Farm animals in India and China are becoming more resistant to antibiotics | Hacker News Reader

Farm animals in India and China are becoming more resistant to antibiotics

nature.com

211 pointsdigital55115 comments

Source paper https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6459/eaaw1944.ful...

>From 2000 to 2018, the proportion of antimicrobial compounds with resistance higher than 50% (P50) increased from 0.15 to 0.41 in chickens and from 0.13 to 0.34 in pigs and plateaued between 0.12 and 0.23 in cattle.

>Globally, 73% of all antimicrobials sold on Earth are used in animals raised for food.

Jeeeesus. It sure feels like humanity is painting itself into a corner along multiple dimensions. I wonder at how many previous points in history did new technology save us from the brink of annihilation. Im not sure we've ever been powerfull enough to be truly as in danger as we are now.

On the other hand, earth is still slaloming between asteroids we cant predict or stop so we've never been out of danger at all. Oh well, back to work.

Resistance to antibiotics would take us back to 1900, not to the brink of annihilation.

My point isn't to dismiss the problem, just that it would mean things like surgery being much riskier, not massive die offs.

> Resistance to antibiotics would take us back to 1900, not to the brink of annihilation.

You can't assume that the virulence of bacteria with evolved antibiotic resistance will be like that of the strains that existed in 1900.

There's plenty of evidence at this point, it isn't an assumption.

Not so! MRSA has shown increased virulence as it has become more antibiotic resistant.

resistance to atb come and go, if there is no pressure to have defense then its abandoned over not so many generations

Not necessarily. It depends on what's hanging out on the same plasmid as the resistance gene, and if that confers an advantage.

We had massive child mortality rates in 1900.

We would still have access to a lot of modern medicine even if we had no antibiotics. In 1900 we had just started to use sanitation, had no vaccination, and had no clue how _a lot_ if diseases worked.

Population of the UK and Ireland 1900: 40m

Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 1900: 295m

Population of the UK and Ireland 2019: 68m (+70%)

Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 2019: 1,700m (+576%)

That's due to agriculture and lack of synthetic fertilizer, not antibiotics.

https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/...

"Earth's phosphorus is being depleted at an alarming rate. At current consumption levels, we will run out of known phosphorus reserves in around 80 years, but consumption will not stay at current levels. Nearly 90% of phosphorus is used in the global food supply chain, most of it in crop fertilizers. If no action is taken to quell fertilizer use, demand is likely to increase exponentially."

It's not like it leaves the atmosphere and gets blown into space like Helium. I'm sure it collects in bones, plants, gets washed into the sea and it's generally just spread around.

Average age would be interesting. I imagine a lot lower in 1900

Not to contradict you, but had we the Spanish flu today you'd get 300mm dead within a year, and about 2.5 Billion people hospitalized... that would far exceed any humanitarian crisis we can currently imagine.

The public health response was relatively ineffective in 1918 (influenza was not particularly well understood then), a similar virus would very likely not infect the same proportion of people as were infected then.

The proportion would probably also be reduced in at least 2 ways. The geographic extent would be smaller, and in areas where there were outbreaks, fewer people would be infected.

If there was a good vaccine match for the virus, even more so.

> The geographic extent would be smaller

This is definitely not my area, but as a lay person I've heard that because of the large increase in global travel, a dangerous flu strain could spread basically to basically every continent before we had time to meaningfully respond. Do you have reason to believe that isn't the case?

The 1918 pandemic also arose in a world without air travel. The geographic extent of any similar disease would not be smaller, it would be much larger and spread much quicker.

The Spanish flu came after the Great War, that's what made it so deadly. That and lack of medication, poor sanitation, hunger etc. which made people even more vulnerable. We have similar pathogens today, some if which mutated from the Spanish flu (Influenza type A). Also, flu is caused by a virus and this research is about antibiotic resistant bacteria.

It's humanity being painted in a corner, but it's very specific groups of people doing it. Most humanity is also not evolutionary trained in fighting issues, but it's really good at fighting people.

