A. The results change, thus indicating that the bug was important in some way. In this case, fixing the bug gained us not only silencing the critics, but improving our understanding.
or
B. The results don't change, thus indicating that the bug, while still a bug, was not important to the final result. In this case, we've fixed a bug that the critics were using as a banner, and that they were mistaken in it's importance. We don't get the improved understanding, but we do get a chance to politely say STFU to the more vocal/less qualified critics.
If I were looking for a case where the science is clear, I wouldn't have tried to defend antibiotics for growth promotion in farm animals.
This statement just goes to show that you haven't been paying attention lately. The ban made sense at the time it was instituted (if a little excessive IMO) as an application of the cautionary principle. However, in the wake of the ban there have been numerous studies looking at prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes in the bacteria colonizing the gut of livestock and detectable on the processed meat products (chicken breasts, et al.) and all of them show no change in the wake of the ban.
...there were examples of antibiotic-resistance plasmids from farm animals winding up in human farmers and causing disease.
Plasmids that confer antibiotic resistance do not cause disease. The bacteria do, and the resistance genes simply make the bugs harder to kill. Assuming you knew that and I'm being overly pedantic, then you are making the very large assumption that the resistance genes originated in the livestock and migrated to the animals, and not the other way around.
I've spoken to a lot of surgeons who were using vancomycin as a last-resort antibiotic, and were finding vancomycin-resistant infections, which really scared them.
I'm sorry, but surgeons have a vested interest in reserving antibiotics for their own use exclusively. Physicians are also the other primary sources of antibiotic prescriptions. It is the abuse of antibiotics in Human Medicine that is driving the development and spread of VRE and other multiple resistance microbes. VRE scares the crap out of EVERYONE, but making decisions based on fear without taking the time to examine the evidence is a recipe for disaster.
The best proposal I've read was to ban antibiotics that are either new or important for human medicine until resistance becomes a problem. Only after the period of maximal effectiveness in human medicine has expired let agriculture use them. The fact is that animal use of antibiotics (for growth promotion or disease treatment) is a scapegoat.
Then I saw the EU pharmaceutical companies trying to defend their use of vancomycin in farm animals.
Why wouldn't they?? There is no strong data proving a link between vancomycin use in livestock and VRE in humans. Instead there are a lot of trials showing that VRE is endemic in hospitals and that many new cases of VRE infection are acquired as secondary infections by people visiting hospitals for some other reason. If you believe the data (which I do) there is plenty of reason to revise the antibiotic prescribing guidelines for Physicians and little if any reason to change prescribing practices in livestock from a human medicine point of view (I don't know that anyone has bothered looking at the effect of prescribing practices on antibiotic effectiveness within livestock for livestocks sake).
How high a threshold of evidence do you have to have to keep vancomycin out of animal feed?
How about anything stronger than circumstantial or anecdotal evidence that the original ban in the EU was based on (in conjunction with a lot of fear and "Look Busy It's An Election Year"). As I said before the ban made sense based on the importance of antibiotics and and the "Better to be safe than sorry" argument. However, the ban was first voted on 12 years ago and antibiotic resistance gene prevalence in livestock hasn't changed. It has been completely ineffectual. The attention focused on it is taking away from true cause, which as I've stated before is reckless prescribing practices in human medicine.
They're still getting surprises when a resistant strain that used to be limited to hospitals winds up in the community.
Only morons would be surprised. If I contract an infection at the hospital and then
The anti-science members of the Republican party may have had more opportunity to attack science, with Bush in the White House, but that doesn't mean that the Dems don't have just as many fighting science from their side of the isle.
I'm an Animal Scientist, so I see the "Anti-Biotechnology" campaign that you dismissed as a major movement against my own discipline. There is a democratic member of congress (House Rules Committee chairwoman Louise Slaughter) who keeps attaching an EU style antibiotics ban to pending legislation as a rider. She is completely unwilling to pay any attention to the data coming out that the ban of antibiotics for growth promotion has had zero effect on the stated goals of the ban (reducing antibiotic resistance in humans) and has numerous negative effects on agriculture (increased days to market, increased mortality, increased use of therapeutic doses of antibiotics coming from classes more likely to be used in human medicine, reduced growth performance, reduced feed efficiency, etc.).
You admit that you pay attention to certain publications that point out attacks within certain fields and by certain people. The agricultural community is under attack by the likes of Rep. Slaughter and the HSUS (Prop 2 in California is pointless "feel good" legislation that will have no positive effect on animal welfare and only lead to a mass exodus of agriculture from that state, and a concomitant increase in food costs in the most populous state in the union), the foot soldiers are predominantly on the left since agricultural jobs are populated predominantly by those on the Right.
Blind adherence to a political stance on a topic of science that one does not fully understand by politicians and their supporters is unfortunately common on both sides of the isle. That the Republicans have had more success recently does not mean that their are any less Dems of similar bent.
In essence, you don't think that the facts support my hypothesis because of selection and observation bias on your part. As the president said, we need to stop this partisan bickering.* You and I both are opposed to the politicization of science to the detriment of science and policy, but you needlessly throw political affiliation into a debate of a purely scientific issue.
*(I agree with the sentiment, but I disagree with Obama's implied assertion that partisan politics actually has held up any legislation. The Dems control both the executive and legislative branches of government with a super majority in the senate until recently, thus rendering the republicans just this side of irrelevant for the past 18+ months. Legislation hasn't happened because of divisions within the democratic party.).
The people on the left usually understand science better.
In my experience (as a scientist) political ideology and scientific competence are not correlated in any direction. Certain fields are more heavily populated by one ideology or another, but generally speaking smart and dumb people occupy both camps in roughly the same proportions.
At the time there also seemed to be quite a few incomplete studies found at various.edu sites which agreed with the autism MMR link.
citation please!!
I work at a University, and I've never seen any of those "Incomplete" studies you've mention. However, I have seen plenty of journal articles and write ups on those articles in the press showing no detectable connection between the 2, so if you want to make a bold assertion like that you are going to need to back it up with links.
I've also got an alternative explanation for the tenuous connection you are so sure is causational. Children are getting vaccinated every couple of months like clockwork, when is there a gap of more than 3-6 months between regularly scheduled vaccines during the time in which children are most likely to begin presenting signs of Autism?? The publicity this "debate" has garnered over the years makes it so parents are paying closer attention, whether they realize it or not, in the immediate wake of each round of vaccines thus making them more likely to notice the signs closer to a vaccination than in the couple of months between. (anecdotally, my wife and I both found ourselves thinking of autism when our daughter went unusually quite for 3 hours about a week after her last vaccination. Turned out to be nothing, but does anyone bother to record their anecdotal false positives??) That the first scape goat Thimersol, has been removed from virtually all children's vaccines without altering or slowing the rate of Autism diagnosis is pretty strong evidence that if the connection is real, they don't have the correct culprit yet. That epidemiological studies using a much more powerful sample size (ie much greater than an N of 12) have found no evidence of a causational link between vaccines and autism is further evidence that the temporal connection is due to a combination of observational bias (arising from the controversy itself), frequent vaccination throughout the period of time when autism is most likely to be diagnosed, and the fact that most autism screenings (Autism screening: 9, 18, and 24 months) are scheduled during the same visits in which vaccines are administered (Vaccine schedule: 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 15, 18, and 19-23 months, 2-3 and 4-6 years ).
I know the meme that correlation is not causation but in my experience there often is a correlation.
It's isn't a MEME, defined as "an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)." This is a fundamental principal of statistics and what helps differentiate scientific data from a collection of anecdotes. That you don't understand this is why you will continue to argue against all of the valid evidence.
Some of the studies were pretty simple, graphing autism rates compared to when the MMR vaccine was introduced.
This statement is further evidence of your lacking qualifications to contribute meaningfully to this discussion. The MMR vaccine was introduced in the mid 1960's and caused a precipitous drop in measles and rubella cases. The first 20 years of licensed measles vaccination in the U.S. prevented an estimated 52 million cases of the disease, 17,400 cases of mental retardation, and 5,200 deaths. What percentage of those 5,200 deaths were in children that would have been autistic? or those 17,400 cases of mental retardation from the measles that could have been masking cases of Autism? Or what about the confounding factor of increased screening, and the inclusion of more mild forms of autism that would hav
I'm what many here would call an "appologist". I've argued against a lot of the FUD that people post here about GM crops in general and Monsanto's "Round-up Ready" crops specifically. I avoid the emotional rhetoric and focus on my understanding of the underlying science and the current evidence when discussing this topic.
Witht that being said, this report is very frightening. They did a very good job ensuring that their conclusions are supported by the data (analyzed correctly!), but that they did not over-reach. Their data is highly suggestive of chronic toxicity, but they admit it is not enough by itself, and I agree with them on both counts. However, my concerns will not allow me to let uneducated FUD slip by.
...the so-called "Roundup Ready" crops which by definition encourage the farmer to use potentially toxic doses of the herbicide.
