Hacker News Reader

Comment by jurassic | Hacker News Reader

One thing I hear cited often is the way antibiotics are widely used in animal agriculture to boost margins by helping keep more animals alive in the lowest cost living conditions (often squalid and unhealthy for the animal). This is antibiotic abuse on a massive scale, for the profit of private individuals. :facepalm:

View on HN

This feels like a pretty low hanging fruit to regulate away. Ban antibiotics use in agriculture in civilized countries and ban importing antibiotics grown meat from the others (I would guess it's easy to test).

It's been this way for decades. IMO it's the main source of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

You have billions of chickens being raised every year, each a Petri dish ready for evolution of resistance.

You have at least 10 billion fresh "Petri dishes" every year. That obliterates human antibiotic use.

When chicken is given an antibiotic, how exactly is that distributed over the body, especially for a sedentary overweight chicken that can hardly walk?

There's no way you can tell that a high dosage will result in no bacteria alive when there can be a pocket of sick flesh where antibiotic might not reach its full potential.

Similarly, the massive rise in UTI infections in women over the years is a side effect of this problem. I do not believe UTI infections in women were that debilitating in the past. Today you can't even get rid of them with antibiotics and a lot of women develop a decade long recurrent UTI infection problem.

Human antibiotics use is not an issue.

The FDA has already been working to reduce antibiotic use in agriculture.

https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/safety-health/antimicr...

I wouldn't call it low-hanging fruit considering just how dependent large-scale animal agriculture is dependent on antibiotics

This would mean either that we would have a lot less food, or we would have to divert a lot of effort from other productive activities to make it up. Maybe that's okay, but still this idea is not free, and not low-hanging fruit.

Not less food, just less meat.

Not just meat, also dairy & eggs. Thats significant.

I like how you don't even contemplate reducing profits as solution (as opposite to mass deaths or mass starvation).

How would you go about reducing profits? If you add costs, the farmers will either pass them along to the purchaser or they will get out of the meat business. That means either higher prices (which should lower demand) or lower supply. In either case it looks like consumers eat less meat. I'm not trying to defend antibiotic usage. I'm curious what a reduced profit solution would look like, maybe I'm imagining it wrong.

I do not see how profits have anything to do with antibiotics and the level of effort required to produce animal products.

Antibiotics allow us to produce animal products with reduced effort per unit than otherwise. If we ban antibiotics, it will require more effort to produce the same amount of animal products. That is true regardless of what happens on the money/profit side. This may be a fine tradeoff, but it's still a necessary tradeoff.

As the article mentions, it's a very sketchy hypothesis that antibiotics help agricultural production by the mechanism of permitting survival in cheaper conditions. Antibiotics actually seems to improve production for other, unknown reasons. We just assume that the mechanism must match the mechanism taken advantage of by antibiotics use in humans, but it looks like there's probably something else going on.

It might be as simple as the antibiotics shifting the balance in the gut towards bacteria that just happen to be more beneficial to rapid growth? That would be consistent with the thesis of this paper, where antibiotics are used naturally to encourage the growth of "compatible" organisms. I wonder exactly which antibiotics are used for agriculture -- if some antibiotics help and some hurt, that would support this hypothesis.

Pig farms in the nordics are under strict animal wellfare regulations which are enforced effectively. Pig farmers also informally experiment with everything from breeding to feed and antibiotics in order to gain every advantage.

As I heard it from an uncle in who raised piglets for decades. There is no visible health difference between two groups of piglets, one raised on antibiotics and one not. Its also worth mentioning that any piglet which gets any severe wound or infection is simply discarded, rather than treated. They still use antibiotics because the piglets on antibiotics gain substantially more weight from the same feed over the same time. In my uncles case, he stopped when the legal loophole closed. But the danes still do.

A major category, ionophores, are used to help ruminants tolerate high grain diets.

There's not really any mystery why that helps them grow of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com