Now, if only scientists could learn how to point fingers...

One small way consumers can help is to reduce animal consumption. As an industry it releases a decent amount of greenhouse gasses, it creates antibiotic resistance, and it uses a ton of land and water (many of the people burning the Amazon are cattle ranchers). It's also very closely tied to actual consumer demand so consumers can affect it pretty easily.

You say that but we are also creating huge monoculture corps susceptible to a single disease wiping them out long term. Skipping meat is only part of the problem. The real solution is there needs to be long term control of meat and agricultural production to avoid self-inflicted devastation of the food supply.

I never said skipping meat will fix everything, just that it's an easy thing that actual consumers can do to help. The monoculture problem exists but not really relevant at all to the problem I'm talking about seeing how I'm not even saying people should cut out meat completely and there are better ways to diversify the supply of food than to add meat (especially since large amounts of animals are fed off of a monoculture of feed grain).

Interestingly, antibiotics like Rumensin are used to kill off methane-producing gut bacteria and promote other gut flora that are more efficient at digestion.

No, that's the consumers in emergent economies. In the 1st world things are working properly.

That's the all gist about meat consumption: let's look at all the problems meat production has in emergent and 3rd world countries and then tell people in the West they shouldn't eat meat.

Nothing new here, it started when we realized we're naked.

Before we invented artificial fertilizer, we were legitimately afraid that we're run out of land to grow food.

> Im not sure we've ever been powerfull enough to be truly as in danger as we are now.

I mean when the Black Death comes along and mops up 30-60% of a continent's entire population in half a decade, you get a little more respect for how terrifying nature has manifested in history...

With that said, we've been two key turns and a button press away from total annihilation since the mid-1950s when the US and Soviets started assembling their nuclear stockpiles.

The fact society still exists past the Cuban Missile Crisis should be considered history's greatest miracle.

It is fascinating to see how comfortable we've all become with living under the threat of near-instant nuclear annihilation.

It's easy to slough off things that are overwhelmingly scary when you have effectively 0 leverage to change them.

You're being driven into mass hysteria by shitty research and a pop-sci bias which only selects for you the absolute worst possibility under the weakest academic standards.

Take this paper for example. See figure 2? Those numbers come directly from the trend lines on those figures. But look closely at the data. The shading effectively represents how much data they have each year. In the "Chickens" figure there is a box plot in 2000 that is barely discernible, but if you look carefully you see that the distribution matches recent years. How convenient that that data was hidden, since it directly refutes their conclusions.

In fact, the fact that they used bar graphs here is extremely questionable when a scatter plot would far better represent the data. We'd easily be able to glean what the box plots are trying to hide: that the data is extremely noisy, that past data is almost non-existent, and that every year the range of their distribution is nearly 0%-100%.

While there might indeed be an effect in the data over time, the fact is that the effect is far smaller than year-to-year variability.

Professors gotta eat too

> It sure feels like humanity is painting itself into a corner along

it's called capitalism, and "increasing shareholder value". This is why large corp lobby in the USA, this is why big pharma bribes anyone with a stethoscope, this is why big oil is trying to stop/slow/control progress of solar/wind.

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/22/borrow-earth/

Edit: for many people, today & money is far more important than tomorrow & children. I hope that humanity proves me wrong, but it will get darker before it gets brighter.

Why would the economic system be at fault here? Why is the economic system to "blame"? What alternatives do you have in mind, and how do they compare to capitalism?

I've been a vegetarian for a few years. Part of the impetus for my choice was the lack of regulation and health code standards in this country.

Recent news that the federal government is reducing inspection of meat really does scare me. How many people need to die (like in the early 1900s) before we re-realize the importance of these regulations on public life? When will the next Upton Sinclair come along?

Upton Sinclair lamented the fact that nobody really got the point of The Jungle.

I think after all this time he is about to be proven right.

Well, the point of the jungle is that we need to form a socialist worker's state. Instead, everyone freaked out about sausages.

