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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Antibiotics are not widely used. There are many regulations, to use them at all you need a vet to sign off. You also have to pay for them. Then the animal has to be off of them for weeks before you can sell it.

In any case where are talking about a virus which an antibiotic won't touch at all.

Modern large farms have very strict bio controls. Things like: You shower before entering the barn (there is a shower in the barn entrance). Then you wear only approved clothing. Your shoes are disinfected as part of this process. then when you leave you reverse the process. If you enter one barn you are not allowed in a different barn for a week.

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People really do underestimate the biological controls in large operations. I'm absolutely not a supporter of that style of farm, but

They're essentially clean rooms with animals living in them. It's kind of amazing. We only see the ones that are bad.

But like I said. No animal deserves to be crated all day every day for its life.

> Antibiotics are not widely used. There are many regulations, to use them at all you need a vet to sign off.

This isn't true, some types of antibiotics are routinely used as a preventative measure on chicken farms.

> Both FDA and the World Health Organization (WHO) rank antibiotics relative to their importance in human medicine. The highest ranking is “critically important.” Antibiotics in this category are used sparingly to treat sick birds. Antibiotics in other less-important classes may be used in chicken production to maintain poultry health and welfare, including for disease prevention, control and treatment purposes.

https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/questions-answers-ant...

> maintain poultry health and welfare

That's a little deceptive. The antibiotics widely used by the industry are used for growth promotion. I don't know how it works, but I don't believe it's because they're keeping the birds healthy--i.e. treating infections. Some sources suggest part of the mechanism is by suppressing otherwise healthy or benign gut microbiota that compete for calories. Antibiotics have been used this way for nearly a century. There have been attempts to phase out subtherapeutic antibiotic use, but the practice is standard operating procedure in the US, and the US is a major chicken exporter. It's banned in the EU, though.

Of course it's at least a little deceptive, it's from an industry association PR page. When I said anti-biotics are used as a preventative measure, that wasn't meant to exclude their use for other non-medical purposes, but that's a more complicated argument.

I posted that, not because it is an unbiased source, but because if even that biased of a source admits it, then it's hard to dispute.

While I'm unsure about chickens, they're also [ab]used for larger meat animals like cows and turkeys because they make the animals grow larger, faster.

The fun thing is - nobody knows exactly why this happens. There's a bunch of hypotheses, but they're exceptionally hand-wavy.

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