Big meat can’t quit antibiotics
vox.com
vox.com
The book: "Taking On Big Pharma: Dr. Charles Bennett's Battle" was released this week.
I was asked to go with Dr Bennett to speak to members of Congress about the dangers of Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics. As these were a significant contributor to my late wife's suicide. Alas that was right as the world changed at the start of the pandemic and derailed those plans.
I have the many FDA warning for Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics here:
People just don't expect side effects like permanent psychoses to come from their antibiotics, as one of the most recent FDA warnings documents.
Dr Bennetts new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Big-Pharma-Bennetts-Childrens/...
His related interview:
https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/shows/doctors...
You linked an interview with Childrens' Health Defense, an organization whose primary purpose is to argue, categorically, that all vaccinations are dangerous and do not work. They are the largest such organization and their activism has been directly responsible for the growth in resistance to MMR vaccination and later to COVID-19 vaccination.
This does not mean that the point about a class of antibiotics is incorrect, and I understand that there's a possibility of "strange bedfellows" here because of the potential agreement on the matter of, uh, "big pharma". As I see it, one possibility is that you linked the CHD article not knowing this. Another possibility is that you linked the CHD article knowing this, but figuring just because they're wrong about vaccines doesn't tarnish them on this issue. Another possibility is that you generally agree with their position on vaccines.
I'm not here to judge or change your mind, I'm just telling you that I don't have any prior view about whatever fluoroquinolone antibiotics are. I read the first half of your post wanting to do more investigation. Because of the CHD link inclusion, I am now predisposed not to believe this is a real issue. I am a non-medical social scientist but I have spent a lot of the COVID period publishing work about vaccination. Anti-vaxx stuff is a complete deal-breaker for me. And if your reason for posting was to persuade an audience, I think that's the opposite of what you want.
I'll also state I think deleting vaccine skeptics does more harm on HN than good. Let their ignorance be argued, lest they get a persecution complex and dig in more deeply. Only delete, in my opinion, those that cite disinformation or misinformation.
eh, "Disprove [the situation you just said was emotionally gutting] wasn't caused by [nonsense I can write down in 5 seconds but will take 2+ orders of magnitude to respond to]" is pretty classic sealioning/asymmetric trolling. Maybe if they put up a claim with evidence, otherwise it's just low-effort shit posting and not worth much more than a downvote.
That there are adverse advents with multiple (All?) Big Pharma products is also something I have no control over.
I supplied a link to my late wife's page where all the FDA warnings are linked to directly. The other links can be ignored if that is your desire.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2921747
They are also absolutely known and proven to cause permanent pain in the hand and feet (neuropathies) in some patients and "long lasting" anxiety, depression, hallucinations.
Those are just a few of the serious long term side effects they can cause.
Here is a good overview.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4087/2/3/17
Let me conclude that sometimes they are the right choice to save someone's life or prevent serious health consequences due to infection, but in the majority of cases there would be alternative antibiotics available.
Extremely sorry for your loss
It is barely understood. Fluoroquinolones are known to cause: Mineral and metal chelation, permanent DNA damage, permanently changed unhealthy epigenetic state changes, increased oxidative stress, permanent damage to mitochondrial DNA.
> Are other antibiotics safer in this regard?
Besides aminoglycosides like gentamicin which is now liberally used topically because internal usage causes permanent hearing loss, most antibiotics in use generally do not carry a notable risk of lifelong disability.
> What are the most commonly used antibiotics?
That very much depends on the infection being treated, but let me just guarantee you that there would almost always be an antibiotic available that is a safer alternative to fluoroquinolones.
Unfortunately, those antibiotics are generally strictly controlled reserve antibiotics you get IV in a hospital, which you would only get to avoid death or other serious consequences, and just won't get for that treatment resistant gonorrhea, where fluoroquinolones can already indeed be the only freely available alternative. Then there are also substances that just aren't available everywhere, like streptogramins which in Europe you can probably only get in France.
No one really knows what causes these issues.
Any other antibiotic is safer. These should have been removed from the market a long time ago. Just read the other comments in this tread for examples.
I can't even imagine how hard it is for you. I am sorry for your loss.
It was incredibly hard to deal with, on top of the chronic infection causing me to take the antibiotics in the first place. The most frustrating thing was the seeming indifference I got from many (not all) of the doctors I saw about it.
