Antibiotics for industrial animal farms are one of the reasons bacteria develop multiple resistances. One should ban antibiotics for animals world wide. Unfortunate this wont happen, till its to late.
"The sheep look up" holds still true.
I wouldn't go quite that far. I am on record here on HN as agreeing with a doctor who said in an interview,
"Q: Do you think we have enough data to know what’s happening with the antibiotics used on the farm?
"A: I think we know enough to say that we need to be doing a better job of improving appropriate use of antibiotics in all sectors, humans and animals.
"Q: But the agriculture sector is different, because antibiotics have been used there for a long time with an eye toward improving the growth of the animals, really for food purposes, to make them bigger and fatter with less food. Does that concern you as a use?
"A: Certainly the CDC believes quite firmly, and I think there are a number of veterinary experts here and in other places who agree with the stance that we should never be using antibiotics in agriculture or in people for any other purpose than to treat infections.
"Using antibiotics to promote growth in animals is not a good use of antibiotics. It’s not careful use of this really delicate and invaluable resource."[1]
I am also on record as saying, responding to a passage in another thread-opening article,
>> "What Europe did: In the EU, all antibiotics used in human medicines are banned on farms—and no antibiotics can be used on farms for 'non-medical purposes,' i.e., growth promotion." <<
I'd like to see the United States follow that lead immediately, and I write this as a man who has several uncles and cousins who are farmers, including some who raise cattle. It makes sense to me to have lines of defense against transmission of animal-infecting, and especially antibiotic-resistant-animal-infecting, microbes to human beings, by controlling what animals raised as lifestock eat and how they are treated with veterinary medicines.[2]
Animals get sick, both on and off the farm. Careful veterinary practice can enhance human health, by reducing sources of zoonotic infections. The epidemiologists who work to prevent human disease also keep track of news of animal infections on the farm and in the wild.[3] With this in mind, I can't agree with the policy idea
One should ban antibiotics for animals world wide.
expressed in the parent post. We should be careful about the use of antibiotics, many of which were originally "natural" substances emitted by microorganisms as a defense against other microorganisms, and we should use antibiotics mostly to treat cases of actual human or animal disease, and also use other infection control measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases either to humans or to nonhuman animals, wherever they live.
AFTER EDIT:
Meanwhile, in human medicine, the development through natural selection of multiple-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis is very alarming. I wish India were doing better in controlling tuberculosis. Both a newspaper in the United States, which did much to break the story,[4] and a newspaper from India[5] are in agreement with official sources from both countries[6][7] that much more needs to be done to stop the spread of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis in India, which could threaten the health of the whole world. (A century and a half ago, tuberculosis was perhaps the world's leading cause of death.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6599795
(expressing agreement with the quoted expert in the thread-opening article)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674781
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/
[4] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230344420...
[5] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-23/news...
[6] http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Facing-the-Reality-of-Drug-R...
[7] http://www.tbcindia.nic.in/pdfs/RNTCP%20Response%20DR%20TB%2...
All of whom would not be harmed by outlawing the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in agriculture.
Right now we have a situation where people raising cattle can make more profit by using antibiotics, this drives down the cost of meat to where farmers raising cattle naturally can't compete on price (and must charge a premium for antibiotic-free meat).
If the laws were changed, no one would use antibiotics, consumers would pay an extra 50 cents / pound of beef and the farmers would remain equally profitable. In fact, it might make the midwestern family farm viable again, right now they can't compete with the massive cattle lots, but such regulation could make raising 10-100 head of cattle a worthwhile endeavor again.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230444460...
Game Theory is a method of examining it.
Even extremist libertarians think that the government should be able to exert its' powers in order to prevent contagion. This is a clear example of the government failing in one of its core responsibilities.
Wouldn't an extremist libertarian say something related to the market sorting it out?
I am genuinely interested in your opinion. (tragedy of the commons and all that)
Markets are only one facet of a healthy functioning society. You still need government and it's courts and law enforcement. Civil courts deal with the negative externalities (pollution, contagion, etc), not markets. There are of course myriad instances of humans banding together on their own to solve tragedy of the commons issues, without the courts or regulation, but of course in the US anti-trust laws would prevent such coordination as "cartel like behavior".