He had a quote along the lines of "I aimed for the heart and hit the stomach"

edit: > "I aimed for the public's heart," Sinclair later wrote, "and by accident hit it in the stomach."

You're correct that he complained about that, but the point was supposed to be about the exploitation and abuse of laborers.

That's true, but "exploitation and abuse of laborers" and "tubercular beef" were ultimately caused by the same thing.

Upton Sinclair’s complaint was that everyone cared about the health implications but didn’t care about the workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle#Reception

Yes. And people sought to address the specific causes of tubercular beef while leaving the rest untouched because they weren't cared about the exploitation and abuse of laborers as much as their own health.

I mean the same thing happened to Orwell. He was a democratic socialist who literally went to war with the fascists in Spain but people think Animal Farm is meant to be a rebuke of communism generally (and not Stalinism specifically).

That point being, to promote socialism.

Its simple to get to know your local rancher. You can even voice your concerns and have them heard by the person raising your beef, while walking the ranch on a nkce day. Factory farms are the bigger problem, not just meat per-se.

> Its simple to get to know your local rancher.

>Factory farms are the bigger problem, not just meat per-se.

Not just meat farms! One thing vegans and vegetarians often gloss over is the death per calorie involved in crop fields. Those thousands of acres have animals in them, and the machines sure dont stop for every varmit that gets in the way.

It is not clear what the right answer is (assuming all you care about is number of animal lives, which is an inadequate measure anyway). The best advice i know of is to only eat well raised cow meat because 1 cow provides a lot of calories, and vegetables, chickens, and pigs etc do not and kill lots of animals.

>eat well raised cow meat

It takes significantly more feed to raise a cow. The calories extracted from cow meat is extremely inefficient considering the high number of calories in (feed) and water. So, you could not use feed (vegetable death-per-calorie!) because it's something like a 8:1 calorie ratio for feed to a pound of beef. You'd have to pasture raise the cows.

There is no feasible way to ensure that all food is pasture-grazing cow meat at a price point accessible to most Americans.

There is currently no cruelty free-way to have cheap, accessible calories. If you really wanted the lowest death-per-calorie, one of the most feasible approaches would be consuming large amounts of rice.

I don't think anyone would want to subsist exclusively on a diet of rice, beans, and dietary supplements.

> There is no feasible way to ensure that all food is pasture-grazing cow meat at a price point accessible to most Americans.

Maybe Americans (westerners in general actually) should simply eat less? 3 oz of meat per day is enough (5 oz of protein is recommended, but part of that can easily be filled by grains, legumes, cheese, milk, etc...). No one needs 10 oz of meat per day (current average consumption for Americans).

Not only that, the long lost art of growing it yourself. Both animals and produce. Then you have complete control over the process

What do you propose? That we start eating crickets? Actually I would try some, maybe they taste like shrimp. Shrimp are another quickly reproducing species, but they're also sensitive to pollution.

I've had a dish of lemon grass stir-fried cricket. It was at a restaurant that served lots of bug based dishes. It was one of the few that we had that I'd regularly order.

They didn't taste like shrimp though. They also have a lot of chitin.

If a cow is not raised in pasture, it's not a well raised cow.

Ruminant holon systems like those used by Polyface Farms (Joel Salatin of Omnivore Dilemma fame) are incredibly efficient at both producing calories and utilizing waste products.

> I don't think anyone would want to subsist exclusively on a diet of rice, beans, and dietary supplements.

Hmm? I am enjoying the wide variety of legumes, for one. :D I make stews out of them. :)

> I don't think anyone would want to subsist exclusively on a diet of rice, beans, and dietary supplements.

I think this is a part of the problem in dominantly meat-eating cultures: they don't realize how diverse and nutritious plant life is. Treating meat and perhaps milk/eggs as real food and the rest as mostly fillers and in-betweens (I know I did).

Even without meat/milk/eggs/animal products, rice and beans, even barring all legumes and cereal grains, probably even barring all grains (e.g. amaranth, buckwheat, chia, quinoa, also sunflower, poppy, hemp..) there would still be enough plants life to have a diverse diet and probably even fully nutritiously sufficient diet without artificial supplements (a couple of micronutrients can be tricky, e.g. B₁₂).