Condolences for your loss, and my deepest sympathies.
I had to take moxifloxacin and ciprofloxacin at two different times in my life. Besides the achilles, feet and hand tendon pain, both times I would have severe stinging pain in my scalp for months after taking them. Blessed as I am it went away again.
And you can bet those ranches will fight tooth and nail against being held accountable; it is, after all, the most "logical" way to spend their resources to protect their revenue. Imagine the shareholder response if the profits were to drop significantly, and permanently.
It's simply how we've trained corporations to behave.
unless the choice is to not biy their product how or why woukd these get factored in? how would you do so and retain a nominally free society?
How would you justify this being our biggest problem?
> how would you do so and retain a nominally free society?
Nominally free doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, as the saying goes. If you want to take actions that affect everyone negatively then you should be paying for that. Inversely there are also positive externalities and we should probably subsidize/pay groups who produce those
Google "pricing in externalities"
"An external cost is a cost not included in the market price of the goods and services being produced, i.e. a cost not borne by those who create it".
The less real costs are factored into a product, the less the market able to efficiently price it. Many of our greatest modern problems could be ameliorated if we handled external costs better: pricing industrial runoff, CO2 emissions, antibiotic resistance, etc.
We mostly choose not to price in those costs, because the consequences of such are generally delayed, and it allows us greater standard of living for the moment. When given the options "meat will be cheaper but infections harder to cure in 20 years", or "energy will be cheaper but large scale climate disasters will be common in 50 years", we've chosen cheap meat and energy.
I'll add to this that in many cases this also eliminates a lot of the subjective/contextless moralizing around spending of energy/mass surplus that goes on, resulting in more individual freedom. It's common in environmental discussions for example for someone to complain about <xyz> form of transportation, often cars or aircraft but I've also seen it come up in rockets. This can lead down all sorts of rabbit holes in terms of cost/benefit etc. But the entire discussion could be avoided as far as AGW if we'd simply make all hydrocarbon fuels CO2 net neutral (either via producing them directly from atmospheric CO2 with renewable energy or scrubbing an equal tonnage of emissions from the atmosphere for every ton CO2 released). Then whatever price the fuel was would fully reflect the CO2 cost, which would naturally filter out to all users, and everyone would be free to spend on that or not as they wished. All sides would optimize to the pricing, producers would search for ways to make the net neutral hydrocarbons cheaper, users would seek ways to use them more efficiently, and those buying services would do the same. That's a Free Market at work, the emergent result of lots of decentralized individual decisions is a much more efficient allocation of resources, and without any central judgement around "oh, that's not a worthy usage" needed.
You can make really good conservative arguments for say fighting climate change as it could upend traditional social order, but partisan polarization has made it an issue of "the other side" so mainstream conservatives aren't making those arguments IMHO.
They also know that when there are negative externalities, government action to try to counter them is often a cure worse than the disease.
Also "my proposal will be costly, but the positive externalities will outweigh them" is often stated, but rarely proven.
The OP indicates that the incentives of corporations driven by a profit motive is not to price in externalities. If not the government, what other mechanisms do you suggest?
It makes total sense to have debates over what things rise to the level of problem and what the best fix is but, at least in my state politics, Republican's seem to just abandon their principles for pragmatism (which is good) but I can't seem to figure how this doesn't cause an identity crisis. Having a "how a conservative evaluates market interventions" seems less taxing than getting pushed to a breaking point and then begrudgingly doing things not in line with your ideals.
It's important to recognize that both markets and government action sometimes fail, and why, to have a grownup conversation about options.
Because IME markets in general are so short-sighted they literally plow ahead with profit over all until the river is burning (pollution in Cleveland) or thousands are poisoned for decades (Flint water crisis). And often don't stop or self correct even in such extremes.
Some governments have certainly overreacted to market failures, but I don't think that means every conversation has to qualify that.
A good government solution to this has been emissions trading¹. The government sets up a maximum allowed emission rate, and producers can trade those rights between them. By making it costly to pollute, producers have incentives to lower pollution, and the allowed rate can be lowered over time, improving the air for everyone.
If markets are so stupid and short sighted, it's hard to understand how they've generated 250 years of huge and sustained increases of material wealth all over the planet. 10x as many people now live far richer and healthier lives than 250 years ago.
