individual amino acids that make up protein than plant feedstuffs. As to the eating of a carcass, cows are incredibly curious. I've had to take a dead rat away from a cow that kept walking over and licking it. She may not have ended up eating it, but who knows. Hell, if you leave a junked car in a dairy pen they will lick all of the motor oil off of it simply out of curiosity.
No, small scale farming had problems related to animal nutrition, "Jack of all trades and master of None", inherent inefficiencies related to economies of scale, etc. I remember seeing horrific pictures of animals with vitamin and mineral deficiencies that hale fro the "Good Old Days" of small hold farming. Getting larger means that a farm can afford to hire specialists. I've spend the last 8 years studying animal nutrition and I can't imagine how a farmer would be able to get all that information and dealing with the day-to-day problems of running a farm for profit. Sure, anyone can throw some corn and soy into a mixer with some oil and a trace mineral supplement, but without the appropriate tools and training, they will either formulate diets too rich (thus wasting what little profit they would otherwise make on expensive shit) or too poor (thus short changing their animals and leaving money on the table). The "Good Old Days" are a fantasy, no matter what area or field you are discussing. It is human nature to romanticize time long past by forgetting or downplaying the negatives and focusing only on the supposed positives.
Small scale farming is not sustainable. It can't be, smaller farms use more energy per unit of product due to all sorts of small things that add up. That's why most small farms have either gone out of business or found a gimmick like the Organic and Local Foods movements. They get a premium for doing things inefficiently. The only problem is that if that premium persists, then the large operations will cater to that market and once again drive the smaller operations out. One has almost nothing to do with the other, except that smaller operations can change direction faster to get in on the ground floor with the next gimmick, assuming it comes along before they are forced out of business by their own inefficiencies.
Doesn't work that way. There is a lot of evidence that our previous assumption that resistance genes have a metabolic costs when not in use is incorrect. There is a research farm in the US that hasn't used any antibiotics for over 50 years and the levels of antibiotic resistance in the herd have not gone down in the intervening decades. Either they haven't waited long enough, or our assumption is wrong.
So, you believe that spending a couple of seconds looking at cows while you speed past them at 70 MPH enables you to get a good picture of the animal's welfare? A proper animal welfare audit take hours and needs to be conducted by trained professionals, not some motorist on his way to somewhere else. Bad farms exist, but that can't be ascertained while driving past without any knowledge of what are meaningful metrics and what are irrelevant to the cow. If anything, captialism is the cows best friend. Sick, injured, stressed (including heat stress) cows don't grow as fast as healthy, uninjured, and unstressed cows. Slower growing animals consume more total feed, and frequently have lower value carcasses due to the negative effects that chronic stress has on body tissues. Those farmers that ignore the welfare of their animals will be less profitable than their peers, and will eventually be run out of business by the economics inherent in capitalism.
GM animals are not to my knowledge on the market anywhere in the US or Europe. The only GM animal I know of that is even under consideration is a Canadian strain of pig with a phytase gene from the mold Aspergillus niger expressed in the saliva so as to enable the pig to utilize dietary phosphorus with almost complete efficiency. The pig has not yet been approved, and even after it is, it won't reach very many kitchen tables for a long time. The strain of pigs has been isolated from all of the genetic improvements made in swine since it's initial creation. While it may digest Phosphorus almost completely, it is not commercially competitive due to the lower performance relative to un-modified commercial pig lines. They'll have to cross them with faster growing animals to become competitive. They will also most likely be incredibly expensive for farmers to buy, either gilts or semen due to their high cost of development and limited population. I know of no other GM animals that are being considered for approval, never mind any that are already approved. Have you come across some that I've missed? I did my MS in phosphorus nutrition, so I came across these pigs 8 years ago or so during my lit review, but it's possible there are other GM pigs that I'm unaware of outside of my discipline.