Many, perhaps even most of the remaining diverse crops are currently notably more work to grow, but they should still have significantly less ecological impact than eating excessive amounts of meat.

Those crop fields are also harvested to feed farm animals. Eating meat requires more crops (and thus acreage) per calorie to the human consumer than eating the crops directly.

Eating meat will always have a higher death per calorie. An informed vegan knows that there is no such thing as a cruelty-free diet, only one that minimizes it.

"One thing vegans and vegetarians often gloss over" how very scientific of you.

This isn't practical because it requires so much effort from the consumer. It's a lot of time and coordination and it's relatively expensive. Farmers markets are one opportunity but high quality organic ranchers are breaking their backs processing meat and driving it to all the farmers markets, and are barely turning a profit off $16/lb meat.

I'm working in this space for a tiny company that delivers high quality, low antibiotic use, low environmental impact, pasture raised single-source meat products in California. We're going to run farm education "meet the rancher" events to get people out to where the meat is actually produced, but we have to be realistic: that's more for the instagram photo ops to convince people that we're legitimate instead of to truly change consumer behavior.

The ugly truth is Americans eat too much meat, and we expect it to be dirt cheap. Meat has been heavily subsidized, and all the externalities from industrial meat production have been ignored, for the past 60 years at least. Turning back the clock on those consumer expectations is going to be very painful.

I'm also extremely worried about the rise of industrial meat production in the developing world, but it seems elitist of wealthy Americans to complain about Chinese agriculture standards when we can't even fix it in our own backyard.

Unfortunately even fruit and vegetables aren't safe.

Syphilis and TB antibiotics are being used to combat disease on orange trees in Florida:

The E.P.A. has proposed allowing as much as 650,000 pounds of streptomycin to be sprayed on citrus crops each year. By comparison, Americans annually use 14,000 pounds of aminoglycosides, the class of antibiotics that includes streptomycin

In its decision to approve two drugs for orange and grapefruit trees, the E.P.A. largely ignored objections from the C.D.C. and the F.D.A., which fear that expanding their use in cash crops could fuel antibiotic resistance in humans.

scientists are especially worried that the drugs will cause pathogenic bacteria in the soil to become resistant to the compounds and then find their way to people through groundwater or contaminated food.[1]

Several lawmakers wrote to the EPA last month to urge a rethink of the policy given legitimate scientific concerns around the issue of antimicrobial resistance. To quote the letter:

Antibiotics are life-saving medicines and, except in extraordinary circumstances, should only be used to treat specific illnesses in people and animals," the lawmakers wrote. "EPA's assessments appear to ignore scientific evidence, violate the principle of judicious antibiotic use, and could create unnecessary harm to human health by authorizing an unprecedented amount of medically important antibiotics to be used for plant agriculture.[2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/health/antibiotics-orange...

[2] http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/08/lawmakers...

The most terrifying thing about antibiotic resistance is that bacterial will readily take up DNA fragments from dead neighbors (or via sex pillus).

This means that if a benign bacteria develops resistance, that gene can easily find its way into a pathogenic one if they are both in the same environment.

"the four types of antimicrobial drug most commonly used in farm animals to help them gain weight — tetracyclines, sulfonamides, quinolones and penicillins — are also the ones with highest resistance rates."

It never ceases to amaze me the decisions that we as a species make with full knowledge of the consequences that seem to be geared towards implementing wide spread disaster. We as a species have very much decided that short term gains are well worth long term disaster.

What's rational for the individual is not always well aligned with what's rational for the society.

There are negative externalities, in other words, and a truly well functioning economy would align bad behavior with higher costs, surely we can get there...?

Not without government regulation.

Businesses never regulate themselves before the disaster because it is always more profitable to use the "there won't be a disaster" scenario plan.