True, a river burned in Ohio 50 years ago, but that's very, very small potatoes in the big picture as I see it.
Now, you admit collective action is needed. Great. Because unbridled markets gave us slavery, child labor, 12h-7d work schedules, company towns, the food pyramid, greenwashing, and robber barons.
So the solution to externalities is largely collective action. Because obviously the market alone didn't make emissions trading happen. Markets were backed into a corner. And it feels like a half assed solution considering we don't need to burn coal any more. The market just values profit more than quality of life of those near the site of production.
If we look solely to markets and careless regulation then the biggest companies will capture regulators. Then we're on the path to modern day feudalism. Seeing Amazon hollow out local competition only makes this feel more and more real here in the Midwestern US.
"A basic principle of modern state is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized." (Noam Chomsky)
Look at the housing market. People take risky loans make a ton of money, they keep it.
Housing market goes to crap, immediately they get bailed out.
And voters vote for it!
It's simple math to do. Expecting "big meat" to change it's behaviour without changing the inputs to the equation is ridiculous. That isn't how businesses work.
If we want to actively shield population from eating shit, we would have to remove more than half of items in shelves in most supermarkets, I suspect even more in typical US one. But then why the heck should things like cigarettes or even sugar be legal, we know now pretty well how they slowly kill everybody involved.
There's also been proposals about a sugar tax and limits on the size of soft drinks but they are difficult to implement due to conservative/right wing pushback.
Your comment is whataboutism but not even that good of a counter since actions are being taken
https://thepostmillennial.com/coca-cola-accused-of-paying-na...
Is NAACP right wing?
A lot of left wing groups also oppose sugar tax calling it racist
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/taxing-bubbles-or-cas...
Here's sources showing Republicans against both the soda tax and cigarette regulations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/06/18/s...
https://money.com/soda-tax-gop-partisan-battle/
Your second source, when you say that alot of left wing groups are against it, is about Philadelphia and in the end.
". The city council passed the 1.75 cents-per-ounce sugary drink tax on June 5, and it will go into effect in January. "
The NAACP is a bipartisan group so its stance on the issue has no bearing.
We are blessed to be in Vermont, which has strong local food systems. We can get nearly all our produce and meat from local farms. We have been purchasing grass fed, pastured beef from Squier Family Farm, in Wallingford VT for years. We can get lamb and pork from the Bur-Ger family farm or any of a half dozen other families that show up at the local farmers market or sell in the coop.
We recently had some Omaha steaks, claiming to be grass fed, shipped to us by a family member. They absolutely sucked in comparison. I have had Butcher Box steaks that were comparable, but also much more expensive, and way more material in packaging.
For produce, we have a half dozen farms to choose from. It means eating more seasonally, but the quality of the veg is just so much greater.
Now you can see this as privilege, but it's also the result of hundreds of neighbors making the conscious decision to support their local food system. While everyone was complaining about food price increases, the local food systems were WAY more stable in their pricing, and we even saw the price of grass fed ground beef drop around here. It requires more thought and planning, but it really pays off, IMO.
This points to another deeper problem that drives this. Americans expect to be able to eat meat, even when eating cheap food.
Historically the food of poverty has either not included meat, or has used less desirable parts of the animal.
If meat production was all done humanely, then a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat, or not often.
The subsidies, both explicit and implicit, in the meat industry in the US helps disguise income inequality
This could not scale to feed my old neighborhood in Chicago, for example. In that place, sourcing this way would be so much more expensive. I pay other prices for living in a very small city in the mountains, but this is a perk.
I guess I just want to caution us from applying the usual "privilege" critiques and pretending like only super-scalar universal solutions are worth considering.
I agree with the whole of your comment. Subsidies of industrial food systems shape our collective diets.
My diet includes bulk purchased lentils and chickpeas, rice, home-ground wheat and other very cheap staples that are the majority of my calories. We're eating lentils, beans, rice, making our own bread, and the meat is in about 1/4 our meals. I feel like we eat very well, perhaps better than I have in my whole life if I measure it by health and ethics. I spent years in Chicago where my corner bar had a Michelin star, and there were dozens of equally good places and man did I enjoy my privilege of being a well paid single remote working hacker there.