As to the value of this particular GM. The modification can only be considered beneficial. The primary storage form of P in plants is phytic acid, in which 6 P molecules are attached to a benzene ring. This form of P is virtually indigestibly by non-ruminant animals (pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys, horses, humans, etc.) so rock phosphates are added to bring the digestible P content of the feed up to the animals requirement. This frequently doubles the total P content of the feed, with the undigested P ending up in the manure and potentially in local surface and ground water. The phytase enzyme secreted in the saliva of these GM pigs can degrade phytic acid, rendering all of the P in the diet digestible. This results in a dramatic reduction in P excretion and virtually eliminates the need for non-renewable rock phosphates in pig diets. I for one would love to eat this particular GM pig due to the importance of P balance on the environment.
Organic production prohibits not only the use of such useful strain of pigs, but it also prohibits the use of in-feed enzymes such as the commercially available phytase enzyme preparations. They don't liberate 100% of the P like the GM pigs, but they can increase P digestibility cost effectively enough that they are cheaper than rock-phosphates. Don't even get me started on the other inefficiencies that are required for organic production and are a net negative on the environment and welfare of the pig.
Organic is an idea that is filled with emotional meaning, and almost none of it's restrictions are actually good for consumers, the environment, or the animals. I'm always amazed at how many "Greenies" support the inherently inefficient Organic movement as if they were remotely compatible with each other. Green requires maximal efficiency to minimize waste and environmental impact. Organic severely, and arbitrarily, limits efficiency for an intangible idea about "the good old days" and is a tax on the well meaning, but ignorant wealthy.
P.S. Super-bugs are only a problem for someone with a compromised immune system. Neither the acquired or innate immune systems use antibiotics to fight infection, so the superbugs are just as susceptible to those systems as their non-resistant peers. Doesn't help if your 90 year old Grandmother gets MRSA, but the majority of the population is healthy enough to clear it without even noticing they were infected.
Reductions in consumption might make American more healthy from a cardiovascular stand point, but it would be irrelevant in the context of this topic. Also, I think that the "Fast Food Nation" image of Americans is over rated. I eat fast food maybe once a month, usually as an alternative to skipping a meal. Most people I know use fast food similarly. Maybe my experience is not typical, but it seems like a popular meme that has been over-represented.
"Factory Farming" is a misnomer intentionally created by animal rights and vegan groups to make animal agriculture appear heartless and opportunistic. As someone with a PhD in Animal Science, I'd love to correct any misperceptions you have about modern agricultural practices. However, all I see are vitriolic FUD masquerading as an argument. Large farms work because of economies of scale. They allow specialization. On a small farm with one farmer and a couple of hired hands (I used to work on several Dairies in MA and CT that fit this description), the farmer has to be an expert on everything or contract the different jobs out. There simply aren't enough hours in the day for that farmer to keep up with everything simultaneously. On larger operations, there is enough profit that individual employees can be specialized. Some are even big enough to have an onsite veterinarian who's sole task is caring for the animals in that farm system. Specialists can spend more time on a single task, and are thus more likely to do that task better than one man trying to do 12 task with insufficient time. Modern farms are large because of the small profits generated by each animal make smaller farms uneconomical. That's the reason, not because farmers don't care about their animals.
Be careful who you take at face value. Does the animal rights activist disapprove of modern practices because they are bad, or because they can be misrepresented as a tool for their political agenda (ie no animal agriculture anywhere)? Is this person a Vegan because of what they learned about how dairy cows are raised, or did they make an emotional decision to become vegan and then decide to come up with post-hoc justifications for that decision? I am part of the modern agricultural system. I do research at a major land grant college into animal agriculture. I grew up in the suburbs and didn't handle my first cow until I was 20, pig until I was 21 and chicken until I was 22. I was not raised in an agricultural community, I learned about it from the outside like 99% of Americans. But unlike most vegans or animal rights activists, I listened to the reasons before passing judgement and it makes a world of difference. I'd suggest trying it sometime.