This is a common misperception. "Round-up Ready" crops require fewer applications of herbicide than their un-modified isolines for similar yields. By adding resistance to an herbicide that would normally kill the plant of interest (Corn, Soybean, etc.) they can use a more effective herbicide than those that the plant of interest was previously resistant to. Otherwise you need to use lower doses (so as not to kill the corn) more frequently, thus resulting in a net increase in overall herbicide application per acre or per bushel produced.
I want to be clear, I'm not arguing with the validity of the analysis in the paper that this thread is supposed to be discussing. I'm just informing you of your error in understanding the net effect "Round-up Ready" crops have on total herbicide use in agriculture.
Thank you for your input. I'm getting a little tired of repeating myself and it's nice to see someone who has a modicum of knowledge contributing other than myself.
The factors you mention don't play much role in, say, the whole last day of farm animal life.
The transport and slaughter of livestock has undergone dramatic changes in the last 20 years, in large part as a result of the research and advocacy of Dr. Temple Grandin. I've attended a couple of her talks, and she is credited with redesigning almost every aspect of the US slaughterhouse with animal welfare in mind. She's been integral in the development and implementation of animal welfare audits at meat packing facilities and she's managed to base those assessments on empirical measures of welfare. IIRC, auditors can show up any time and they observe the handling of 100 animals and count the number of hot-shots, strikes, vocalizations, etc. If any number is greater than that allowed by the regulations, then the operation is forced to make changes or be shut down.
don't traumatic experiences release, among other things, substances that make blood "redder"? Possibly meat looking better?
Not that I'm aware of. Animals are killed and exsanguinated (blood removed) before the carcass is processed any further. Besides, meat undergoes a lot of radical changes in the first 24 hours after the animal dies that would negate such an effect even if it exists. Furthermore, I am not a muscle biologist (I'm a nutritionist), but I'm pretty sure that most of the red color in meat comes not from hemoglobin (oxygen carrier in blood), but from myoglobin (oxygen carrier within muscle cells). There is still blood in an uncooked steak, but far more myoglobin than hemoglobin, further decreasing the value of such an effect if it were to exist.
Vivisection is a dirty word invented by activist groups to make it seem as though routine surger is animal abuse.
The dictionary included with my compter defines Vivisection as
the practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of experimentation or scientific research (used only by people who are opposed to such work).
Therefore, it could be said that my step-father (who was in a car accident) has had over 100 vivisections on his legs in the last 30 years, my mother has had at least one vivisection for all 3 of her children and several for her torn rotator cuff, and my biological father recently underwent a vivisection to treat bone spurs on his left shoulder.
Furthermore, in the course of my animal research I've conducted vivisection on almost 100 pigs. I would argue that the pigs being under optimal veterinary care for the duration of the opperation (anesthesia were used during as well as prophylactic and post-operative analgesics and antibiotics), living for another 4 months, growing from 15kg to over 100kg (market weight), living a pampered life where they were fed by hand 2x/d and their pens cleaned every day by me should also be accounted for when assessing the overall quality of the animals life. By the end of each study I had learned the personalities of each individual pigs. I won't say I thought of them as pets, but I was far more familiar with them than I am with most of the students in the classes I've taught.
As someone with 8 years animal research experience, preceeded by 4 years of animal husbandry experience, I have to disagree with the entire premis upon which your post is based. While it is true that there was no oversight on early research with animals, that has not been the case for a long time.
Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC) are required by federal law in any research institution that gets any federal funding. Their role is in the approval of any research protocol that involves the use of live animal models. They have absolute VETO power over any pending research. They are required to consist of experienced researchers as well as laymen from the community with no connection to the institution. The whole function of an IACUC is to ensure that
1. The research is needful (not needlessy replicating a trial or using animals when another model would be more appropriate),
2. Animal use is large enough for statisticall validity, but not wasteful (if you can get by with 100 mice they won't let you use 200 just because you have them handy),
3. Animal suffering is avoided whenever possible (suffering is allowed only if unavoidable, but then you need to justify why the suffering is necessary, and these protocols get a lot more scrutiny), and
4. Animals will have access to Veterinary care as needed.
Furthermore, every researcher I've ever met go into animal research because they like animals and enjoy working with them. Most have multiple pets whom they treat better than some people treat their own children. You are correct that there is a certain amount of desensitization that occurs, but it is not to the unnecessary suffering of animals. We all minimize the amount of pain and suffering that our animals will experience based on our best understanding of what exactly causes them to suffer. We are not these insensitive, unfeeling, monsters who abuse animals and don't give it a second though.
Besides, the current focus on PAIN as the primary causitive agent of suffering is misplaced. Animals find chronic FEAR to be far more stressful than chronic pain according to behavioral studies I've seen presented by the Animal Behavior group at my university.
Also, you are correct that there is evidence that animal abuse is correlated with human abuse (correlation != causation), but it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand because abuse (unnecessary pain or suffering) is not the rampant problem you believe it to be.
I feel confident, based on my own 1st had research experience and the collection of FUD that is your post, that you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Any research institution in the US that recieves federal funding (ie all of them) requires approval of all research protocols by the Institutions Animal Care & Use Committee (IACUC). These committees are required by law to contain both experienced animal researchers and members of the local community with no connection to the institution (laymen).
The whole function of an IACUC is to ensure that 1. The research is needful (not needlessy replicating a trial or using animals when another model would be more appropriate), 2. Animal use is large enough for statisticall validity, but not wasteful (if you can get by with 100 mice they won't let you use 200 just because you have them handy), and 3. Animal suffering is avoided whenever possible (suffering is allowed only if unavoidable, but then you need to justify why the suffering is necessary, and these protocols get a lot more scrutiny). 4. Animals will have access to Veterinary care as needed.
So I ask you, were you aware of this and have personal experience that you've used to come to your conclusions, or are you simply vomiting back FUD you read on PETA's website. If the former, please elaborate. Otherwise, I ask you to refrain from posting again. This is a very complicated issue and involves a lot of emotional judgment making. It is best if only those who know what they are talking about contribute so as to minimze confusion in the future.
This answer "use inmates" is so flippant and unhelpful that you should be banned from contributing furthe to this debate. There are lots of biological and logistical reasons that humans would make poor research models, that you don't even need to bring morality into it.
The variability from human-to-human, even within insular ethnic groups is orders of magnitude greater than that in most species used for research. The genetic and phenotypic diversity in humans would cause us to find a higher proportion of false positives and false negatives, thus wasting time, energy, resources, etc. There is also the issue of generation interval. You can run dozens of studies in a short period of time using mice and rats due to their accelerated (by comparison to humans) life cycle. Or, you can run multigenerational longitudinal studies in several months instead of over 60 to 100 years. Another advantage is the litter size. You can get 6 to 12 pups per litter (depending on the line), which allows for rapid population expansion when you discover or create a new genotype of interest. All of these are advantages over working with humans that ignore both the genetic and moral arguments.
No one believes that data from mice or rats is directly applicable to humans. However, you are far more likely to detect subtle effects if the differences between the individuals in your sample group are minimal. Lower vertebrates such as mice and rats are more uniform in genotype and phenotype and are used in the early stages of scientific discovery for this reason. Once an effect has been reliably observed, characterized, and understood, then we can proceed to other, more human like animal models. Ultimately though, all new treatments and procedures do need to be evaluated in humans before final approval, so we do experiment with humans. We just don't do discovery type work with humans.
here's the thing, if you are putting a chemical into a shampoo you think might blind someone, wtf are you doing?!?!
This kind of research is all about the uninteded consequences. A good example of where this kind of work was not done is DES. It was a drug intended to, among other things, treat morning sickness in pregnant women. It was believed to be safe, without testing, and my grandmother took it while pregnant with my mother. Turns out that a couple of rounds of testing in pregnant mice would have clearly shown it to be teratogen that primarily affected the developing reproductive tissues of the fetus. My mother has had to deal with complications due to DES her entire life. Furthermore, the effects span generations. My sister is a second generation daughter of DES (Grand daughter of the original patient prescribed the drug), and she's actually had more complications than my mother. Even more horrifying is that their is early evidence that 3rd generation daughters of DES are also affected. By now that has got to include hundreds of thousands of Women in the US alone that are dealing with the fall out of incomplete drug testing in animals.
Maybe I'm biased based on my family experiences, but I'm of the opinion that a couple hundred preganant mice are a small price to pay to have prevented this.
I think people _do_ condone (albeit tacitly) the mistreatment of agricultural animals, and I think it's because of the "yuck" factor of some science research. I suspect that an average dairy cow probably lives a worse life than your average lab rat (I've worked on dairy farms, and know how appallingly they're treated).
As someone who has also worked on a half dozen dairy farms in the north east I have to ask you WTF are you talking about. I'm asking becuase I've seen alot of people interpret management practices that minimize stress as being abuse based on the human tendancy toward anthropomorphizing (what would I want in that situation).
I've worked on operations that utilized rotational grazing and daily pasure access, as well as freestall barns with an 8x8 milking parlor, and one thing has been constant across all the farms I've worked on and that's the razor thin profit margins. Abused cows, or even more subtley stressed ones, produce less milk for the same amout of feed intake. Therefore, abusing or stressing your cows is a sure-fire way to end up filing for bankruptcy.