This right here is the key and its just not meat. So many foodstuffs are nothing but sugar and corn. It makes you think that you are wealthy since you have so much food to choose from. The reality is that it is disguising the increasing devaluing of the dollar + decades of income stagnation.
Now you got me on a rant:
With the rising costs of everything due to what CEOs claim is "inflation", we are seeing this reduction in quality in everything we buy.
I would protest this by only buying locally and spending as few dollars as I can just to stick it to the man and this captured government that we have but the fact that year after year the currency is being whittled away to 0 means I lose no matter what I do.
So what can I do to preserve the effort spent to earn that wealth? Can't invest in stocks, the market is down and so I could lose, don't want to spend the money and reward all these CEOs who have been price gouging and selling us products with quality fade. Maybe buy real estate? I will probably lose on that as well. There seems to be no escape, I am trapped with no recourse.
It wont offset inflation, but it makes a bigger impact on the people around you, who grow your food, ship and transport your food, sell you food and goods, install your heat pumps or wood stove, maybe even build the wood stove. The fabric of social relations that drives modern production, light industry as they sometimes call it, is what makes us collectively wealthy.
However what you describe is largely out of my control and this is where my frustrations lie. The locally sourced money eventually finds its way heading in one direction: the portfolios of all these elites who have the capacity to shape policy and help accelerate this one way flow of capital. In my 30+ years of living I have not seen this trend reverse. Like I mentioned, any attempts to stem this flow is futile since even my outflow is reduced to 0, I lose that "energy" stored in the battery anyway in the form of inflation. I guess in a way if you think about it, a real battery cannot hold energy indefinitely (as far as I know) but still...how do I reconcile with the fact that the effort used to generate that money is either stolen by these people, either by it moving in one direction from me to them or by their monetary policy that makes it eventually worthless?
The wealth is in the social relations and material goods even (you are not wealthy because you have the money to buy a house, you are wealthy because you have a well insulated, sturdy house). Turn the abstract capital into the means of production and (social) reproduction.
Just trying to give a pep talk, not disagreeing with your sentiment 8^)
US has the highest obesity rate. Even more among the poor.
Eating healthier food sounds like a big improvement.
We might eat less meat, but you can buy meat today that is humanely raised for marginally more expensive than the factory farmed stuff. And that's with the overhead associated with small producers in a niche industry. If we were to make humane standards universal, cost savings would obviously follow. Just look at Europe.
This is a solved problem that only persists due to mass American indifference to how our meat is tortured and poisoned before we eat it.
It's difficult to humanely produce meat at the same scale and price as industrial meat production.
And everything is difficult until you do it. And everything costs more until its done at scale.
Even if you raise a cow on a 'happy' farm, at the end the cow will end up in a slaughter house where the cow experiences immense terror and fear.
To be humane would mean not to eat animals if our survival doesn't depend on it and in most parts of the world we don't need to eat animals anymore.
I think 'less cruel' would be a more apt description - but eating animals that came from a happy farm is still cruel.
I've processed chickens and ducks that I have raised. Much smaller scale, and actually when it comes to duck I'm much more about the eggs than the meat 8^)
There are videos of farmers who gave up farming animals because they realized 'there is someone in there'. In the BBC docu series 'dark side of dairy' a farmer starts crying when he's asked to explain what happens to the baby cow.
Chickens are deeply social animals and can create deep bonds with humans. You might have seen the video of a hen waiting for her human friend coming back from school and running towards him.
Or how about Monique - the hen that traveled around the world and 'kind of saved my life' [0] of her human friend.
Cows are these gentle and curious giant creatures and yet we betray their trust by killing them in the end. [1]
Also, why are we not using the actual words like killing and butchering vs processing. The meat industry comes up with all these words to soften what is actually happening to animals.
Humanity will eventually give up killing & consuming animals for pleasure and future humans will see what we are doing now to other sentient beings as barbaric [2]
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/apr/21/why-did-the-c...
I've had my hands in a carcass, pulling out organs. I have tried to make sure I made death and quick and painless as I could for chickens. I have not butchered anything bigger than that. I don't do that for all my meat.
I think we differ more about how much death and life are intertwined and inseperable, than we differ on how sacred and considerate that relationship should be.
In what way?
Humanity has agreed that human slavery is bad, so why would future humans not apply this same principle to other sentient beings - since the need to exploit and kill other animals becomes ever more redundant.