"One must distinguish regulation (which often is specific to a certain area of business) from law (which is more general). For example, there are laws against fraud, and long before governments began to regulate the US economy, people brought alleged fraud cases to court, as well as other tort action that existed under a common law system."

"Private enterprise works on a voluntary basis, a business owner cannot coerce someone to do business with him. Things like loss of reputation, shoddy products, poor service and the like serve as real boundaries for business owners, who in a free market survive only by offering goods that people are willing to purchase.

There are numerous private (read that, voluntary) organizations that police businesses, settle disputes, independently test products, and provide needed information for consumers and producers alike. Yes, these organizations do have a regulating effect upon the behavior of individuals who participate in private production and exchange."

Edit: removed the conclusions, the rest - in my opinion - is relevant to the comment above.

"without government regulation, there would be no legal oversight of markets"

"without government, markets would be a chaotic mess"

No one said those things. You've proved wrong claims that nobody made.

> We as a species have very much decided that short term gains are well worth

We as a species (as a whole) cannot decide about anything, that's an illusion. Governments decide to allow or disallow for, not us commoners. And it hardly matters on what democratic party you vote, money/economy is their highest priority, everything else is subordinate. So yes, governments allow for this just as they allow for pesticides killing entire insect species, it simply brings in tax money and they cannot afford to disallow.

> We as a species have very much decided that short term gains are well worth long term disaster.

Sounds like a minority of people with power and influence have decided the rules in which they're allowed to exercise that power for profit.

and what happens to the shareholder value? /sarcasm

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

The Jungle is different now, more clean maybe but also more dangerous.

That’s not a great post title IMHO and doesn’t match the article.

It implies that farm animals are refusing to take their tablets...

Why not just go with “Alarm as antimicrobial resistance surges among chickens, pigs and cattle” as per the Nature article?

Technically the resistance is a property of "Salmonella, Campylobacter, Staphylococcus and E. coli", not chickens, pigs, and cattle.

If you're curious why antibiotics are seen as necessary by farmers - I found an insightful Quora answer about US practices:

"The antibiotic, not antibiotics, in question is monesin sodium, also known originally by the trade-name Rumensin. It is an anti-biotic in the truest sense- it changes the living conditions for gut flora of a ruminant animal in such a way as to promote the growth of bacteria that produce proprionic acid, and making it less favorable for other microorganisms such as those that cause coccidiosis or inefficient digestion that results in methane gas.

So yes, it's an ionophoric activity. It kills off some stomach bugs by changing the environment inside the cow, promotes others, and makes the animal healthier and more efficient as a result.

Yes, there are other antibiotics fed at times, as prophylactics against respiratory disease disease during severe weather or shipment, but it is illegal to sell animals containing residues, and those additives are expensive.

It's not a surreal concentration-camp factory-farm shoving pills into cows so they roid-rage and turn into bloated meat-sacks, it's a finely tuned process of optimizing cow health and efficiency to get the most out of inputs and the best results. Which in turn means more profit for the farmer. Strange as it may seem, when your livelihood comes from livestock, you put a lot of attention, science, and technology into making sure they are as healthy and happy as possible, so they make you the most money when sale time comes."

https://www.quora.com/How-do-antibiotics-cause-farm-animals-...

>Strange as it may seem, when your livelihood comes from livestock, you put a lot of attention, science, and technology into making sure they are as healthy and happy as possible, so they make you the most money when sale time comes.

This seems like such a huge conflation of terms -- of course there's a lot of attention, science and technology put into animal farming, because it's a huge industry. Making sure animals are healthy makes sense, because you can't sell animals that die before slaughter: but happy? Where did that come from? Since when does the happiness of animals factor in anywhere in the equation of industrial slaughter for meat?

I'm by no means a vegan, and neither am I overly skeptical of markets and their value, but please let's not fall for the siren song of pretending that the market has already made animals as happy as they can be, because "of course they are, because nothing else would make economical sense".

Abhorrent conditions for animals make economic sense: that's why they exist. And this doesn't even address the glaring point of the "game theory" aspect of antibiotics in animal farming.