I can't decide if you are playing devils advocate, or actually believe that animal suffering is routine in animal production and research. I'm a researcher in the field of production animal science (mostly pigs and chickens, with experince in Dairy production as an undergraduate)
Suffering implies Stress (intentionally capitalized). Stressed animals grow slower, and less efficiently (more food for the same unit increase in body weight, fetal growth, milk production, wool production, eggs layed, etc.). The profit margins on animal production are so narrow that increasing the days to market weight, or increasing the amount of feed required to get there (> 50% of total production costs) can spell the difference between making money on every pig and losing money on every pig. Furthermore, producers are routinely paid a premium for leaner animals and a penalty for fatter animals by the slaughterhouse. Stress makes the animals deposit more mass in the form of fat instead of protein.
In essence, if a farmer wants to make a profit it is in their best financial interest to minimize the stress animals experience over their entire lives. That should be a pretty convincing argument, even if you are unwilling to consider that people get into agriculture becuase they like animals and desire to work with them. This impression that large operations routinely mistreat their animals, but somehow still make a profit is completely disconnected from the biological and financial realities of the situation.
As I've said before. It continues to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people on this site continue to vomit back this sort of ill-conceived FUD, when 5 min. thinking about the realities of biology and business ought to at least make you skeptical.
I also found it offensive that Discovery, a site supposedly dedicated to science, seem to be pandering to animal rights activists. Why mention some rare case of abuse? You want to talk animal abuse? Look at the food industry. You want to talk abuse? Look at how humans treat each other.
I find it offensive that you took an opportunity to make a valid critisizm of the summary (TFA does not indicate that they are the most used), and instead used it as an opportunity to attack animal agriculture. As a researcher in the field of animal agriculture I often run into this mistaken impression. I've probably contributed 100,000 words to this topic on/. alone.
Stressed animals grow slower and put on more fat when they do grow. Animal abuse causes stress. Producers are paid a premium for lean animals and penalized for fatter animals by the slaughterhouse. Slower growing animals require more food and time to reach market weight, and even in the most efficient opperations feed costs make up more than half of all production costs. In essence, anyone routinely stressing their animals will be out of business in short order.
It continues to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people on this site continue to vomit back this sort of ill-conceived FUD, when 5 min. thinking about the realities of biology and business ought to at least make you skeptical.
Yes, I was talking about antibiotics as food additives.
I never asked what the route of administration was. Both therapeutic and prophylactic antibiotics are routinely administered in the animals food when treating the entire herd, or an entire barn. Injection is unrealistic unless you are only treating a handful of animals.
He would also be under legal obligation to report those farms in question to the authorities.
Hence the problem, which means losing his biggest customers
One of us is not understanding the other. The legal obligation I'm referring to is his role as a "Mandatory Reporter", which means that if he is discovered to be aware of violations without reporting them he will lose his license. It would be better for him to lose one client and keep his career than to risk losing his ability to work as a Vet and thus lose ALL OF HIS CLIENTS.
Farms are going out of business left and right in France already, so no need to push them over the edge.
Wow, who'd of thought it possible. Denying producers tools with documented effectiveness makes them less competitive. This is probably due to the disconnect between what people say that they want (through their politicians), and what they are actually willing to actually pay for in order to get it. When the French citizens go to the market, most are apparently going for the cheaper imported meat than the artificially more expensive meat, thus driving farmers out of business. Since the ban has been completely ineffective at it's stated goal, it should be revoked in order to make your domestic producers more competitive.
Here is a link to another of my posts on this thread, which in turn contains links to primary research papers on antibiotic resistance gene abundance in the wake of the EU ban. The research is done in countries with no easy access to verboten antibiotics via a leaky national border. One good example is the study from the UK, which I've been told has some of the strictest import/export controls around (being an island nation obviously makes that easier). The evidence is the same everywhere, the ban doesn't work. I'd be willing to be dollars to doughnuts that the antibiotics your friend saw were being used to treat disease outbreak, and not as growth promoters/prophylactics. That use is still perfectly legal, as long as the drugs in question are not on the list of antibiotics that cannot be used no matter what.
The only way to kill all of the bacteria inside of a person is through massive doses of antibiotics, coupled with radiation. It's dangerous, expensive, and completely unnecessary for fighting a chest cold that won't go away. You obviously have no education in the life sciences past possibly a couple of introductory biology classes in college.
Your talking about taking weeks out of someones life, spending tens of thousands of dollars, and using multiple cocktails of antibiotics in order to treat any disease that calls for antibiotic treatment. You sir must be independently wealthy or come from a country with nationalized health care and a budget surplus in the trillions of dollars. Otherwise, your simply an idiot with an off the cuff solution that obviously won't work, but are either too ignorant or pig headed to admit that it won't work.
This is a complex issue with no silver bullet solution. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll be able to contribute meaningfully to any debate.
Your link suggests that resistance to disinfectants and antibiotics may go hand-in-hand. However it still seems like a stretch to suggest livestock would develop and retain antibiotic resistance without the use of antibiotics, due solely to disinfectant use by their handlers.
I'm not suggesting that disinfectants cause antibiotic resistance, but that antibiotic resistance genes can have beneficial effects for the bacteria outside of antibiotic resistance. When that is the case, removal of the selective pressure provided by antibiotics will not result in the resistant bacteria operating at a competitive disadvantage, so there is no selective pressure to make the genes go away.
The antibiotics used for growth promotion and for treating diseases, are in many cases the same drug, with only the dosage being different. As you point out, those drugs that are used for disease treatment and not prophylaxis/growth-promotion are used MORE heavily in the wake of the ban because of increased disease outbreaks. In those cases, the ban has actually done more damage than good to the stated goal of reducing antibiotic resistance in bacteria. The net result of the ban has been an increase in total tons of antibiotics used/year for agriculture, and a shift in the families used toward those related to those most important to human medicine, and no measurable decrease in resistance in the wake of the ban. It's time to reconsider the ban, but instead they are talking about banning more antibiotics and a couple of US Representatives are pushing to get an EU style ban even with all of the evidence that it has not beneficial effects, only negative ones. That can only be described as a leap of faith into a pit of cobras, IMO.
In a growing (juvenile) animal, increasing lean BW is synonymous to a certain extent with health. The counter example you give "By that definition a person whose weight goes from two hundred pounds to four hundred pounds over the course of a year would be "gaining health"." does not apply because you are talking about the increase in BW in an adult, primarily due to the increased deposition of FAT. Body weight deposited on a pig in the form of fat above a very small amount is lost revenue. Slaughter houses pay a premium for very lean animals and charge a penalty for excessively fat animals (the difference between the premium or penalty based on back fat thickness can make the difference between profiting on a pig and losing money). So when I'm talking about increasing BW, I'm talking about increased lean protein accretion in immature growing animals. Swine are marketed in the US at around 220 to 250 pounds live weight, but that is not the adult weight of a pig (they'll actually continue to grow indefinitely with enough food). Breeding animals (boars and sows) are much larger (275 to 450+ pounds for sows), so even at market weight the (lean) weight of the animal can be a good method to evaluate the health of the animal.
Any reasonable definition of health is based on the organism's capacity to maintain homeostasis. Stress per se is not bad or good for an organism; the issue is whether the parameters of the stress are within the limits the organism can tolerate. In that case, stress is often beneficial.
You obviously have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. Every definition of "health" i've seen can be summed up as "the state of being free from illness or injury." You can be healthy while doing a polar bear swim, but you are simultaneously being stress to the point at which you are no longer considered to be within your Thermal Neutral Zone, and thus not in Homeostasis.
Stress is by definition bad because it causes a perturbation of homeostasis. A common working definition of physiologists is that "stress" consists of external body forces that tend to displace homeostasis and "strain" is the internal displacement brought about by stress. That is why we try to minimize fluctuations in temperature, air flow, feed quality and quantity, and negative social interactions (tail bitting, fighting, etc.). Unhealthy animals are stressed, Stressed animals must use a greater proportion of the absorbed energy, minerals, vitamins, and protein to try and get back to homeostasis, in unstressed growing animals those nutrients would be used for lean protein accretion, therefore sick animals will always grow slower than healthy animals, heat or cold stressed animals will always grow slower than animals raised in a controlled environment that minimized temperature fluctuations, etc.
I never said that 2-5 years is an insignificant amount of time, only that the ban was not the panacea that many appear to believe it to be. I've previously suggested that the EU regulations be modified to reflect the data we have collected over the last 10 years. The ban should be on the use of all novel antibiotics for which resistance genes have not yet become prevalent in the human-colonizing bacterial populations. Once the genes appear, the effect of antibiotic use in livestock is going to be negligible by comparison to the effect of human-to-human transmission rates. At that time allowing there use in animal production costs human medicine nothing while benefiting animal agriculture. My proposed regulations would by their vary nature require efforts to detect the development of novel resistance genes and their level of ubiquitousness, but we could very easily make the drug companies cover part of that cost. The earlier they detect the resistance gene, the earlier they can start marketing the drug to agriculture. (obviously the efforts to prevent the spread once discovered would not be funded by the drug companies due to a potential conflict of interest).