Most of us here in the West eat animals either because of culture or tradition and because we enjoy the taste, not because we need it to survive.
Will there be small pockets of humans in the future that still eat animals? Yes, tribal folks living with nature or people who choose to live in areas where there are no other food sources.
But I believe most future humans will reject the idea that exploiting and killing animals is necessary for our survival, when there are so many other food sources available. In the future we'll probably have meat substitutes that are healthier and with a smaller carbon and cruelty footprint than animal meat.
> Tibetan Buddhist perspective
I don't know what this perspective really means. I read some time ago the Dalai Lama was advised to eat animals, because his health depended on it. And maybe other Buddhists and people in Tibet have to eat animals because their survival depends on it.
Also my understanding of Buddha's teachings is to end suffering. A core principle of Buddhism is non-violence, kindness and compassion. Killing an animal when it's not necessary is neither of those.
I also understand that it's ok for Buddhists to eat animals if they weren't killed specifically for them. But buying animal meat from shops does not qualify that criteria. Eating roadkill does.
We can choose between causing suffering or not causing suffering. A tiger for example can't.
So when we can avoid the exploitation and killing of animals - why don't we?
This ex special forces guy perfectly sums it up. https://youtu.be/BUMGBwgGYWw?t=100
Temple Grandin discusses this in "Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals" [1]. She discusses the distress she felt when the first slaughter house that she had designed opened, and she watched the cows calming going to be slaughtered. Even with the reduced distress, or perhaps because of it, that she felt like a betrayer. But she also talks about how she comes to terms with consuming ethically produced meat. Prey species like cattle — or the nearest wild equivalent — live with high stress levels, with threats from predators, and the constant search for food. On a farm the food is assured, and the environment is less stressful. Her thesis (which I hope I am representing correctly) is that this can be a trade. The animal lives a calmer safer life, without cruelty, and in return, we eat it.
Not everyone will be happy with that argument. The world would be arguably be a better place if more people thought about this
And 'ethical farming' is not without cruelty. Cruelty is still applied at the end.
And I wouldn't call it a fair trade either.
These cows are being bred because we want to eat them. If there wasn't a demand then the cow on the ethical farm wouldn't exist or experience cruelty.
Animals in nature are free and yes are being hunted by other animals who need to eat other animals to survive. It's the nature of things.
Most of humanity don't need to eat meat anymore and hence have the choice of not causing suffering or being cruel.
Of course lots of small producers cant afford these certifications, which doesn't meat they don't have high standards for how they raise their animals.
[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24341618/K...
It is unnecessary to do that in this case because the scale isn’t that vast and you can easily see the trend on an absolute scale. However, this graph serves the same purpose as—I gather—stock charts do. They are interested in what happened while the trend was downwards, and the specific time at when the trend stopped (or at least halted).
At the very least break down the use by animal and mass.
Never mind cows are not raised like pigs which are not raised like chickens. To lump them all together is silly and insulting.
Unfortunately the FDA report does not include mass either, but I reckon if you were to look at the antibiotics/animal mass you would see that swine is a huge outlier.
I’m genuinely amenable to the idea that mass antibiotics is bad because it makes intuitive sense. But the article starts out with “For decades…” and then the relevant plot has the X-axis start in 2012 for some reason. I strongly suspect, but don’t have time to confirm, that if you extended that axis back to, say, the 90s you’d see more nuanced trends that would threaten the doom-porn nature of the standard Vox “explainer”.
But you can quit big meat.
That said am I interpreting this right? How much of a risk does the use of antibiotics in meat present to a vegetarian?
Whatever the exact value, it's most likely much lower. At least you're not ingesting whatever is left in the meat which, by reading some of the responses here, seem to come with significant risk.
We can't regulate anything correctly in the US, it seems. Only recently have I ever seen, in my entire adult life, the FTC have any real teeth, and I doubt it'll last
It's one of those situations where the people involved are so over powered by those they are meant to govern/regulate, that there's little chance of them being anything but toothless. The only time they seemingly act is when the acts are so large and publicly visible, that the only way to save any face is to publicly react. For the things that slide under the public's radar, they don't have resources for it and just let it go. At least, that's how it appears to me.
I'm tired of everyone romanticizing the EU here, it's full of all the same corruption and regulatory capture issues as America. I question whether even a fraction of you have ever lived there.
