Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

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> 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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