But let's assume the "ultimate extreme libertarian society", in which even the air we breathe has been privatized. The air shareholders would still need to use the courts to enforce their ownership rights against polluters (a factory, for example). Without the authority of the court to back them up, the air shareholder would never be able to actually force the factory to pay for the right to pollute. The market helps ensure reasonably efficient allocation of air rights, but the courts (government) are still required to actually make the system function.
And finally, to answer your first question: Why would you need an FDA to restrict antibiotic use in agriculture? Normal courts, cops, and laws can't do that?
The Tea Partiers of the world hijacked the term and repurposed it for their own weird definition, I think it was that lot at any rate.
I don't know of any left wing liberal libertarians anywhere in the world. The anarchist libertarians (called minarchists or anarcho capitalists typically) are probably more common in the US than outside of it. Some Tea Partiers actually are libertarians, many are not.
As with everything, some people swing more left others more right. Everyone is different. But the points I presented in the previous posts are mainline libertarian points agreed upon by virtually all of them (us).
If we create a specialized arm of the police who specialize in things like air pollution, crops, etc, are we not just recreating the same government entities that are being railed against?
The FDA/DEA/etc do all sorts of things - failing to regulate antibiotics, preventing women from purchasing birth control without a doctor's permission, sending people to jail for possessing herbs, etc. If we nuke it all and recreate the important bits, it's a great way to eliminate everything we don't need.
The specialists in the cops become their own sub-department. The ministers need a 'place'. Lo, why not put them together, and while we're at it, note this is very much a national 'common' problem, so lets have them all work at the federal level.
Not saying I agree that it's the way it should be, but the reduction is inevitable.
(For the record, they I think it should be is the FDA is needed, but its powers and practices need better alignment to its intended mission)
In short, prohibiting indiscriminate antibiotics would make it easier on farmers who already forgo them, but it could still hurt GP's farmer relatives (assuming they're currently guzzling down antibiotics) because the overall market for beef would shrink.
(Though I think it's a good idea regardless.)
The house of cards is stacked very, very high.
EDIT: "even some of"
Seriously.
Most livestock production is done in hyper-concentrated confinement operations which take up negligible land space. For the wellbeing of the animals, the quality of the environment surrounding these sites, and the quality of the meat -- these confinement operations should be done away with. The space, though, is irrelevant.
Eliminating livestock production increases food availability because the feed-conversion-ratio is between 4 and 40 (how many pounds of feed turn into 1 pound of cow,pig,chicken, etc).
It is certainly not about space.
India is primarily vegetarian ONLY because they have lots of land in which to grow things. Most other regions do not have so much grow-worthy land, and require a mix of farming and livestock to sustain their populations.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx
(ethanol has shifted that mostly some, yay!)
For instance, on my farm, while our soil and climate is quite good for growing beans of many varieties, which are great for human consumption, you still need to maintain a rotation to maintain a viable farm. We've had to push cereals out of some of our land because it simply won't grow on their soils. That basically leaves corn as our only real rotation option.
To add to that, corn is essentially worthless right now. Its market price is below what it costs to grow. I'd rather grow something I can make money from, but I don't know what that is. You just have to roll the dice and hope the price improves before you have to sell it.
As an interesting aside, a neighbour of mine actually did try growing beans year after year, but he soon found himself out of business completely when disease started running rampant and his yields dropped to nothing. It was kind of sad to watch, and frightening to think what could be if we lose the animal markets.
Mostly, this thread seems a bit wishy-washy on how we feed livestock in the U.S...
But sure, it's unlikely humans would keep growing that much corn if it wasn't going to ethanol or livestock.
> But sure, it's unlikely humans would keep growing that much corn if it wasn't going to ethanol or livestock.
Which is likely, and in line with what I was suggesting earlier. However, unless some unforeseen markets open up, that means leaving the land fallow every few years rather than growing corn, not growing more food for humans.
That is where I was going with my original post. If we stopped growing corn completely, that doesn't necessarily mean we gain 80 million acres to grow something else, you just lose the meat out of the nation's diet, putting more pressure on the land that is already growing other foods.
I'm not saying it is impossible to see such a transition through, but our agriculture system grew up with animals being a large part of it. To stop that over a short period of time would be a huge transition, and I could see it being an incredibly painful time for farmers and consumers alike. It won't simply be a matter of stopping the consumption of animals and starting to eat a vegetarian diet like small groups of people are able to do today.
