India's farmed chickens dosed with world's strongest antibiotics, study finds

Consider how many of these steps involve cell growth and or tissue damage that needs to be repaired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGOcOUBi6s

TLDR; Low dose antibiotics don't eliminate infections, but by reducing their growth the immune system puts far less effort into defense.

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/an285

There is also other growth promotion due to antibiotics.

source: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11400

abstract: Antibiotics administered in low doses have been widely used as growth promoters in the agricultural industry since the 1950s, yet the mechanisms for this effect are unclear. Because antimicrobial agents of different classes and varying activity are effective across several vertebrate species, we proposed that such subtherapeutic administration alters the population structure of the gut microbiome as well as its metabolic capabilities. We generated a model of adiposity by giving subtherapeutic antibiotic therapy to young mice and evaluated changes in the composition and capabilities of the gut microbiome. Administration of subtherapeutic antibiotic therapy increased adiposity in young mice and increased hormone levels related to metabolism. We observed substantial taxonomic changes in the microbiome, changes in copies of key genes involved in the metabolism of carbohydrates to short-chain fatty acids, increases in colonic short-chain fatty acid levels, and alterations in the regulation of hepatic metabolism of lipids and cholesterol. In this model, we demonstrate the alteration of early-life murine metabolic homeostasis through antibiotic manipulation.

There's a big reason that people breed animals to be obese. I grew up on a sheep and chicken farm. And to be honest, a lot of people would not eat those animals. They are lean, and gamey. Not like anything you would buy in any store.

Personally, I love it, and it makes me sad that I can't buy anything like it in NYC. Not even stuff that claims to be cage-free or organic or whatever. You just can't get that stuff here.

But it has a lot less fat than what you buy in the store. Fat is basically flavor for chefs. Whether it's butter or animal fat or vegetable oil, fat is where it's at.

The more obese an animal is, the better it's going to taste when you cut it up and cook it. That's just an unfortunate truth. When there's a market for something, people find a way to produce it.

The market is for massive amounts of white meats with a lot of fat you can render. That's what people buy, so that's what people sell.

Not that our (Norwegian) farmed fish industry is much better.

In any case, this has a negative impact on the whole world if a new bacteria that is resistant grows from these farms, that's why I was suggesting the big guns.

This is grossly irresponsible. People will die over it.

"Water, most common adulterant

Water turned out to be the most common adulterant in milk. It reduces the nutritional value of milk."

Sure, put the people in corporations personally liable without any government agency inspecting.

You're going to a society ten times more litigious than the US. People with no economic recourse to sue will get the short stick of things.

Your proposition is beyond ridiculous, and that's what merits attacks on the profound naivete of libertarian approaches.

Probably because some libertarians always have the generic comment of taxation is theft. When I ask them who should pay for the military I don't get a reply back.

These laws and institutions to enforce them do not exist in india, that's the problem

They do in the EU, and this doesn't happen.

Markets are economic systems that separate people into amoral atoms that have no mechanism to turn moral agreement into general behaviour. Even if I agreed something should happen, my isolation from others makes my individual actions a form of charity and an injury to myself.

If one company refrains from pollutants, it is "donating" profits to a moral cause not persuasive to other businesses. Yet if all-at-once agreed, no business is making a loss with respect to another.

I cannot really imagine what place libertarians really want to live in. They seem to think morality is an individual action radically isolable from cooperation with others. It isnt. The attempt to make it one creates markets for murder, rape, etc. as natural concequences of people's moral isolation.

A lot of nice things are theoretically possible when everyone behaves. Too bad the real world doesn't work that way.

Does anyone have an answer to this question?

> libertarian answer

Property rights in the land, air, and water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism

Libertarian approach would be simply adopt to the new situation, as I realistically see many people just don't care or believe.

So I would (and do) still try to act as ethical as possible and go all for green technologies, but I doubt it can be forced up on people and do much good in the end, if people are not convinced of it.

Forcing developing nations to adopt the policies of the wealthy creates an understandable tension and incentive for cheating the regs.

Libertarianism is simply a political framework which we can use to see and interpret the world. It can be combined with other frameworks to help us reach even deeper levels of understand (or perhaps not).

The right-libertarian could argue that the best solution is a competitive marketplace that will fuel hyper-economic growth, and accelerate the rate at which we develop technologies that allow us to ween off of fossil fuels.

A left-libertarian, maybe someone with a strong civil libertarian persuasion, could argue that the non-aggression principle is being violated by the emissions of greenhouse gasses. They would then establish an "emissions rights" framework, and perhaps a marketplace to address the issue.

"Colistin is manufactured by two companies in India but the country is also importing at least 150 tonnes of the drug each year."

They appear to have found some customs documents, that's all. Googling, some article says "China was estimated to be using 8000 tonnes of colistin per year of the global production of 12 000 tonnes" a few years ago. So it would not be surprising if this import were only 10 percent.

Also: TFA says "There are currently no regulations that would prevent such export to the UK on hygiene terms, except for those agreed under the EU. Any regulations to be negotiated after Brexit might not"

while the article linked says "the UK uses less than a tonne a year of colistin in agriculture."

So it's not banned now, it seems!

In the 90s in Ethiopia there was a famine caused by drought, lack of development and especially over-population. Affluent countries gave tonnes of food aid and reduced the size of the catastrophe.

Soon afterwards, the population of Ethiopia exploded. As a collective they had learnt nothing about the danger of over-population.

In India, there's also a lack of social awareness about the impact humans have on the environment - but the issue isn't famine. Rather, the huge population is bolstered by developments such as modern farming techniques that produce food of dubious quality.

Generally, humans (in the third world in particular) are like most species in that their populations increase to the limit of what development and the environment supports. Sudden environmental changes and rapid, careless development bring suffering to many of the extra millions that exist.

And when suffering occurs, never does anyone of influence say that perhaps humans should stop breeding like rabbits and that perhaps a catastrophe is nature's way of telling us that.

Instead, with every catastrophe we hear pontificating about how terrible it is, and often foreign entities will rush to give aid and thereby reinforce the irresponsible collective behaviour of the societies that are suffering.

Does that sound heartless? It's not quite so heartless as how suffering individuals are treated by their own societies. When a society is mal-developed and contains hundreds of millions, the suffering of an individual is negligible to the whole. In these circumstances it is likely that only mass suffering will cause reflection and change.

Suffering societies need to learn from tragedies and take collective responsibility by reducing their population numbers and valuing the lives of their members.