Conventional wisdom agrees with you, but the evidence does not. Denmark has had a ban on growth promoting antibiotics for almost a decade now, with the rest of the EU having followed suit only a couple of years later. Several antibiotics that have been approved for use the US were never approved for use in the EU for agriculture. However, they were approved for use in humans. DANMAP is the danish antibiotic use and resistance tracking program that was developed to ensure compliance and track the ban's effect. I can't remember off the top of my head, but for several of those antibiotics that were never approved for animals, but were in humans, the resistance levels are higher in Denmark, then they are in the US where agriculture has been using them alongside human medicine. It appears as though many antibiotic resistance genes have no negative value in the absence of selective pressure, which goes a long way toward explaining the generally higher resistance levels in some EU member nations relative to the US.
This is a very important and complex issue, and FUD articles like the IBTimes one are not helpful. They stir up the general populace to act without considering the evidence that already exists. The EU ban has not been effective at its stated goal of reducing resistance prevalence in the human population. I think that a ban that excludes the nursery phase would be more appropriate if not a complete repeal of the ban. But that's just based on my own interpretation of the scientific literature (as opposed to the financial literature, or populist literature). You can agree with me or not, it won't affect my research.
I don't know about geekoid, but I have a PhD in Animal Agriculture and am a researcher in the field, and I'd say that his comments are spot on. He is correct that despite all of the actions taken place, and all the attention in the media, the causal connection between low dose antibiotics in agriculture and the rise of "Super bugs" in humans is largely circumstantial. I understand the EU's decision a decade ago to be cautious in the absence of a complete mechanistic explanation, but in the last decade little has been done to do the necessary legwork to justify the ban post-hoc
An interesting point is that the MRSA levels in EU member nation hospitals is on average higher than that in US hospitals, despite the continuing use of low-dose antibiotics in US animal production, but not the Europe. The Europeans place the blame on livestock imported from non-EU countries, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If 20% of your pigs come from outside the EU, and the baseline MRSA levels are low, then they should still be lower than the levels in a country where 100% of the pigs get antibiotics in the nursery at the very least.
I'm of the opinion that animal ag does contribute, but that the relative significance of animal production is overblown. The largest contributor IMHO is human medicine. Everyone goes to the hospital eventually and "Super bugs" are endemic to large hospitals. Once they move in and set up shop, they never get completely eliminated, thus casually contaminating a percentage of the people that go to that hospital. As geekoid pointed out, super bugs are not necessarily virulent, they are just difficult to treat with antibiotics. Your own innate and acquired immune systems are just as effective as they would be without the antibiotic resistance gene, because your own immune system does not use antibiotics. That means you can visit a sick uncle in the hospital, pick up MRSA and be a carrier for anywhere from hours, to the rest of your life. You then go back out into the community and occasionally infect those you interact with in the community. That seems like a far more probable vector than antibiotic use in pigs, with whom most people never come into direct contact with unless it is already been cleaned, kill, cut-up, and cooked.
Maybe this makes me a bit of a conspiracy nut, but I think that the reason animal agriculture is being scapegoated is the strength of the human medicine lobby and the conventional misconception that MD are scientists. Human medicine is a multi-billion dollar a year industry and they want to preserve this valuable tool. They are all to familiar with the difficulty associated with trying to regulate prescribing practices without people accusing them of letting the sick die, death committee's etc., and so they try to prolong the efficacy of antibiotics by attaching every other contributing source of antibiotic resistance. Agriculture is convenient because less than 1% of the population has any direct contact with it, and it's easy to vilify something people don't understand. I don't even think it's anything that malicious, just trying to do the best for their patients without having to address some fundamental flaws in their prescribing practices.
When they start placing the blame on agriculture, everyone believes them because of all of their medical training and the cultural norm to defer to "Doctors". However, MD's are not scientists for the most part. Some are, but the vast majority have no idea what is involved in performing rigorous research, how to calculate and interpret a P value, or the difference between correlation and causation. They mean well, but they are not actually helping. Throw in a politicians need to "look busy" around election time and you have a recipe for remedies that don't address the problem and can occasionally make the problem worse.
is the International Business Times an authority on anything. I'd never even heard from them before today.