Even if that's true, while meat is tasty, it's a luxury, and arguably a step in the food chain that's a waste.
If the entire industrial meat sector evaporated today, my guess is the biggest impact would be an economic disruption from large number of suddenly unemployed and businesses no longer buying services/products, rather than any kind of food shortage per se.
But if we're talking about an antibiotic ban, the impacts wouldn't even reach that far. ABX don't enable production, they enable cheaper production. The most likely outcome isn't a serious collapse in supply, it's some combination of an increase in costs and modest reduction in supply.
No more a luxury than, say, cancer treatments.
If you don't eat meat, you don't eat meat.
I visited north Xinjiang once, and was quite over-exposed to meat so much that I was happy to get back to lower elevation lands where I could actually get some vegetables again.
And the premise of the diet is supported by sound scientific research rather than simply hearsay (as your comment implies).
Those diets may be good for losing weight, but are they good for a healthy person?
First, I started to lose 1kg a week, until I was in a healthy weight (when the weight stabilized instead, without much adjustments to diet), and my choleterol that I was fighting for years, dropped to healthy levels in 4 months, also several other broken blood levels got fixed.
Also my sleep got better, and for the first time in my life going to the gym made a difference (before that, I could go to the gym all I wanted, and I would never get stronger, and I was very weak, sedentary 14 year old girls could lift more weight than me in the upper body).
But that is just a anecdote, it happened to me, I did no research to see WHY it happened, it just did, and now I stick with that diet.
Either "nutritionist" or "dietitian".
And obviously many meats.
This is a thorough list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0Ah8MbmZepQxWdGo4...
Initially, it's definitely challenging, and switching to a wholly low-carb diet is not without an unpleasant transition period.
What a massive load of shit. Even if we're going to get on the train that eating meat vicariously results in antibiotics being rendered useless, the two are not any more directly related than watching Netflix destroys the environment (Netflix runs on computers, producing computers causes pollution, pollution destroys the environment).
Methionine is an essential amino acid that is one of 2 that is used for the start codon for DNA transcription. It follows that if cancer is uncontrolled cell growth, that restricting the resource it needs would limit it's growth.
Appeal to authority: my wife, the molecular biologist pointed out the codon angle. It seems reasonable enough to me to have become a pseudo vegan (without the self-righteousness (at least in regards to that)).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methionine#Methionine_restricti...
I may have to consider chicken or something else.
I submit to you "free radicals". Oh-my-god-theyre-awful-help. Enter anti-oxidants, oh-my-god-theyre-great-yay. Let's supplement them right? Ouch, turns out, those dietary anti-oxidants were the bees knees, but supplementation to extremes might be a bad idea, and we might need some free radicals to prevent cancerous cell growth.
My moral here is, natural whole foods, mostly, will keep you pretty near balance. Eat your berries, whole grains, eggs, and proteins because the one thing we know is bad for us is a lack of balance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_codon
Note the reference to methionine. My understanding is that the body recycles methionine as well. So give your body just enough to let it do it's thing but don't pour gasoline on the cancer fire by supply a surplus of a critical component.
I'm still slowly doing the research on this. It was spurred by my daughter telling me about "the Blue Zone healing cancer". Googled that, and checked out the dietary element, and that led to the topic we're discussing now.
It seems reasonable enough. And simple enough. And you don't have to be vegan, but mindful of intake.
Just trying to share a recent discovery that seems like a possible life changer.
Changing one's diet based on this speculation would be absolute quackery.
A cell's addiction to methionine is an effect of cancer, and restricting methionine can be potentially be used to treat cells that are already cancerous, but there's no thought on how this could possible cause cancer. Dump a bunch of methionine in cells and they're not going to develop cancer, as far as anything I've ever seen. Interestingly enough, diabetes patients that use metformin to treat their diabetes seem to have slightly lower cancer rates than diabetes patients that don't use metformin, which has triggered interest in insulin receptors as possible treatment targets or causes, which are vaguely related to metabolism, but such work is extremely early and no conclusions should be drawn. And that's on far far more solid ground than methionine as a cancer risk.
We understand caloric restriction far better than methionine restriction in terms of extending lifespans of lab animals, so if one wants to speculate on dietary changes, this seems like a far better speculative, pre-knowledge, gamble than methionine restriction.