There is no fitness advantage to antibiotic resistance in a natural livestock population.
This is a fair summary of the flawed assumption that the EU ban is based on. However, the current evidence suggests that resistance genes often confer no competitive disadvantage when not used, and may provide competitive advantages in addition to antibiotic resistance. Here is a good example
It's only when we select for antibiotic resistance by loading up livestock with antibiotics
As someone who has formulated a fair number of swine and poultry diets in the last decade (I'm a non-ruminant nutritionist) I can assure you that you are regurgitating FUD here. In swine production, prophylactic antibiotics are used only during times when piglets are under increased stress or compromised immune function. The rest of the time we avoid using antibiotics because they are expensive and feed costs already account for more than half of the total production costs. Adding unnecessary antibiotics on top of that can make the difference between making money and losing money on pigs.
A good example is their use in weanling pig diets. These pigs are being abruptly transitioned from a highly digestible, liquid diet, containing maternal antibodies and providing most of the energy in the form of lipid, to a less digestible plant based diet lacking any passive immunity, and where energy is derived primarily from carbohydrate. This would be stressful enough, but in order to minimize maternal disease transfer to the piglets we wean at around 21 days of age, which coincides with the lag period in which maternal immunity is wearing off and the piglets own immune system is not fully up and running. Therefore we give the piglets a helping hand by using very low doses of antibiotics to reduce the bacterial populations enough to prevent full blown disease outbreaks. The UE has experienced a huge increase in piglet mortality as a result of the ban because there is only so much that top notch management can do to mitigate the loss of prophylactic antibiotic use in weanling pig diets. Once these animals are a couple of weeks older the antibiotics are removed because leaving them in would waste money.
I'm sure I'm going to sound like an arrogant blow hard, but you are probably not qualified to be arguing this with me. I'm 6 weeks away from my Ph.D. defense in Animal Science. The last 8 years I have devoted to understanding the nutritional needs of animal agriculture, and since half of all immune tissues are located along the gastrointestinal tract (where immune challenge is constant), I've taken a fair number of courses covering immunology. The ideas you are espousing were the current theory even 8 years ago, but research into the effect of the EU ban suggests (strongly enough to convince me) that the underlying theory was flawed. I'm not trying to sugar coat the antibiotic resistance problem. I'm just convinced, based on my understanding of current and peer-reviewed literature, that the solution implemented by the EU is not working and unlikely ever to work. By extension of the bans ineffectiveness, and other research showing the net negative the ban is having on other production criteria (reduced average daily gain, feed efficiency, piglets surviving to weaning, etc.), I believe that the ban should be modified to reflect the current knowledge.
My suggestion is to ban novel antibiotics in livestock until after the human-colonizing bacteria develop and spread resistance genes on their own. At that point, allowing antibiotic use in livestock is not going to affect human transmission rates, so the ban for that drug should then expire allowing agriculture the benefits of the antibiotic. That maximizes the effectiveness of the antibiotic for as long as poss
You do realize that the ban does not include the use of antibiotics to treat disease outbreaks?! The ban in question was on the use of sub-theraputic doses of any antibiotics as a prophylactic, and on certain classes of antibiotics under any circumstances. There are certain classes of antibiotics that are still approved for use in livestock because they are considered to be less crucial to human medicine. A good example is penicillin. It still works but it is usually not even considered by human medicine.
If your friend does exist and your not just making shit up (I work with veterinarians and they are the strongest opponents to such a ban because it takes valuable tools for combatting disease out of their tool box, without leaving the doctors the possibility of deciding what is appropriate on a case-by-case basis), he would know which drugs were on the approved list and which not. He would also be under legal obligation to report those farms in question to the authorities. His discovery of their purchasing forbidden antibiotics would end with the farms being driven out of business by the government in short order. With all of the FUD and emotion this topic brings up, the local media would have had a field day with this sort of report and it probably would have made fairly large news. If he didn't report them he'd risk losing his license to practice, which would be financially ruinous for him.
Since I've heard of no farms being accused of using verboten antibiotics, and since you've provided me with no evidence of this happening, I have no reason to believe that you aren't just making shit up to try and bluff your way out of looking stupid on a web forum. You are free to provide evidence to support your claims, but without it I have no reason to believe you and plenty of reasons not to.
It's well known that many resistance mechanisms have serious cost to the organism.
The empirical evidence coming out of the EU suggests that "many" should be replaced by "only some" because "many" implies a predominant proportion. All the papers I've seen on the issue found no reductions in gene presence for any of the genes they looked at, and they usually looked at all the known resistance genes for the antibiotic of interest. It would appear that resistance genes that result in a competitive disadvantage when the antibiotic is not present are the exception rather than the rule as was assumed when the EU ban was originally designed.
Conclusion: the EU-style ban is inadequate. A proper ban must be world-wide and complete.
That is your personal conclusion based completely on your personal bias and assumptions and completely disconnected from the actual data. Pigs in the EU have little to no chance of exposure to antibiotics fed to animals outside of the EU. Transporting live animals from the US to the EU, for example is prohibitively expensive. If they want US genetics, they by sperm or fetuses from US animals, thus bypassing the bio-hazzard issues. Therefore, if the animals are not be exposed to an antibiotic for 30 generations (3 litters/year for pigs over 10 years), and the resistance gene prevalence hasn't changed, it is unreasonable to expect that banning its use thousands of miles away in animals that they are never going to come into contact with is moronic.
You are convinced that resistance genes have to result in a competitive disadvantage in the absence of antibiotic exposure. Probably because that was the functioning theory when you last took a biology or immunology class. However, the data suggests very strongly that this is not the case. You don't get to unilaterally decide, in the absence of any corroborating evidence, that somehow animals completely outside of your animals production are the problem, or that your theory is correct. That's an act of faith, which cannot be argued with no matter how wrong it is.
Something is better than nothing.:-(
I fail to see how decreasing animal welfare, increasing animal production costs, and increasing the environmental input of animal production, in exchange for no improvements in your stated goals is better than the alternative. It's time that the EU regulators, and believers such as yourself face the facts. The ban isn't working!! The best data available suggests that it will never work because it was based on a theory that has turned out to be flawed. It's time to admit the error and fix it.
I've suggested an alternative. Ban the use of new antibiotics in livestock until human-colonizing bacteria develop resistance genes on their own. Then, after the ban becomes pointless, allow the use of these antibiotics in livestock. Humans will get the maximum amount of time between development of the antibiotic and appearance of resistance in human-colonizing bacteria, and livestock production will still get the hand-me down technology eventually. Everybody wins, unless of course the reason you want the ban is because you are against animal agriculture to begin with (PETA, ELF, ALF, etc.), but that's an entirely different and unrelated soapbox.
Antibiotics in livestock cause **antibiotics** in humans.
You are wrong, and here's why!
I can sum it up in two word "Anaphylactic Shock." There are a lot of people that are allergic to antibiotics. Any dose in their meal would kill them within minutes. That we don't see people dropping dead across the country means that no antibiotics are present in our animal products (meat, milk, cheese, etc.).
The only way that animals can possibly contribute to antibiotic resistance in human-colonizing bacteria is by jumping from a strain that was colonizing an animal. This widespread misconception that there are antibiotics lacing our food is preposterous when you think about how many people with deathly allergies to antibiotics are failing to drop dead over their pork chops, steaks, bowl of cereal, etc.
No, this is real world thinking. Medicine costs money, and here in the US the costs have gotten out of hand. Making a round of antibiotics cost tens of thousands of dollars per patient instead of maybe a hundred (including physician fee's, maybe tens of dollars for something like penicillin without the physician fees) is untenable. I can afford a ten dollar co-pay for antibiotics, I cannot afford 10 thousand dollars for a Z-pac.
As I've stated in response to Viol8's claim that resistance has rendered some antibiotics "Useless", hasn't happened.
Methicillin still kills lots of bugs. It cannot be used against certain strains of Staphylococcus aureus , but it still works against a lot of other bugs, including the majority of Staphylococcus aureus strains. Therefore the drug is still useful, but only in fewer cases. Those who's lives are saved by Methicillin because the staph infection they have is not MRSA would probably disagree with you that MRSA has rendered Methicillin "Useless".
There have always been antibiotics that are ineffective against certain infections. That's because the protein or pathway that is interrupted by an antibiotic may not be present in all bacterial species. If the antibiotic affects the formation of the cell wall, it will be ineffective against bacteria that don't have a cell wall, or use different proteins to make it. That doesn't make the antibiotic "Useless" just a poor choice when fighting that particular bacterium. That is part of the reason we've spent so much time and energy on developing novel antibiotics. No single antibiotic kills all bacteria, so we target specific infections with specific antibiotics. Even so-call broad-spectrum antibiotics were never believed to affect all bacteria
Even penicillin, the first and possibly most abused antibiotic is still effective. It can't be used for everything, but I've administered it to swine and seen it knock down infections.
