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happy as pigs in antibiotics...

pigantibiotics

U.S. Meat Farmers Brace for Limits on Antibiotics
By ERIK ECKHOLM

RALSTON, Iowa — Piglets hop, scurry and squeal their way to the far corner of the pen, eyeing an approaching human. “It shows that they’re healthy animals,” Craig Rowles, the owner of a large pork farm here, said with pride.

Mr. Rowles says he keeps his pigs fit by feeding them antibiotics for weeks after weaning, to ward off possible illness in that vulnerable period. And for months after that, he administers an antibiotic that promotes faster growth with less feed.

Dispensing antibiotics to healthy animals is routine on the large, concentrated farms that now dominate American agriculture. But the practice is increasingly condemned by medical experts who say it contributes to a growing scourge of modern medicine: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including dangerous E. coli strains that account for millions of bladder infections each year, as well as resistant types of salmonella and other microbes.

Now, after decades of debate, the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to issue its strongest guidelines on animal antibiotics yet, intended to reduce what it calls a clear risk to human health. They would end farm uses of the drugs simply to promote faster animal growth and call for tighter oversight by veterinarians.

The agency’s final version is expected within months, and comes at a time when animal confinement methods, safety monitoring and other aspects of so-called factory farming are also under sharp attack. The federal proposal has struck a nerve among major livestock producers, who argue that a direct link between farms and human illness has not been proved. The producers are vigorously opposing it even as many medical and health experts call it too timid.

Scores of scientific groups, including the American Medical Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, are calling for even stronger action that would bar most uses of key antibiotics in healthy animals, including use for disease prevention, as with Mr. Rowles’s piglets. Such a bill is gaining traction in Congress.

“Is producing the cheapest food in the world our only goal?” asked Dr. Gail R. Hansen, a veterinarian and senior officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which has campaigned for new limits on farm antibiotics. “Those who say there is no evidence of risk are discounting 40 years of science. To wait until there’s nothing we can do about it doesn’t seem like the wisest course.”

With the backing of some leading veterinary scientists, farmers assert that the risks are remote and are outweighed by improved animal health and lower food costs. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence that antibiotics used in food animals have a significant impact on the effectiveness of antibiotics in people,” the National Pork Producers Council said.

But leading medical experts say the threat is real and growing. Proponents of strong controls note that the European Union barred most nontreatment uses of antibiotics in 2006 and that farmers there have adapted without major costs. Following a similar path in the United States, they argue, would have barely perceptible effects on consumer prices.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/us/15farm.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

antibiotics for breakfast...

Advocates of “organic” or “natural” foods get up in arms about some of the practices at big commercial hog farms—especially putting antibiotics into the livestock feed to make the animals grow faster. The idea simply makes some people uncomfortable, but more importantly, the overuse of antibiotics in animals, just like in hospitals, can worsen the problem of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. According to a study out of Ohio State University, however, pigs that went without antibiotics were more likely to carry human pathogens like salmonella and trichinella.

The team of scientists led by Wondwossen Gebreyes studied around 600 pigs. About half lived in indoor commercial hog farms and received antibiotics; the other half lived the old-fashioned way, outdoors and antibiotic-free. The non-treated swine showed more salmonella infections, 54 percent compared to 39 percent of the treated pigs, and more infections of toxoplasma and trichinella.

At first, it might appear that we’ve reached an impasse: If we keep pumping livestock full of antibiotics, bacteria will continue to become more resistant and we’ll lose our best weapons against them, but if we stop giving livestock antibiotics, our meat will be more dangerous, so pick your poison.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/06/12/antibiotic-free-pigs-carry-more-pathogens-but-is-that-a-bad-thing/

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We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.

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“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and unsanitary conditions?”

The answer is simple: politics…..”

http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/antibiotic-abuse-in-pig-feed-breeds-drug-resistant-pathogens-part-2/

complacent with our use of antibiotics...

An emergency medicine expert has called for an investigation into the danger to human health of feeding animals antibiotics to promote growth.

The president of the Australian Society for Infectious Diseases, Dr Thomas Gottleib, is worried about the flow-on effects on the food chain.

He says heavy use of antibiotics in animal health, agriculture and the medical world is feeding antibiotic resistance in humans.

"We've been using antibiotics since they've emerged in the 1950s as drugs that we can use on any occasion where there's a potential infection," he said.

"We've become very complacent with our use of antibiotics.

"There was an incredible use of antibiotics both in the medical world, in animal health and in agriculture, and all this large volume of use is feeding antibiotic resistance both in Australia and worldwide.

"We in Australia are not isolated from the rest of the world because the impact of antibiotic use anywhere in the world eventually impacts on us because we travel, and bacteria travel, and the risk of resistance developing is just becoming more and more evident."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-26/animal-antibiotics-contributing-to-human-resistance/3696320

Many farmers have made it

Many farmers have made it common practice to give animals antibiotics to ensure they are healthy, even if the animal would not otherwise be healthy. The Food and Drug Administration, however, will be limiting a few of this practice in order to keep human antibiotic resistance from growing. Article source: Animal antibiotic use partially banned by FDA

antibiotic resistance....

Antimicrobial resistance could claim 40 million lives by 2050 if left unchecked, UK Special Envoy on AMR and England’s former chief medical officer, Sally Davies, told the Observer on Sunday.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses and other types of germs become stronger than the medications used to treat them – creating so-called “superbugs.” As a result, targeted infections become difficult or impossible to treat.

Speaking to the Observer, Davies described AMR as a growing “antibiotic emergency” that threatens routine medical procedures like surgery and childbirth, and which could become life-threatening.

AMR is responsible for approximately one million deaths annually, but that figure is set to double by 2050, according to Davies. Older populations are particularly vulnerable, with mortality rates for people over 70 increasing by 80% since 1990, she added.

Despite efforts to limit antibiotic prescriptions and misuse, about 70% of all existing antibiotics are used in livestock globally, creating reservoirs of resistant bacteria.

“We’re essentially throwing antibiotics at cows and chickens and sheep as cheap alternatives to giving them growth promoters or prophylactics to prevent the spread of disease,” Davies said. “If you’ve got intensive farming where a lot of antibiotics are used or a busy hospital that has a poor sewage system, resistant bacteria can get into waterways.”

The bacteria evolve quickly, multiplying every 20 minutes, and can travel via winds and rain, further complicating containment. “They also mutate a great deal, and if they do so in the presence of antibiotics and that mutation protects them, these strains will multiply,” Davies explained to the Observer.

“This is how pernicious this problem has become,” she said, emphasizing that the dangerous traits of AMR require both careful use of existing antibiotics and the development of new ones.

However, developing new antibiotics is financially unappealing for pharmaceutical companies, Davies explained, noting that blood pressure or cancer drugs, taken daily or over long periods, are far more profitable.

Penicillin, discovered in the late 1920s, dramatically extended the human lifespan by up to 30 years by countering most bacterial infections, but all of that progress could now be in peril.

Antibiotic-resistant infections could claim the lives of more than 39 million people worldwide over the next 25 years, with another 169 million expected to die of related causes, according to a study published in The Lancet medical journal in September. German doctors also are warning that the world risks going back to the era before the discovery of penicillin, Bild reported in October.

The medical industry has been slow to develop new antibiotics because the research is too long and too expensive, while the profits are too low, according to Professor Yvonne Mast, microbiologist and researcher at the Leibniz Institute in Braunschweig. Only 13 new medications have been approved since 2017, but only two represent a new chemical class and can be termed innovative, according to the World Health Organization.

 

https://www.rt.com/news/610478-antibiotic-resistance-millions-deaths/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

 

 

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME antibiotic resistance....