The problem is that factory farming doesn't harm people and it keeps meat cheap. Expensive meat hurts poor people and minorities the most. It's a disturbing and tough issue.
A core political issue in the 2020s will be how to deal with tiny groups holding oversized political power as we cannot afford to just keep paying them off (or worse, letting them "wag the dog" as they did with Brexit) anymore.
If you actually need to dose some to treat an illness, there are protocols to follow to ensure that they're clean before they go off to market.
If you wait until after animals are sick to treat then depending on what disease it is you've lost all or most of a herd due to the way existing regulations require them to be handled.
If we want to drop antibiotics, we're going to end up with significantly increased prices of meat due to increased land usage requirements. This would be ecologically good, but socially disastrous.
US farms are also subsidised. Maybe to a lesser extent than the EU but it's significant.
There are plenty of farms in the EU that house animals permanantly. I can't speak as to the differences in conditions between US and EU regulations regarding animal housing.
It's not at all clear that banning indiscriminate antibiotic use in the US would render farms financially unviable. There are significant trade barriers that mean that meat producers are somewhat insulated from world competition.
There would probably be a rise in the price of meat, but how significant is hard to say - there may be some research done on this, maybe not. I don't believe that meat in the EU is significantly more expensive than in the US
But maybe this is why I’m not a politician.
I'm not saying those rules are bad, I honestly don't know, but I do wonder how necessary they would be if high concentration livestock operations weren't so prevalent in the U.S.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/spotlights/2022-2023/nearin...
Over here we have better livestock rearing practices, and we choose better breeds.
"Although intake was estimated to be low and exposure can be considered safe, the dietary habits among consumers vary and increased consumption of several foods that are burdened with antibiotics can raise the risk. Furthermore, low and long-term exposure can have severe effects for gut microbiota which in turn is related with severe consequences for health and diseases that sometimes are not directly correlated with antibiotics exposure."
> I don't understand this factory farm model
Seems to me like you understand it just fine. Or maybe you are underestimating the cost difference or people's ability/willingness to spend more on these items.
More government sponsored investment is definitely needed. The CO2 externality alone of cattle is a significant portion of humanity's CO2 emissions, something like 15%.
The land use for meat production between feed and grazing is very large as well, google says 33% of farmland is dedicated to animal feed production. That's a huge amount of land consuming water resources, steadily losing topsoil, and removal of natural habitats and potential carbon sinks.
Grazing is 35% of US land. Again, just a huge amount of land that is denied natural habitats.
I would prefer a traditional vegetarian diet to a "cultured meat" diet. I don't want industrial food poducts in my body.
In capitalist systems, "sometimes" seems to be happening very often. Frequently enough now, and over history, that some very believable and actionable critiques of capital have been written, re-written, re-discovered and re-packaged -- at their root being the insight that this alienation, capture and monopoly is the result of class differentiation, capital accumulation, and production under the commodity form. That's not bullshit.
Vegetarianism is a far far harder sell to Americans than "give up your practically worthless pointlessly large Trucks/SUVs that you almost never use for what the advertising portrays you using them as". It may be harder than "give up soda", "use bikes more", "don't live in the suburbs", etc.
I know I'm talking about meat in this thread, and sourcing it, but just wanna also acknowledge that reducing intake of it, and making sure it's good is the strategy I think is best and scalable. Seems to be some consensus forming around it too.
"More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh"
> I don't understand this factory farm model
is prven by this part:
> For a slightly higher cost we can rear animals like cattle and chicken humanely
I think a better statement would have been, you know nothing about this topic but have strong opinions on it.
It's the same as the link in humans between obesity and gut microbiome dysbiosis
https://eu.boell.org/sites/default/files/2021-09/MeatAtlas20...
It delivers an excellent compilation of the issues at play that will keep the problem going. As long as there's no change in policies, consumer behavior and/or some mad disease that brings down the meat industry, it's going to keep continued.
The FDA banned the use of human antibiotics for any other purpose than treating disease in 2017.
You can’t get away with not using antibiotics in livestock any more than you can do away with them in humans.
And using non-human approved antibiotics on livestock won’t increase resistance because they aren’t the same drugs.
And as for concerns about antibiotics in meat, there is a required “wash out” period when animals are treated. Exposure to humans consuming meat is minuscule. And meat is routinely tested on a random basis.