How happy are these animals in the documentary, Dominion?

https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=984

Your post presents a nice rainbows and sunshine guess at how the animal ag industry works, and I really wish it worked like that, too.

Dominion... of Australia? I quoted Harman Meyerhoff, an independent American dairy farmer.

If the goal is to solve a problem, when hearing different opinions and life experiences a better instinct to have is empathy -- calling people shills won't get you anywhere.

I'm absolutely shocked who could have predicted this

We need a new drug platform because the current model only satisfy the owners of the pharma corporations.

I recently listened to a podcast featuring Dr Matt McCarthy, who is an infection diseases physician and ethics professor and who authored the book Superbugs[1].

He did a good job (to a layperson such as myself anyway) of explaining why big pharma don't have much incentive to develop new antibiotics, possible financial interventions that may makes sense, and the alternative treatments that are being developed.

I haven't read the book, but he's done quite a bit of press around it on podcasts, youtube etc. Definitely worth a listen to learn more about the topic.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42878826-superbugs

The simple reason is pharma wants to develop chronic use drugs or cancer drugs, and why would they want to make antibiotics that are carefully rationed, if profits are lower? Seems to me, we may need a socialized, international effort, an ISS of antibiotic development.

Yep, I agree with him. Without the right incentives we are dead in the water.

this has nothing to do with how Big Pharma develops drugs...

Why ? If new antibiotics are not profitable in the long run, then you don't do that. That was presented in the podcast.

What is your explanation?

My explanation is the problem lies in the food source, not antibiotics. We can't rely on the continuous increase in the use of antibiotics to prevent a food cataclysm.

Presumably any newly developed antibiotic would be sold for prices similar to existing ones, if not for a premium. If this results in decreasing profits, then we must conclude development costs are rising, which suggests finding new antibiotics is increasingly harder. Sure, we can throw taxpayer money at it to have more drugs developed and introduced in the near-to-mid term, but if finding new antibiotics is indeed continuously harder, at some point it will also be too expensive for public money to finance R&D

We have to aim to solve the root cause, not just mindlessly continue to throw money at it

I suspect the parent was referring to the lack of incentives for big pharma to develop new antibiotics, which is of course very relevant in a discussion around resistance to existing drugs.

I don't believe this to be a contentious issue. It is well understood that the current model and associated costs of drug development provide little incentive for research and development of novel antibiotics.

In the words of the infectious diseases physician I referenced in another comment:

For the past 75 years, we've relied on a partnership between the federal government and big pharma to bring new antibiotics to market. And what we're seeing is that that partnership is dissolving, and it's dissolving for the simple reason that pharmaceutical companies increasingly are having trouble making a profit off of antibiotics.

The reason for that is if you think about an antibiotic, they are prescribed in short courses. And doctors are very stingy about doling them out. And even the best new antibiotic may wear out its welcome when the bacteria become resistant. So what we're finding is that these companies say, why would we want to make a product that doctors don't want to prescribe?

Now to address this, there are a number of policy proposals on the table. They're called push and pull incentives, which can entice these companies to stay in the antibiotic business. A push incentive might be something where you go to a company that's making billions of dollars and say we'll cut your corporate tax rate if you promise to invest some of those profits into new antibiotics. This is a sure-fire way to get more money into the pipeline. However, many people recoil at the idea of giving a tax break to a multi-billion dollar company.

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/02/729120288/-superbugs-book-chr...

It has everything to do how pharma develops drugs and what are the incentives around medicine that we give to them.

It’s time to start trade wars over the use of antibiotics in healthy livestock instead of starting trade wars for silly protectionism. There needs to be some kind of sanction.

It would be interesting to extend the study to other regions as well. The map doesn show any data for North America, Europe, Australia and Russia.

> Van Boeckel and his colleagues analysed 901 epidemiological studies, conducted in developing nations

Please can this title be changed? Perhaps “antibiotic resistant bacteria surge in farm animals in China and India“. The current title plays directly into the common misconception that it’s the host that becomes resistant to an antibiotic rather than the microbes within them. This misconception confuses the narrative that antibiotic resistance is a growing global threat (which it is).

