Why Is It Still Legal to Use Human Antibiotics on Farm Animals?
motherboard.vice.com
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“Let’s put it simply: would you rather have meat from an animal that was sick during its lifetime or one that was healthy?”
Anyway, I'd rather eat meat from animals that had been sick, as opposed to meat contaminated with antibiotic-resistant pathogenic bacteria.
Edit: I wrote "somewhat defensible" because it's my impression that antibiotics serve as low-cost mitigation for overcrowding, poor hygiene, and other deficiencies in livestock management.
This isn't a justification for using them, but if we continue to factory farm animals the way we do, it's a necessity.
> If you YouTube the animal farming, you'll see heavily overcrowded environments with animals not able to adequately move.
And also wide meadows with three cows. Nobody (in TV, press or internet) is interested in the normal, but the freak are guaranteed to receive big exposure. To make conclusions about a population just seeing its outliers is normally unwise.
I was raised on a farm, and live in the prairies. And I've watched as factory farming has slowly displaced every farmer that wasn't lucky enough to have oil on their property. I've milked cows, and goats, and even rubber banded my fair share calves for my buddy who hobby farms (He has the three cows in the field). My uncle still has a dairy farm, but if it weren't for the oil, he wouldn't be able to compete. But I can't show people my experiences with factory farming conditions, so I sent them to youtube instead.
If you were to cut out the alarmist, repetitive fluff you do actually have a problem at the bottom of all this. overused antibiotics (anywhere, on any species) tends to push evolution toward antibiotic resistance. That's bad. That said, from what I read in this article, this bill is also bad.
I think the issue here is that antibiotics being given to animals were not studied for these scenarios. For instance, how they may impact milk and meat quality. Not to mention that they are given to animals in much less "regulated" way, compared to people.
There's no ambiguity in using antibiotics in livestock management to increase feed efficiency. That's just about the money. It either needs to be illegal, or we need some class torts ;)
Their usage should be a lot more restricted than it currently is. Anything that unnecessarily diminishes their value to human treatment should be disallowed. Use on other species, for example; particularly when that enters the human food supply. Treating non-bacterial infections in humans is another.
I think it's pretty hard to overstate the importance of avoiding overuse of antibiotics. You don't even need to imagine modern medicine if antibiotics had never been discovered. More likely than not you wouldn't be alive today.
Antibiotics kill bacteria. There is nothing specific to our primate subspecies about them, AFAIK.
Simple – antibiotics approved for use to treat human illness. The problem is that when they're used indiscriminately, whether on humans who don't need them, or on livestock, bacteria develop resistance.
A good example is nitarsone which is an organoarsenic additive commonly found in turkey feed until it was banned earlier this year. AFAIK it has not been approved for human use ever.
“You should never give an antibiotic to anybody, human or animal, unless they’re ill,”
IIRC that is even wrong !
You shouldn't be using antibiotics unless you have good change to get severely sick or develop (long term, or very bad short term) complications (holes in body due to infection, septicemia, ... )
As someone that's been on IV antibiotics, I can tell you that there's no fucking around with bacterial infections and only a doctor (an infectious disease specialist) can evaluate the situation properly.