Not to say reducing antibiotic use isn’t an important goal, but the article just brushes off the 42% reduction in use in 2017.
Great progress has been made.
Probably other reasons it's bad as well (I'm also not a doctor and just write code).
It's billions of Petri dishes. It's a white swan in the making.
It's really a shame that now humans are not given antibiotics to combat antibiotic resistance, when humans do not even consume most of the antibiotics produced.
Consider watching Earthlings (2005) - http://www.nationearth.com/ - I'd say a must watch film for anyone who cares about animals.
Ranches surrounding me (I live in relatively rural Montana) don't even come close to resembling the kinds you mention. The cattle are given the run of hundreds of acres, and also they often graze from those fields, etc.
Yeah, there are a shitty minority of ranches that produce a large amount of meat in terrible conditions. But they are not the norm, not in my experience.
And for a tangent, I'd like also call out that it's not just beef being produced by ranchers. We're not just tossing carcasses in the landfills. We use the whole animal. Calcium, leather, feed, gelatin, medicine, etc.
So, most people want to believe their meat comes from somewhere nice, but on average, basically all meat in the US comes from animals that are living in horrible conditions (I suspect living lives not worth living -- a life of suffering).
> So, most people want to believe their meat comes from somewhere nice
I have the ability to know mine is, because our grocery stores get their meat locally.
"We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms."
Being honest though, it's sus as fuck, and not just because of the source, or that these are "rough estimates" to use their terms.
A simple read through the spreadsheet shows some pretty odd (and significant) discrepancies. A single example: A row with "2500-4999" animals per farm has farm counts and "total animals" that amounts to over 6.5k animals per farm.
Also, note that CAFO - the farms we're (legitimately) concerned about - is not based solely on the animal counts†, though that's the only part of the definition that the "Sentience Institute" uses because "the public may consider it bad too".
It strikes me as straight up lying with numbers - presenting real numbers in a way which tells the story the institute wants to tell.
† "has a manmade ditch or pipe that carries manure or wastewater to surface water; or the animals come into contact with surface water that passes through the area where they’re confined."
The author, my favorite philosopher, uses industry booklets and instruction manuals as examples of what happens at the farms (and you know worse things happen than what is described). It's horrific stuff, enough to make the reader want to decrease their meat consumption. I'm 99% sure that since its publication, the % of animals coming from CAFOs has increased. And since then various other problems appeared (chickens genetically engineered to grow so fast that often their bones break -- resulting in more suffering than before).
https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-...
Do you mean line #69 (Inventory, Table 14) ?
----------------------------------------------
Animals per farm | Total farms | Total animals
2500 to 4999 ..... | 1,973 ...... | 6,681,843
----------------------------------------------
6681843 / 1973 = 3386 animals per farm
> It strikes me as straight up lying with numbers
Do you have better source ?
it's only been 100 years since the very first development of effective antibiotics. before this, bacterial diseases were deadly. if we go on with this misuse, they will become deadly again.
The EU manages fine without so much antibiotics.
Edit: why is this downvoted?
For example, Perdue says, "All of the animals for our branded products are raised in no-antibiotics-ever programs"; as a big company, surely this leaves enough vagueness for them to raise and sell animals with antibiotics under other brands/products. Since it's a private company, consumers can't know really what percentage of animals fall under one category or the other.
https://corporate.perduefarms.com/news/statements/antibiotic...
Though it is interesting that such a big company would move towards that direction at all.
The sea change in chicken production demonstrated it was possible to quickly scale down antibiotics in farming, but it didn’t do much to reduce overall use, as the chicken industry only used 6 percent of antibiotics in agriculture in 2016. And the momentum didn’t spread to other parts of the meat business, like beef and pork, which together account for over 80 percent of medically important antibiotics fed to farmed animals.
We live with a huge amount of bacteria around us, and in our guts. Our skin generally protects us from them very well, but those same bacteria that are harmless outside the body can kill when inside the body.
Antibiotics not only improved survival rates from silly trivial injuries. They enabled a whole world of surgical interventions, because after surgery you can just give antibiotics to kill off any inadvertent infection you may have introduced. (Yes, sterile operating conditions help too.)
Nor should they. The impact would be more far reaching than what's being discussed in the article.