Methionine restriction by avoiding methionine rich foods doesn't strike me as harmful at all, since there's still plenty in even a vegan diet. And in my case, I said pseudo-vegan -- it's more a mindset than dogma.
Left alone, grain consumption is extremely inelastic, and production is extremely variable - not a good combination. But yes, it's not that hard to create other mechanisms for regulating that market, even world wide.
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat.
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog.
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly.
Perhaps she'll use a combination of market forces and
warehouses to accomplish the same thing much more
simply next time around.it's like running eighty concurrent webserver processes and killing them 100 times per second round-robin because if you don't kill them constantly they will bring down the whole system.
I mean maybe this setup "works" but aren't we really stretching the definition of that word?
Ruby on Rails?
Oh, but guess what, you don't get to choose that trade-off -- you'll have a lot less livestock to eat either way. You can do it with or without entering the post-antibiotic era. (Or at any rate, a lot more expensive meat, which will likely result in a lot less of it, sure.)
Fortunately, a lot less livestock to eat does not mean a global food shortage. People are quite capable of living with a lot less meat. It may be a global deliciousness shortage, because meat is delicious; but most people on the planet don't eat much meat already (cause they can't afford it).
The OP is odd in suggesting "We have a few chances left to turn back the tide of resistance — but only a few, and not much room for mistakes. I hope we take them." -- without any hints as to what these chances are -- and then suggesting that if we don't take them, what we'll 'lose' is cheap meat from routine antibiotic use in livestock! But in fact, ceasing the use of routine antibiotics in livestock production -- before they become useless, because it'll be stopped when they become useless anyhow -- seems like the #1. What else you got?
This could all be alleviated if we just took a step back as a society and took control of our own lives, food included. Maybe spending 20-30 minutes a day on growing your own supply (where applicable) isn't the worst thing in the world if it came down to it.
I understand this is not possible everywhere but I grew up on a pretty small suburban home that grew maybe 50% of its own vegetables outside of winter. Having moved to a heavy industrialized nation and moving that down to 0% I can see the difference in quality when eating mass produced food.
Again, not everyone if willing or able to do this, but where applicable it should be encouraged and promoted instead of looked down upon as another hippy mentality blabedibla...
Meat requires a lot of space to grow!
Europe is small, and there isn't a lot of extra space. Less meat.
Enter the United States. WOAH! Lots of land! More space to raise meat! More meat!
NPR mentioned another factor a while back in their program, "The making of meat eating America," American innovation.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/26/155720538/the-ma...
Almost two centuries ago, he says, meat was one reason why immigrants found America so amazing. "When the Irish come in the 1840s, they write letters back saying 'I eat meat every day,'" Horowitz says. "And they get letters back saying, 'You must be kidding. It can't be true.'"
Back in Europe, says Horowitz, the growing of livestock was often organized and regulated in a way that funneled meat straight to the wealthy or the landed aristocracy. In the new world, though, meat was much easier to find. Grazing lands were close to cities; sometimes . Farmers quickly realized that raising animals was a good business. Cities set up markets for them. "And the result is a flourishing of the livestock industry, very early in American history."
As a result, when new technology came along, like railroads and refrigeration, American entrepreneurs were able to jump right in and use it to turn beef into a centralized, national industry.
"Why could they sell chilled beef in New York in the 1880s? Because New Yorkers had been getting beef in their markets and butcher shops for at least a hundred years. So we have this new meat coming in? It's a little cheaper, let's give it a try!" Horowitz says.
That's been the story ever since: , more efficient meat production, and Americans kept saying — "Hey, it's a little cheaper, let's give it a try!"
I have the impression (but haven't really checked any real sources on this) that the carefree use of antibiotics on farm animals is mostly an American thing. And that the use of antibiotics in animal farming is much more regulated in Europe. Don't know for sure, though. And don't know about the rest of the world.
Most people get MDR infections from other people, not from animals. I'm not saying animal to human infections don't occur, they obviously do, but it's not a major source of transmission.
I think the US is a case study in how this level of "direct democracy" usually gets gamed by monied interests.
Startup idea: cheap consumer-oriented broad spectrum antibiotic detection kits for meat and fish.
You could only check it after buying, and slapping the so called bio-butcher, if he sells you antibiotic meat, with the meat he sold.
1. http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?tem...