You are arguing from a place of fervent opinion, possibly based on some small amount of biological education. I applaud your interest, but you don't know what you are talking about. There is no magic bullet that is going to solve this problem, but your proposed solution would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that you so obviously believe that it is workable.
even ignoring all of my other arguments, the bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotics administered in Bio-containment would by definition survive the treatment. Then they would leave bio-containment along with the patient and be spread to friends, family, and hospital employees anyway. The only bugs that would enter bio-containment and never leave are the ones that are SUSCEPTIBLE to the antibiotics.
Slashdot Mirror
And then they fix the bug and either...
A. The results change, thus indicating that the bug was important in some way. In this case, fixing the bug gained us not only silencing the critics, but improving our understanding.
or
B. The results don't change, thus indicating that the bug, while still a bug, was not important to the final result. In this case, we've fixed a bug that the critics were using as a banner, and that they were mistaken in it's importance. We don't get the improved understanding, but we do get a chance to politely say STFU to the more vocal/less qualified critics.
Either way looks like win/win to me.
If I were looking for a case where the science is clear, I wouldn't have tried to defend antibiotics for growth promotion in farm animals.
This statement just goes to show that you haven't been paying attention lately. The ban made sense at the time it was instituted (if a little excessive IMO) as an application of the cautionary principle. However, in the wake of the ban there have been numerous studies looking at prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes in the bacteria colonizing the gut of livestock and detectable on the processed meat products (chicken breasts, et al.) and all of them show no change in the wake of the ban.
...there were examples of antibiotic-resistance plasmids from farm animals winding up in human farmers and causing disease.
Plasmids that confer antibiotic resistance do not cause disease. The bacteria do, and the resistance genes simply make the bugs harder to kill. Assuming you knew that and I'm being overly pedantic, then you are making the very large assumption that the resistance genes originated in the livestock and migrated to the animals, and not the other way around.
I've spoken to a lot of surgeons who were using vancomycin as a last-resort antibiotic, and were finding vancomycin-resistant infections, which really scared them.
I'm sorry, but surgeons have a vested interest in reserving antibiotics for their own use exclusively. Physicians are also the other primary sources of antibiotic prescriptions. It is the abuse of antibiotics in Human Medicine that is driving the development and spread of VRE and other multiple resistance microbes. VRE scares the crap out of EVERYONE, but making decisions based on fear without taking the time to examine the evidence is a recipe for disaster.
The best proposal I've read was to ban antibiotics that are either new or important for human medicine until resistance becomes a problem. Only after the period of maximal effectiveness in human medicine has expired let agriculture use them. The fact is that animal use of antibiotics (for growth promotion or disease treatment) is a scapegoat.
Then I saw the EU pharmaceutical companies trying to defend their use of vancomycin in farm animals.
Why wouldn't they?? There is no strong data proving a link between vancomycin use in livestock and VRE in humans. Instead there are a lot of trials showing that VRE is endemic in hospitals and that many new cases of VRE infection are acquired as secondary infections by people visiting hospitals for some other reason. If you believe the data (which I do) there is plenty of reason to revise the antibiotic prescribing guidelines for Physicians and little if any reason to change prescribing practices in livestock from a human medicine point of view (I don't know that anyone has bothered looking at the effect of prescribing practices on antibiotic effectiveness within livestock for livestocks sake).
How high a threshold of evidence do you have to have to keep vancomycin out of animal feed?
How about anything stronger than circumstantial or anecdotal evidence that the original ban in the EU was based on (in conjunction with a lot of fear and "Look Busy It's An Election Year"). As I said before the ban made sense based on the importance of antibiotics and and the "Better to be safe than sorry" argument. However, the ban was first voted on 12 years ago and antibiotic resistance gene prevalence in livestock hasn't changed. It has been completely ineffectual. The attention focused on it is taking away from true cause, which as I've stated before is reckless prescribing practices in human medicine.
They're still getting surprises when a resistant strain that used to be limited to hospitals winds up in the community.
Only morons would be surprised. If I contract an infection at the hospital and then
The anti-science members of the Republican party may have had more opportunity to attack science, with Bush in the White House, but that doesn't mean that the Dems don't have just as many fighting science from their side of the isle.
I'm an Animal Scientist, so I see the "Anti-Biotechnology" campaign that you dismissed as a major movement against my own discipline. There is a democratic member of congress (House Rules Committee chairwoman Louise Slaughter) who keeps attaching an EU style antibiotics ban to pending legislation as a rider. She is completely unwilling to pay any attention to the data coming out that the ban of antibiotics for growth promotion has had zero effect on the stated goals of the ban (reducing antibiotic resistance in humans) and has numerous negative effects on agriculture (increased days to market, increased mortality, increased use of therapeutic doses of antibiotics coming from classes more likely to be used in human medicine, reduced growth performance, reduced feed efficiency, etc.).
You admit that you pay attention to certain publications that point out attacks within certain fields and by certain people. The agricultural community is under attack by the likes of Rep. Slaughter and the HSUS (Prop 2 in California is pointless "feel good" legislation that will have no positive effect on animal welfare and only lead to a mass exodus of agriculture from that state, and a concomitant increase in food costs in the most populous state in the union), the foot soldiers are predominantly on the left since agricultural jobs are populated predominantly by those on the Right.
Blind adherence to a political stance on a topic of science that one does not fully understand by politicians and their supporters is unfortunately common on both sides of the isle. That the Republicans have had more success recently does not mean that their are any less Dems of similar bent.
In essence, you don't think that the facts support my hypothesis because of selection and observation bias on your part. As the president said, we need to stop this partisan bickering.* You and I both are opposed to the politicization of science to the detriment of science and policy, but you needlessly throw political affiliation into a debate of a purely scientific issue.
*(I agree with the sentiment, but I disagree with Obama's implied assertion that partisan politics actually has held up any legislation. The Dems control both the executive and legislative branches of government with a super majority in the senate until recently, thus rendering the republicans just this side of irrelevant for the past 18+ months. Legislation hasn't happened because of divisions within the democratic party.).
The people on the left usually understand science better.
In my experience (as a scientist) political ideology and scientific competence are not correlated in any direction. Certain fields are more heavily populated by one ideology or another, but generally speaking smart and dumb people occupy both camps in roughly the same proportions.
At the time there also seemed to be quite a few incomplete studies found at various .edu sites which agreed with the autism MMR link.
citation please!!
I work at a University, and I've never seen any of those "Incomplete" studies you've mention. However, I have seen plenty of journal articles and write ups on those articles in the press showing no detectable connection between the 2, so if you want to make a bold assertion like that you are going to need to back it up with links.
I've also got an alternative explanation for the tenuous connection you are so sure is causational. Children are getting vaccinated every couple of months like clockwork, when is there a gap of more than 3-6 months between regularly scheduled vaccines during the time in which children are most likely to begin presenting signs of Autism?? The publicity this "debate" has garnered over the years makes it so parents are paying closer attention, whether they realize it or not, in the immediate wake of each round of vaccines thus making them more likely to notice the signs closer to a vaccination than in the couple of months between. (anecdotally, my wife and I both found ourselves thinking of autism when our daughter went unusually quite for 3 hours about a week after her last vaccination. Turned out to be nothing, but does anyone bother to record their anecdotal false positives??) That the first scape goat Thimersol, has been removed from virtually all children's vaccines without altering or slowing the rate of Autism diagnosis is pretty strong evidence that if the connection is real, they don't have the correct culprit yet. That epidemiological studies using a much more powerful sample size (ie much greater than an N of 12) have found no evidence of a causational link between vaccines and autism is further evidence that the temporal connection is due to a combination of observational bias (arising from the controversy itself), frequent vaccination throughout the period of time when autism is most likely to be diagnosed, and the fact that most autism screenings (Autism screening: 9, 18, and 24 months) are scheduled during the same visits in which vaccines are administered (Vaccine schedule: 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 15, 18, and 19-23 months, 2-3 and 4-6 years ).
I know the meme that correlation is not causation but in my experience there often is a correlation.
It's isn't a MEME, defined as "an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)." This is a fundamental principal of statistics and what helps differentiate scientific data from a collection of anecdotes. That you don't understand this is why you will continue to argue against all of the valid evidence.
Some of the studies were pretty simple, graphing autism rates compared to when the MMR vaccine was introduced.
This statement is further evidence of your lacking qualifications to contribute meaningfully to this discussion. The MMR vaccine was introduced in the mid 1960's and caused a precipitous drop in measles and rubella cases. The first 20 years of licensed measles vaccination in the U.S. prevented an estimated 52 million cases of the disease, 17,400 cases of mental retardation, and 5,200 deaths. What percentage of those 5,200 deaths were in children that would have been autistic? or those 17,400 cases of mental retardation from the measles that could have been masking cases of Autism? Or what about the confounding factor of increased screening, and the inclusion of more mild forms of autism that would hav
Witht that being said, this report is very frightening. They did a very good job ensuring that their conclusions are supported by the data (analyzed correctly!), but that they did not over-reach. Their data is highly suggestive of chronic toxicity, but they admit it is not enough by itself, and I agree with them on both counts. However, my concerns will not allow me to let uneducated FUD slip by.
