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Comment by nszceta | Hacker News Reader

Do these antibiotics and their metabolites stay in the meat post slaughter and make their way into the food supply?

Even if they don't, broad/inessential use of antibiotics helps evolve antibiotic resistant pathogens, which is everyone's problem.

Yes, which is why giving antibiotics to livestock that are going for slaughter is illegal pretty much everywhere except the US.

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.

That's not even based in reality.

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.

Based on reality...? Here in the EU we have managed not to loose most of our herds.

Do you see any problems with prophylactically dosing antibiotics yourself? Anything?

Human living conditions are nowhere near those of livestock.

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.

Central Europeans eat a lot of meat and somehow they manage to keep prices under control without slamming animals with antibiotics prophylactically. Land and regulatory compliance costs are much higher than in the US too.

Yes, because they the EU farmers are given ridiculous subsidies.

It's far from that simple.

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

lol, so are US farmers.

Sooner or later it is going to be socially disastrous anyway.

Perhaps that means that industrial meat production is not sustainable and maybe never can even can be.

Given a choose between faster onsets of more antibiotic resistant bacteria and a higher price of meat, I think a smart policy choice would be the latter, as the former disaster seems a lot harder to manage then the latter.

But maybe this is why I’m not a politician.

anti biotics arent preventative, you have to give them when they actually have the infection, else it doesnt do anything.

I believe the animals are given antibiotics to make them grow faster. I don’t know what the mechanism of action is for that though.

I'm awfully late to the party, but: that isn't true. They wouldn't spend huge sums on preventative antibiotics if they didn't work. The problem is the negative externality of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

You're being down-voted, but you're describing exactly how the U.S. handles outbreaks like this. The avian flu egg shortage is a good example [1][2]

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...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza#Culling

Avian flu and antibiotics have nothing to do with each other. Influenza is a virus.

Sure but the bigger picture re: the industry and its oversight is what we're talking about in this thread.

Antibiotics are used to make the animals grow faster. This is not a case of "we want to keep these animals healthy" it is "we want more meat per animal, and this is a cheap way to get it."

Right, which is only a thing in the US.

Over here we have better livestock rearing practices, and we choose better breeds.

The article reports that US producers want this because their stock handling is weak, and improving their practices would be inconvenient. Lots of people raise chickens, swine, and cattle without prophylactic antibiotics. But running the herd through to vax is tougher work than adding cipro to the feed.

Yeah, maybe in the US, where your livestock practices are pretty suspect at best.

Yes, but in negligible amounts that should not cause illness or emergence of antibiotic resistance in consumers.

"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."

https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6304/10/8/456

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