Can we please stop overusing antibiotics? They are essentially dangerous organic weapons we don’t understand

That would mean less livestock farming, which means people would have to accept a life with less meat. It's simply not going to happen. Humans are way too arrogant and inflexible to impose the smallest inconvenience on themselves unless faced with tangible, immediately harmful effects. Not to mention the complete shift in the global economy that it would demand. I've been a vegetarian for about 4 years and the cognitive dissonance you start to see is remarkable. People claim to love animals and hate animal cruelty through mouthfuls of burger and pork.

> I've been a vegetarian for about 4 years and the cognitive dissonance you start to see is remarkable. People claim to love animals and hate animal cruelty through mouthfuls of burger and pork.

Can you explain why producing eggs and cow milk is any less cruel than producing animals only for meat?

In terms of cognitive dissonance, I have a hard time understanding the rational behind vegetarianism to be honest when a vegetarian presumably has looked into the animal farming industry more than a meat eater.

Dairy cows and egg laying hens are still killed very early into their natural life span once their yields drop with the cows being killed for meat, males from dairy cows are killed within weeks as veal because males can't be milked, and any male chickens born are gassed or ground up within days of their life because they don't lay eggs.

> Can you explain why producing eggs and cow milk is any less cruel than producing animals only for meat?

You're running wild with an assumption that isn't true. Of course it's just as cruel. I don't purchase dairy or eggs, and only consume eggs in restaurants on rare occasions. Really you're preaching to the choir here.

Why do you mention vegetarianism and not e.g. plant-based or vegan then when referring to people being blind to animal cruelty? I genuinely find vegetarianism confusing and want to understand the rationale behind it, especially when someone knows the dairy and egg industry is similarly cruel.

I can't speak for vegetarianism as a whole. The word is ambiguous at best and only useful as a pointer to the layperson. Most people don't even understand the differences between vegan and vegetarian. Ultimately I find veganism is a form of extremism that isn't right for everyone. Any level of mindful eating is admirable, even if someone changes their constant diet of meat to one of having 1 day a week meat-free for the sake of animals and the environment is worth applauding.

Personally, I wish people in general were more educated about the cruelty behind milk, eggs and cheese, so they would seek alternatives.

Vegetarians appear to suffer from cognitive dissonance as well.

We're talking about two different things for two different purposes.

It is possible for people to eat meat and not experience any cognitive dissonance because they're mindfully aware of what they're consuming, what has gone into it, and the reason behind it. See Native Americans as an example. Yes, even the Dalai Lama consumes meat. I don't judge people for their dietary choices. I'm specifically talking about people who gorge on a diet carelessly at the expense of the environment and the economy as a point of evidence that we're unlikely to ever see antibiotics being diminished in the market in our lifetimes.

No offense intended but this is getting derailed a little bit because you seem to be using this thread as a soapbox to push an agenda unrelated to the discussion.

> because you seem to be using this thread as a soapbox to push an agenda unrelated to the discussion.

It reads more like you continuing to find excuses to not be accountable. Is the Dalia Lama some ethical authority to hold up as a standard for others? He's just a religious figure important to a specific group of Buddhists.

> Any level of mindful eating is admirable, even if someone changes their constant diet of meat to one of having 1 day a week meat-free for the sake of animals and the environment is worth applauding.

These kind of baby steps never lead anywhere fruitful. The end goal must be worked towards. Applauding any and every tiny effort just makes people complacent and we never make any real progress. E.g. most vegetarians have no plans to transition to veganism, despite knowing about the cruelties of the egg and dairy industries (which are the same as the poultry and beef industries, just a different point in the pipeline).

Thanks for calling this out. It's baffling to come across vegetarians at all (I'm vegan btw) talking about ethics. To me it's worse than an omni who thinks they care about animals, because a vegetarian has taken some steps to look into the details, but then decides to stop short.