/. fell for it.
Additionally, as someone with a doctorate in animal science and a researcher in the field, I have to say that the case against animal agriculture is overstated. No one will argue that they don't contribute, but the relative importance of antibiotic use in animals (that less than 1% of the population ever come into contact with while they are alive) relative to that of rampant, large-dose, antibiotic abuses in hospitals (You know where all of those sick people hang out, transferring infections back and forth) has never been ascertained empirically.
First, the vast majority of the bacterial species that live in livestock are not capable of living in people. Therefore, the rate of resistance transfer from animal bacteria to human bacteria is relatively low. Evidence exists that these species can, and do transfer resistance gene between eachother. However, the majority of the evidence is "Resistance gene A is present in pig bacteria and human bacteria, and genes are essentially identical, therefore the gene came from animals!" This of course, completely ignores the possiblity that the gene arose to prominence in the human population and then was transferred to a pig via a farm worker that was a carrier. Talk about placing the cart in front of horse.
Second, low levels of antibiotic use in the swine industry is usually only during the first month after weaning. Pigs are weaned at between 18 and 24 days on most farms in order to prevent the sow (aka "Mom") from transmitting certain diseases to the piglets that have little effect on adult animals, but can kill piglets very easily. At this age the maternal antibodies from the colostrum are starting to wear off, but the piglets own acquired immune system is not completely up to the task. Therefore the antibiotics buy the piglets time by reducing the overall microbial load in the intestine, and coincidentally increasing the efficiency of feed utilization (which is good for the environment). Many farms then discontinue the use of prophylactic, or growth promoting antibiotics because antibiotics cost money and feed costs can account for 60-70% of total production overhead. Expensive feed can drive you out of business in a hurry.
Third, to all those bragging about being from the EU, where there is a total ban on prophylactic antibiotics a word of caution. The total amount of antibiotics used in EU agriculture is not actually lower than it was before the ban. The difference is that instead of giving antibiotics to prevent infection, and improve production they are now given to tread disease outbreaks that wouldn't of otherwise happened and to try and minimize reductions in production. Also, the antibiotics of most relevance to human medicine are not routinely used for growth promotion, but they are used to treat disease outbreaks. So, the total tonnage of antibiotics being administered has not really gone down (it did until they banned them in the nursery which was the last phase of the ban), and the antibiotics being used are MORE likely to also be used in human medicine. Bravo, talk about unintended consequences!
Finally, I fail to see how this made the front page here. It is not the usual fare of geek (no computers anywhere), it is not actually news (this controversy has been around for at least a decade), this article contributed nothing new to the discussion (restates already rampant FUD), and the IBTimes are not exactly the NYTimes or LATimes. The only thing I can see in its favor is that it lets the ignorant "Organic" group say I told you so without any real technical points for those few of us in the field to respond to. The original article is link-bait, plain and simple and
Pathetic
Exactly!! This isn't Big Brother for your phone, but LowJack for your phone. I'd prefer it if my stolen phone is made useless to whomever stole it. It might help deter people from stealing it in the first place. No point in stealing something if you can't turn around and sell it because it has become a fancy paper weight.
/. account inentionally trolled the entire site using an anonymous submission guaranteed to start a flame war between the "Apple = Devil" folks and those who actually RTFA. Bravo anonymous douchebag!
I bet my sister wishes this had been implemented for laptops already, seeing as some douchebag broke into her car and stole her 1 year old laptop containging all of the data from her masters degree. She lives in Manhattan, she'll never see that laptop or the unbacked-up data again.
P.S. This entire thread is based on a blanatant misrepresentation of what the patent is for. I can understand not reading the patent, but it appears as though Mr. "Annonymous Reader" didn't even read the article that he submitted. OTOH, I find it more likely that someone with a