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Comment by grammers | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. And as long as antibiotics are produced in factories where the left overs are just sent into the drain as well (see India, China), anything else it just a tip of the iceberg. We need true emergency antibiotics - not once that are produced the way they are produced and not once that can still be used for animals.

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I misunderstand your last sentence: what good is an antibiotic not useful on animals, given that we are animals?

Non human animals. Farmers feed massive amounts of antibiotics to their livestock. This used to increase their weight, but it’s no longer clear that this works.

For reference, ~80% of antibiotics in the US are used on livestock, not to treat infections, but to prevent them and because pumping them full of antibiotics successfully increases animals' weights[1], as you said.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638249/

Do you have any sources verifying the claim that these countries dump harmful chemicals directly down the drain without any neutralizing chemistry?

Tragic and stupid beyond belief if this is true. Equivalent to using one's own kitchen sink as a toilet bowl.

These countries don't. But, in competitive industrial chemical processing, the totalitarian principle applies: to quote Sir Ronald, “everything not forbidden is compulsory”.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-020-0051-0

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