Personally, I find the environmental issues & existential threat of climate change that livestock farming contributes towards is the far more motivating factor in reducing consumption of meat & animal products. It's a false dichomity to say it's impossible to 'love' some animals while eating others; it's bit absurd to claim since humans have been doing so for 1000s of years and that we've domesticated an entire species (dogs), in part, to help us raise livestock, etc.

You're right, it was poorly worded. I didn't intend to say that consuming any meat at all means you don't care for animals.

> It's a false dichomity to say it's impossible to 'love' some animals while eating others

It might not be impossible but it's a strange double standard that e.g. people would be against any form of cruelty at all to dogs but are fine with factory farmed cows and pigs. I don't find the argument that dogs have been brought up to be companions for 1000s of years a compelling justification. Most people couldn't even watch videos of how cows and pigs are slaughtered let alone do it themselves which to me is telling that they're aware of the suffering caused but choose to ignore it.

> I've been a vegetarian for about 4 years and the cognitive dissonance you start to see is remarkable. People claim to love animals and hate animal cruelty through mouthfuls of burger and pork.

When you are eating something with eggs from a restaurant [1] do you also not feel discomfort from two contradictory beliefs?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21052043

Eating eggs in a restaurant is not a belief. I'm not going to reply to any more of your comments because: 1. it's clear you're not interested in a dialogue, you've already decided who is right and wrong and you're trying to bait me into a corner; and 2. this has completely derailed from the discussion about antibiotics.

> Eating eggs in a restaurant is not a belief.

That's a very shallow interpretation of what I said. You say that you avoid eating eggs at home, which must originate from a belief. And yet you eat them at a restaurant, so why is there the contradiction?

> you're trying to bait me into a corner

You've done that to yourself; or, I am pointing out where you're not being consistent.

Humans are squandering arguably one of the most important medical advancements in history, and ultimately it will be human health that pays for it when they stop working for us entirely.

There's a lot the rest of the world can learn from Dutch agriculture: https://www.allaboutfeed.net/Feed-Additives/Articles/2017/10...

Has the US reduced agriculture antibiotic use recently? I know we used to use tons of them as prophylactic and to help weight gain.

Why aren't we on the graph? Are US animal microbes less resistant, and if so why?

If only we had been warned!

Well, if course they are. Chinese farmers use antibiotics like candy. Even the stuff that the West considers reserve antibiotics of last resort. There is zero possibility of any Western pressure making them stop. Look also at the CO2 they emit and the plastic they dump in the ocean. The CCP has only two modes, rising living standards by questionable means, and mass die-offs of the population. This is the strategy of Mao.

No, western pressure could certainly stop the CCP, but there's no political will for it. Especially not when the west is too busy self-flagellating itself over its own real and imagined wrongdoings.

Ask a Uighur how much good "western pressure" has done for the concentration camps in Xinjiang. If we're not going to war over literal concentration camps (which is acceptable; we're in too many wars already), we're not going to war over antibiotics policy.

Of course you can pressure them to slow down, just stop buying their stuff.

I recommend watching "The Coming War with China" documentary on Al Jazeera. It has changed my perspective about the US, China, Mao. It's not all black and white, but rather different shades of grey.

Isn't that what we're doing now with all the tariffs? ISTM Xi DGAF. I will definitely check out that documentary, thanks for the recommendation.

Precisely. But your head of state of is also extending the tariff war to friendly nations like Japan and the EU. Although I wouldn't call the EU too friendly with the generalised anti-Trump sentiment in Western Europe and getting too cosy with Russia again, just like nothing ever happened in Crimea. Eastern Europe (except Serbia and maybe Hungary) pretty much backs the US since we had enough of Russia to last for several lifetimes.

The point is just that the tariffs etc. aren't having the effect predicted above. Chinese policy doesn't seem to have changed in response. Besides we're not importing lots of pork and chicken from China, so banning particular antibiotic practices on imported meat wouldn't have a big effect even if it "worked".

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