...the so-called "Roundup Ready" crops which by definition encourage the farmer to use potentially toxic doses of the herbicide.
This is a common misperception. "Round-up Ready" crops require fewer applications of herbicide than their un-modified isolines for similar yields. By adding resistance to an herbicide that would normally kill the plant of interest (Corn, Soybean, etc.) they can use a more effective herbicide than those that the plant of interest was previously resistant to. Otherwise you need to use lower doses (so as not to kill the corn) more frequently, thus resulting in a net increase in overall herbicide application per acre or per bushel produced.
I want to be clear, I'm not arguing with the validity of the analysis in the paper that this thread is supposed to be discussing. I'm just informing you of your error in understanding the net effect "Round-up Ready" crops have on total herbicide use in agriculture.
Thank you for your input. I'm getting a little tired of repeating myself and it's nice to see someone who has a modicum of knowledge contributing other than myself.
The factors you mention don't play much role in, say, the whole last day of farm animal life.
The transport and slaughter of livestock has undergone dramatic changes in the last 20 years, in large part as a result of the research and advocacy of Dr. Temple Grandin. I've attended a couple of her talks, and she is credited with redesigning almost every aspect of the US slaughterhouse with animal welfare in mind. She's been integral in the development and implementation of animal welfare audits at meat packing facilities and she's managed to base those assessments on empirical measures of welfare. IIRC, auditors can show up any time and they observe the handling of 100 animals and count the number of hot-shots, strikes, vocalizations, etc. If any number is greater than that allowed by the regulations, then the operation is forced to make changes or be shut down.
don't traumatic experiences release, among other things, substances that make blood "redder"? Possibly meat looking better?
Not that I'm aware of. Animals are killed and exsanguinated (blood removed) before the carcass is processed any further. Besides, meat undergoes a lot of radical changes in the first 24 hours after the animal dies that would negate such an effect even if it exists. Furthermore, I am not a muscle biologist (I'm a nutritionist), but I'm pretty sure that most of the red color in meat comes not from hemoglobin (oxygen carrier in blood), but from myoglobin (oxygen carrier within muscle cells). There is still blood in an uncooked steak, but far more myoglobin than hemoglobin, further decreasing the value of such an effect if it were to exist.
The dictionary included with my compter defines Vivisection as
the practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of experimentation or scientific research (used only by people who are opposed to such work).
Therefore, it could be said that my step-father (who was in a car accident) has had over 100 vivisections on his legs in the last 30 years, my mother has had at least one vivisection for all 3 of her children and several for her torn rotator cuff, and my biological father recently underwent a vivisection to treat bone spurs on his left shoulder.
Furthermore, in the course of my animal research I've conducted vivisection on almost 100 pigs. I would argue that the pigs being under optimal veterinary care for the duration of the opperation (anesthesia were used during as well as prophylactic and post-operative analgesics and antibiotics), living for another 4 months, growing from 15kg to over 100kg (market weight), living a pampered life where they were fed by hand 2x/d and their pens cleaned every day by me should also be accounted for when assessing the overall quality of the animals life. By the end of each study I had learned the personalities of each individual pigs. I won't say I thought of them as pets, but I was far more familiar with them than I am with most of the students in the classes I've taught.
As someone with 8 years animal research experience, preceeded by 4 years of animal husbandry experience, I have to disagree with the entire premis upon which your post is based. While it is true that there was no oversight on early research with animals, that has not been the case for a long time.
Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC) are required by federal law in any research institution that gets any federal funding. Their role is in the approval of any research protocol that involves the use of live animal models. They have absolute VETO power over any pending research. They are required to consist of experienced researchers as well as laymen from the community with no connection to the institution. The whole function of an IACUC is to ensure that
1. The research is needful (not needlessy replicating a trial or using animals when another model would be more appropriate),
2. Animal use is large enough for statisticall validity, but not wasteful (if you can get by with 100 mice they won't let you use 200 just because you have them handy),
3. Animal suffering is avoided whenever possible (suffering is allowed only if unavoidable, but then you need to justify why the suffering is necessary, and these protocols get a lot more scrutiny), and
4. Animals will have access to Veterinary care as needed.
Furthermore, every researcher I've ever met go into animal research because they like animals and enjoy working with them. Most have multiple pets whom they treat better than some people treat their own children. You are correct that there is a certain amount of desensitization that occurs, but it is not to the unnecessary suffering of animals. We all minimize the amount of pain and suffering that our animals will experience based on our best understanding of what exactly causes them to suffer. We are not these insensitive, unfeeling, monsters who abuse animals and don't give it a second though.
Besides, the current focus on PAIN as the primary causitive agent of suffering is misplaced. Animals find chronic FEAR to be far more stressful than chronic pain according to behavioral studies I've seen presented by the Animal Behavior group at my university.
Also, you are correct that there is evidence that animal abuse is correlated with human abuse (correlation != causation), but it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand because abuse (unnecessary pain or suffering) is not the rampant problem you believe it to be.
I feel confident, based on my own 1st had research experience and the collection of FUD that is your post, that you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Any research institution in the US that recieves federal funding (ie all of them) requires approval of all research protocols by the Institutions Animal Care & Use Committee (IACUC). These committees are required by law to contain both experienced animal researchers and members of the local community with no connection to the institution (laymen).
The whole function of an IACUC is to ensure that
1. The research is needful (not needlessy replicating a trial or using animals when another model would be more appropriate),
2. Animal use is large enough for statisticall validity, but not wasteful (if you can get by with 100 mice they won't let you use 200 just because you have them handy), and
3. Animal suffering is avoided whenever possible (suffering is allowed only if unavoidable, but then you need to justify why the suffering is necessary, and these protocols get a lot more scrutiny).
4. Animals will have access to Veterinary care as needed.
So I ask you, were you aware of this and have personal experience that you've used to come to your conclusions, or are you simply vomiting back FUD you read on PETA's website. If the former, please elaborate. Otherwise, I ask you to refrain from posting again. This is a very complicated issue and involves a lot of emotional judgment making. It is best if only those who know what they are talking about contribute so as to minimze confusion in the future.
This answer "use inmates" is so flippant and unhelpful that you should be banned from contributing furthe to this debate. There are lots of biological and logistical reasons that humans would make poor research models, that you don't even need to bring morality into it.
The variability from human-to-human, even within insular ethnic groups is orders of magnitude greater than that in most species used for research. The genetic and phenotypic diversity in humans would cause us to find a higher proportion of false positives and false negatives, thus wasting time, energy, resources, etc. There is also the issue of generation interval. You can run dozens of studies in a short period of time using mice and rats due to their accelerated (by comparison to humans) life cycle. Or, you can run multigenerational longitudinal studies in several months instead of over 60 to 100 years. Another advantage is the litter size. You can get 6 to 12 pups per litter (depending on the line), which allows for rapid population expansion when you discover or create a new genotype of interest. All of these are advantages over working with humans that ignore both the genetic and moral arguments.
No one believes that data from mice or rats is directly applicable to humans. However, you are far more likely to detect subtle effects if the differences between the individuals in your sample group are minimal. Lower vertebrates such as mice and rats are more uniform in genotype and phenotype and are used in the early stages of scientific discovery for this reason. Once an effect has been reliably observed, characterized, and understood, then we can proceed to other, more human like animal models. Ultimately though, all new treatments and procedures do need to be evaluated in humans before final approval, so we do experiment with humans. We just don't do discovery type work with humans.
here's the thing, if you are putting a chemical into a shampoo you think might blind someone, wtf are you doing?!?!
This kind of research is all about the uninteded consequences. A good example of where this kind of work was not done is DES. It was a drug intended to, among other things, treat morning sickness in pregnant women. It was believed to be safe, without testing, and my grandmother took it while pregnant with my mother. Turns out that a couple of rounds of testing in pregnant mice would have clearly shown it to be teratogen that primarily affected the developing reproductive tissues of the fetus. My mother has had to deal with complications due to DES her entire life. Furthermore, the effects span generations. My sister is a second generation daughter of DES (Grand daughter of the original patient prescribed the drug), and she's actually had more complications than my mother. Even more horrifying is that their is early evidence that 3rd generation daughters of DES are also affected. By now that has got to include hundreds of thousands of Women in the US alone that are dealing with the fall out of incomplete drug testing in animals.
Maybe I'm biased based on my family experiences, but I'm of the opinion that a couple hundred preganant mice are a small price to pay to have prevented this.
I think people _do_ condone (albeit tacitly) the mistreatment of agricultural animals, and I think it's because of the "yuck" factor of some science research. I suspect that an average dairy cow probably lives a worse life than your average lab rat (I've worked on dairy farms, and know how appallingly they're treated).
As someone who has also worked on a half dozen dairy farms in the north east I have to ask you WTF are you talking about. I'm asking becuase I've seen alot of people interpret management practices that minimize stress as being abuse based on the human tendancy toward anthropomorphizing (what would I want in that situation).
