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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

It seems like overprescribing to a cow is such low hanging fruit.

I understand that if my 5-day-old child marginally needs antibiotics, that the doctor may prescribe to appear active.

But couldn’t sensible legislation end over-prescription to livestock overnight? Is this really an issue of beating the cow lobby?

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The "cow lobby" is large multinational corporations... so yes it's an issue beating their lobbyists. Also, a side effect of antibiotics is weight gain in livestock - so even legislation that ostensibly outlaws use for the direct purpose of directly adding to profits, language in regulation is generally kept for medical purposes of "reducing disease" among herds. Disease that is at a high rate because of high density feedlot practices...

I think a weight loss factor could be added to legal antibiotics to remove the benefits of their overuse.. Caffeinated cows on a rampage might correct the industry.

> a side effect of antibiotics is weight gain in livestock

Original article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11400

There have been quantitative calculations for antibiotics taught for years in ag departments, and known among industry practitioners. Farming is a highly quantitative industry, and any agent of growth promotion is tracked carefully along with feed energy & cost inputs. Today you may have to go back to older documents to see talk about it in a more open manner though.

Here's a more industrial type of analysis paper (2003)

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-agricultu...

Overprescribing antibiotics to animals helps keep meat cheap. Politicians have a hard time with the headwinds caused by ads like “Evil big-government libs are raising the price of your steak!!” So it doesn’t happen. You’d probably be surprised how cheap some feed antibiotics are — Tylan powder being a good example.

In short, yes, it is beating lobbyists and opportunistic political opponents. Even if this issue is important to you, political capital is not limitless, so it has to be weighed against a whole host of other issues.

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