I've worked on operations that utilized rotational grazing and daily pasure access, as well as freestall barns with an 8x8 milking parlor, and one thing has been constant across all the farms I've worked on and that's the razor thin profit margins. Abused cows, or even more subtley stressed ones, produce less milk for the same amout of feed intake. Therefore, abusing or stressing your cows is a sure-fire way to end up filing for bankruptcy.
I can't decide if you are playing devils advocate, or actually believe that animal suffering is routine in animal production and research. I'm a researcher in the field of production animal science (mostly pigs and chickens, with experince in Dairy production as an undergraduate)
Suffering implies Stress (intentionally capitalized). Stressed animals grow slower, and less efficiently (more food for the same unit increase in body weight, fetal growth, milk production, wool production, eggs layed, etc.). The profit margins on animal production are so narrow that increasing the days to market weight, or increasing the amount of feed required to get there (> 50% of total production costs) can spell the difference between making money on every pig and losing money on every pig. Furthermore, producers are routinely paid a premium for leaner animals and a penalty for fatter animals by the slaughterhouse. Stress makes the animals deposit more mass in the form of fat instead of protein.
In essence, if a farmer wants to make a profit it is in their best financial interest to minimize the stress animals experience over their entire lives. That should be a pretty convincing argument, even if you are unwilling to consider that people get into agriculture becuase they like animals and desire to work with them. This impression that large operations routinely mistreat their animals, but somehow still make a profit is completely disconnected from the biological and financial realities of the situation.
As I've said before. It continues to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people on this site continue to vomit back this sort of ill-conceived FUD, when 5 min. thinking about the realities of biology and business ought to at least make you skeptical.
I also found it offensive that Discovery, a site supposedly dedicated to science, seem to be pandering to animal rights activists. Why mention some rare case of abuse? You want to talk animal abuse? Look at the food industry. You want to talk abuse? Look at how humans treat each other.
I find it offensive that you took an opportunity to make a valid critisizm of the summary (TFA does not indicate that they are the most used), and instead used it as an opportunity to attack animal agriculture. As a researcher in the field of animal agriculture I often run into this mistaken impression. I've probably contributed 100,000 words to this topic on /. alone.
Stressed animals grow slower and put on more fat when they do grow. Animal abuse causes stress. Producers are paid a premium for lean animals and penalized for fatter animals by the slaughterhouse. Slower growing animals require more food and time to reach market weight, and even in the most efficient opperations feed costs make up more than half of all production costs. In essence, anyone routinely stressing their animals will be out of business in short order.
It continues to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people on this site continue to vomit back this sort of ill-conceived FUD, when 5 min. thinking about the realities of biology and business ought to at least make you skeptical.
Yes, I was talking about antibiotics as food additives.
I never asked what the route of administration was. Both therapeutic and prophylactic antibiotics are routinely administered in the animals food when treating the entire herd, or an entire barn. Injection is unrealistic unless you are only treating a handful of animals.
He would also be under legal obligation to report those farms in question to the authorities.
Hence the problem, which means losing his biggest customers
One of us is not understanding the other. The legal obligation I'm referring to is his role as a "Mandatory Reporter", which means that if he is discovered to be aware of violations without reporting them he will lose his license. It would be better for him to lose one client and keep his career than to risk losing his ability to work as a Vet and thus lose ALL OF HIS CLIENTS.
Farms are going out of business left and right in France already, so no need to push them over the edge.
Wow, who'd of thought it possible. Denying producers tools with documented effectiveness makes them less competitive. This is probably due to the disconnect between what people say that they want (through their politicians), and what they are actually willing to actually pay for in order to get it. When the French citizens go to the market, most are apparently going for the cheaper imported meat than the artificially more expensive meat, thus driving farmers out of business. Since the ban has been completely ineffective at it's stated goal, it should be revoked in order to make your domestic producers more competitive.
Here is a link to another of my posts on this thread, which in turn contains links to primary research papers on antibiotic resistance gene abundance in the wake of the EU ban. The research is done in countries with no easy access to verboten antibiotics via a leaky national border. One good example is the study from the UK, which I've been told has some of the strictest import/export controls around (being an island nation obviously makes that easier). The evidence is the same everywhere, the ban doesn't work. I'd be willing to be dollars to doughnuts that the antibiotics your friend saw were being used to treat disease outbreak, and not as growth promoters/prophylactics. That use is still perfectly legal, as long as the drugs in question are not on the list of antibiotics that cannot be used no matter what.
The only way to kill all of the bacteria inside of a person is through massive doses of antibiotics, coupled with radiation. It's dangerous, expensive, and completely unnecessary for fighting a chest cold that won't go away. You obviously have no education in the life sciences past possibly a couple of introductory biology classes in college.
Your talking about taking weeks out of someones life, spending tens of thousands of dollars, and using multiple cocktails of antibiotics in order to treat any disease that calls for antibiotic treatment. You sir must be independently wealthy or come from a country with nationalized health care and a budget surplus in the trillions of dollars. Otherwise, your simply an idiot with an off the cuff solution that obviously won't work, but are either too ignorant or pig headed to admit that it won't work.
This is a complex issue with no silver bullet solution. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll be able to contribute meaningfully to any debate.
Your link suggests that resistance to disinfectants and antibiotics may go hand-in-hand. However it still seems like a stretch to suggest livestock would develop and retain antibiotic resistance without the use of antibiotics, due solely to disinfectant use by their handlers.
I'm not suggesting that disinfectants cause antibiotic resistance, but that antibiotic resistance genes can have beneficial effects for the bacteria outside of antibiotic resistance. When that is the case, removal of the selective pressure provided by antibiotics will not result in the resistant bacteria operating at a competitive disadvantage, so there is no selective pressure to make the genes go away.
The antibiotics used for growth promotion and for treating diseases, are in many cases the same drug, with only the dosage being different. As you point out, those drugs that are used for disease treatment and not prophylaxis/growth-promotion are used MORE heavily in the wake of the ban because of increased disease outbreaks. In those cases, the ban has actually done more damage than good to the stated goal of reducing antibiotic resistance in bacteria. The net result of the ban has been an increase in total tons of antibiotics used/year for agriculture, and a shift in the families used toward those related to those most important to human medicine, and no measurable decrease in resistance in the wake of the ban. It's time to reconsider the ban, but instead they are talking about banning more antibiotics and a couple of US Representatives are pushing to get an EU style ban even with all of the evidence that it has not beneficial effects, only negative ones. That can only be described as a leap of faith into a pit of cobras, IMO.
Some citations:
Vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) still persist in slaughtered poultry in Hungary 8 years after the ban on avoparcin
A longitudinal study to assess the persistence of vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VREF) on an intensive broiler farm in the United Kingdom
Prevalence and Mechanism of Resistance against Macrolides, Lincosamides, and Streptogramins among Enterococcus faecium Isolates from Food-Producing Animals and Hospital Patients in Belgium
Any reasonable definition of health is based on the organism's capacity to maintain homeostasis. Stress per se is not bad or good for an organism; the issue is whether the parameters of the stress are within the limits the organism can tolerate. In that case, stress is often beneficial.
You obviously have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. Every definition of "health" i've seen can be summed up as "the state of being free from illness or injury." You can be healthy while doing a polar bear swim, but you are simultaneously being stress to the point at which you are no longer considered to be within your Thermal Neutral Zone, and thus not in Homeostasis.
Stress is by definition bad because it causes a perturbation of homeostasis. A common working definition of physiologists is that "stress" consists of external body forces that tend to displace homeostasis and "strain" is the internal displacement brought about by stress. That is why we try to minimize fluctuations in temperature, air flow, feed quality and quantity, and negative social interactions (tail bitting, fighting, etc.). Unhealthy animals are stressed, Stressed animals must use a greater proportion of the absorbed energy, minerals, vitamins, and protein to try and get back to homeostasis, in unstressed growing animals those nutrients would be used for lean protein accretion, therefore sick animals will always grow slower than healthy animals, heat or cold stressed animals will always grow slower than animals raised in a controlled environment that minimized temperature fluctuations, etc.
I never said that 2-5 years is an insignificant amount of time, only that the ban was not the panacea that many appear to believe it to be. I've previously suggested that the EU regulations be modified to reflect the data we have collected over the last 10 years. The ban should be on the use of all novel antibiotics for which resistance genes have not yet become prevalent in the human-colonizing bacterial populations. Once the genes appear, the effect of antibiotic use in livestock is going to be negligible by comparison to the effect of human-to-human transmission rates. At that time allowing there use in animal production costs human medicine nothing while benefiting animal agriculture. My proposed regulations would by their vary nature require efforts to detect the development of novel resistance genes and their level of ubiquitousness, but we could very easily make the drug companies cover part of that cost. The earlier they detect the resistance gene, the earlier they can start marketing the drug to agriculture. (obviously the efforts to prevent the spread once discovered would not be funded by the drug companies due to a potential conflict of interest).
There is no fitness advantage to antibiotic resistance in a natural livestock population.
This is a fair summary of the flawed assumption that the EU ban is based on. However, the current evidence suggests that resistance genes often confer no competitive disadvantage when not used, and may provide competitive advantages in addition to antibiotic resistance. Here is a good example
It's only when we select for antibiotic resistance by loading up livestock with antibiotics
As someone who has formulated a fair number of swine and poultry diets in the last decade (I'm a non-ruminant nutritionist) I can assure you that you are regurgitating FUD here. In swine production, prophylactic antibiotics are used only during times when piglets are under increased stress or compromised immune function. The rest of the time we avoid using antibiotics because they are expensive and feed costs already account for more than half of the total production costs. Adding unnecessary antibiotics on top of that can make the difference between making money and losing money on pigs.
A good example is their use in weanling pig diets. These pigs are being abruptly transitioned from a highly digestible, liquid diet, containing maternal antibodies and providing most of the energy in the form of lipid, to a less digestible plant based diet lacking any passive immunity, and where energy is derived primarily from carbohydrate. This would be stressful enough, but in order to minimize maternal disease transfer to the piglets we wean at around 21 days of age, which coincides with the lag period in which maternal immunity is wearing off and the piglets own immune system is not fully up and running. Therefore we give the piglets a helping hand by using very low doses of antibiotics to reduce the bacterial populations enough to prevent full blown disease outbreaks. The UE has experienced a huge increase in piglet mortality as a result of the ban because there is only so much that top notch management can do to mitigate the loss of prophylactic antibiotic use in weanling pig diets. Once these animals are a couple of weeks older the antibiotics are removed because leaving them in would waste money.
I'm sure I'm going to sound like an arrogant blow hard, but you are probably not qualified to be arguing this with me. I'm 6 weeks away from my Ph.D. defense in Animal Science. The last 8 years I have devoted to understanding the nutritional needs of animal agriculture, and since half of all immune tissues are located along the gastrointestinal tract (where immune challenge is constant), I've taken a fair number of courses covering immunology. The ideas you are espousing were the current theory even 8 years ago, but research into the effect of the EU ban suggests (strongly enough to convince me) that the underlying theory was flawed. I'm not trying to sugar coat the antibiotic resistance problem. I'm just convinced, based on my understanding of current and peer-reviewed literature, that the solution implemented by the EU is not working and unlikely ever to work. By extension of the bans ineffectiveness, and other research showing the net negative the ban is having on other production criteria (reduced average daily gain, feed efficiency, piglets surviving to weaning, etc.), I believe that the ban should be modified to reflect the current knowledge.
My suggestion is to ban novel antibiotics in livestock until after the human-colonizing bacteria develop and spread resistance genes on their own. At that point, allowing antibiotic use in livestock is not going to affect human transmission rates, so the ban for that drug should then expire allowing agriculture the benefits of the antibiotic. That maximizes the effectiveness of the antibiotic for as long as poss
You do realize that the ban does not include the use of antibiotics to treat disease outbreaks?! The ban in question was on the use of sub-theraputic doses of any antibiotics as a prophylactic, and on certain classes of antibiotics under any circumstances. There are certain classes of antibiotics that are still approved for use in livestock because they are considered to be less crucial to human medicine. A good example is penicillin. It still works but it is usually not even considered by human medicine.
If your friend does exist and your not just making shit up (I work with veterinarians and they are the strongest opponents to such a ban because it takes valuable tools for combatting disease out of their tool box, without leaving the doctors the possibility of deciding what is appropriate on a case-by-case basis), he would know which drugs were on the approved list and which not. He would also be under legal obligation to report those farms in question to the authorities. His discovery of their purchasing forbidden antibiotics would end with the farms being driven out of business by the government in short order. With all of the FUD and emotion this topic brings up, the local media would have had a field day with this sort of report and it probably would have made fairly large news. If he didn't report them he'd risk losing his license to practice, which would be financially ruinous for him.
Since I've heard of no farms being accused of using verboten antibiotics, and since you've provided me with no evidence of this happening, I have no reason to believe that you aren't just making shit up to try and bluff your way out of looking stupid on a web forum. You are free to provide evidence to support your claims, but without it I have no reason to believe you and plenty of reasons not to.
It's well known that many resistance mechanisms have serious cost to the organism.
The empirical evidence coming out of the EU suggests that "many" should be replaced by "only some" because "many" implies a predominant proportion. All the papers I've seen on the issue found no reductions in gene presence for any of the genes they looked at, and they usually looked at all the known resistance genes for the antibiotic of interest. It would appear that resistance genes that result in a competitive disadvantage when the antibiotic is not present are the exception rather than the rule as was assumed when the EU ban was originally designed.
Conclusion: the EU-style ban is inadequate. A proper ban must be world-wide and complete.
That is your personal conclusion based completely on your personal bias and assumptions and completely disconnected from the actual data. Pigs in the EU have little to no chance of exposure to antibiotics fed to animals outside of the EU. Transporting live animals from the US to the EU, for example is prohibitively expensive. If they want US genetics, they by sperm or fetuses from US animals, thus bypassing the bio-hazzard issues. Therefore, if the animals are not be exposed to an antibiotic for 30 generations (3 litters/year for pigs over 10 years), and the resistance gene prevalence hasn't changed, it is unreasonable to expect that banning its use thousands of miles away in animals that they are never going to come into contact with is moronic.
You are convinced that resistance genes have to result in a competitive disadvantage in the absence of antibiotic exposure. Probably because that was the functioning theory when you last took a biology or immunology class. However, the data suggests very strongly that this is not the case. You don't get to unilaterally decide, in the absence of any corroborating evidence, that somehow animals completely outside of your animals production are the problem, or that your theory is correct. That's an act of faith, which cannot be argued with no matter how wrong it is.
Something is better than nothing. :-(
I fail to see how decreasing animal welfare, increasing animal production costs, and increasing the environmental input of animal production, in exchange for no improvements in your stated goals is better than the alternative. It's time that the EU regulators, and believers such as yourself face the facts. The ban isn't working!! The best data available suggests that it will never work because it was based on a theory that has turned out to be flawed. It's time to admit the error and fix it.
I've suggested an alternative. Ban the use of new antibiotics in livestock until human-colonizing bacteria develop resistance genes on their own. Then, after the ban becomes pointless, allow the use of these antibiotics in livestock. Humans will get the maximum amount of time between development of the antibiotic and appearance of resistance in human-colonizing bacteria, and livestock production will still get the hand-me down technology eventually. Everybody wins, unless of course the reason you want the ban is because you are against animal agriculture to begin with (PETA, ELF, ALF, etc.), but that's an entirely different and unrelated soapbox.
Antibiotics in livestock cause **antibiotics** in humans.
You are wrong, and here's why!
I can sum it up in two word "Anaphylactic Shock." There are a lot of people that are allergic to antibiotics. Any dose in their meal would kill them within minutes. That we don't see people dropping dead across the country means that no antibiotics are present in our animal products (meat, milk, cheese, etc.).
The only way that animals can possibly contribute to antibiotic resistance in human-colonizing bacteria is by jumping from a strain that was colonizing an animal. This widespread misconception that there are antibiotics lacing our food is preposterous when you think about how many people with deathly allergies to antibiotics are failing to drop dead over their pork chops, steaks, bowl of cereal, etc.
As I've stated in response to Viol8's claim that resistance has rendered some antibiotics "Useless", hasn't happened.
Methicillin still kills lots of bugs. It cannot be used against certain strains of Staphylococcus aureus , but it still works against a lot of other bugs, including the majority of Staphylococcus aureus strains. Therefore the drug is still useful, but only in fewer cases. Those who's lives are saved by Methicillin because the staph infection they have is not MRSA would probably disagree with you that MRSA has rendered Methicillin "Useless".
There have always been antibiotics that are ineffective against certain infections. That's because the protein or pathway that is interrupted by an antibiotic may not be present in all bacterial species. If the antibiotic affects the formation of the cell wall, it will be ineffective against bacteria that don't have a cell wall, or use different proteins to make it. That doesn't make the antibiotic "Useless" just a poor choice when fighting that particular bacterium. That is part of the reason we've spent so much time and energy on developing novel antibiotics. No single antibiotic kills all bacteria, so we target specific infections with specific antibiotics. Even so-call broad-spectrum antibiotics were never believed to affect all bacteria
Even penicillin, the first and possibly most abused antibiotic is still effective. It can't be used for everything, but I've administered it to swine and seen it knock down infections.
You are arguing from a place of fervent opinion, possibly based on some small amount of biological education. I applaud your interest, but you don't know what you are talking about. There is no magic bullet that is going to solve this problem, but your proposed solution would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that you so obviously believe that it is workable.
even ignoring all of my other arguments, the bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotics administered in Bio-containment would by definition survive the treatment. Then they would leave bio-containment along with the patient and be spread to friends, family, and hospital employees anyway. The only bugs that would enter bio-containment and never leave are the ones that are SUSCEPTIBLE to the antibiotics.