Perdue Says Its Hatching Chicks Are Off Antibiotics
npr.org
npr.org
From a nutrition tech standpoint there are a number of products including probiotics, beta glucans & others that help to protect the birds by boosting immune system activity rather than by killing bacteria. When used in combination with vaccines they can be very effective, albeit slightly more expensive. However, these ingredients add cost & come at a metabolic cost to the animal (i.e. it takes more food to produce 1 pound of meat if more of that energy is directed towards a functioning immune system & away from weight gain).
Animal nutrition science is in many ways more advanced than human nutrition due to the ability to conduct controlled studies and access to large amounts of data. However, the goals are very different.
Animals account for ~80% of antibiotic usage in the U.S. and MRSA now kills more people in the U.S. than HIV. It's an interesting topic.
Positive changes like these resulting from social backlash are what make so-called "ag gag" laws particularly disturbing.
Really: http://amrls.cvm.msu.edu/pharmacology/antimicrobial-usage-in...
http://www.ncsu.edu/project/swine_extension/healthyhogs/book...
"Bacteria evolve to survive threats to their existence. In both humans and animals, even appropriate therapeutic uses of antibiotics can promote the development of drug resistant bacteria. When such bacteria enter the food supply, they can be transferred to the people who eat food from the treated animal."
I suggest reading the article to really understand what they are saying rather than dissecting the little tidbit I picked out but it sounds as if it doesn't matter if the exact same drug is used to treat both humans and animals, there is still a threat.
Obviously more study on exactly what creates the medically relevant resistant bacteria is needed but based on the trend so far I don't think the prudent thing to do is start curtailing non essential anti-biotic use.
Show shopping lists to the participants. Both lists are equal except one product, the one you want to measure. Ask participant what they can tell you about whoever created the list.
Example: two similar lists, one with standard coffee and one with instant coffee. Result: They found that instant coffee was associated with "lazy" etc (they hoped for "smart" and subsequently adjusted their branding to achieve this.)
(I guess it's just a special case of A/B test)
Edit:
I read about this in school many years ago but at least here's one source:
http://web.utk.edu/~rhovland/PTsandCR.html : Projective Techniques in Consumer Research
(My google query was: instant coffee grocery list experiment)
the best example is breeding chickens for egg laying, males are not wanted.
That applies to farming most animals, at all scales.
It seems kind of odd that feminists have http://www.caroljadams.com/spom.html, while the MRAs have missed the boat on this one as far as I know.
The chicken-producing industry (very different from the egg producing industry) does use males. They're differentiated for some products (Perdue's Oven Stuffer Roasters, for example), but 95% of all producers in the country now run "Straight-run" operations, meaning they dont differentiate between male and female birds (no sexing the chicks and separating them). Originally this was a problem, conforming your machines to process two different sized birds (a double-bell-curve, so to speak), but streamlining the selective breeding over the years has brought the females and males together as far as feed conversions and weight gains go.
Always happy to shed light on the poultry industry and it's many quirks :)
https://www.extension.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimodal_distribution
Fascinating bit about selective breeding to reduce the difference though.
Then there's the bit about white meat to the US, dark meat to Russia.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2011/01/the_dark_sid...
Either way, it's the American Consumer that demands white meat... personally I'm a dark meat chap myself.
Not knocking you in any way here, just adding my own two bits. Appreciate your insider's view, really.
It's a bit heavy handed but they weren't always leading fight against humane and responsible farming / livestock.
> All chicken is “antibiotic-free” in the sense that no antibiotic residues are present in the meat due to the withdrawal periods and other precautions required by the government and observed by the chicken companies.
Before you compulsively knee-jerk and claim that I think vaccines are evil and cause autism, take a breath.
The most damming argument against vaccines is that the continual use of vaccines (i.e. forced antibody production) produces same set of evolutionary selectors that help create 'superbugs' that injected antibiotics are often derided for.
However this basic biological fact escapes most people that haven't taken Biology 102 and beyond (which is 99% of the population).
Which is not to say that we could not benefit from further research into the process.
Having to find a new antibiotic more like an entirely different door. Vaccines merely find a way to train our immune systems to tag the villain. Anti biotics have to actually find weaknesses and exploit a biochemical pathway that can be disrupted etc.
It's a bit more complex than the widespread and largely unnecessary antibiotic abuse happening in livestock farms. Unnecessary because more sanitary and efficient methods exist for raising them that obviate their need. Disease can be contained by quarantine and preventative measures which isn't possible among a migratory population like humans.
I am the furthest thing from an expert in this field, but the herd immunity from vaccines provides an entirely different protection than a 'toolset' of working antibiotics.
My naive understanding is that if you have 100% vaccine coverage, it's simply way more unlikely that a virus or bacterium can catch a foothold of reproduction that would even make possible the mutations that result in resistance. And then you have viruses like influenza that are so widespread and elusive that they change annually. But we've gotten really good at responding to that rapid change as well.
Polio is down to 385 recorded cases in 2011 from 400,000 estimated and 52,552 recorded in 1980.
There is even some progress with Malaria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_disea...
If an infection kills me, I'm not around to pass the infection on anymore… at least, once my corpse has been dealt with. If I do survive and the same pathogen wants to infect me again, or keep the current infection going, it has to find a way to dodge my immune system.
Malaria hides in red blood cells. HIV hides in immune cells, plus it mutates like crazy. HSV and VZV also manage to take permanent residence. HCV usually does too, which is particularly nasty because it can take decades for symptoms to appear, and those symptoms are caused by gradual liver damage.
Given what happens when we have spotty natural immunity, being able to immunize most of a population in short order seems like an excellent thing.
Vaccines prevent infection. Viruses that are unable to infect new hosts are very likely to die off. They can mutate as well, but if enough people in a population are vaccinated, it's very unlikely for the virus to mutate in such a way as to avoid the mechanisms by which the vaccine works.
Viruses and bacteria are different things. Bacteria just need a food source, and they're good to go; you'll have enormous numbers of them as long as their food source can sustain them. Viruses need a host cell. Vaccines don't kill viruses, they prevent viruses from spreading.
I have never heard any scientist or public health official claim that use of vaccines will lead to super-viruses. That, I assume, is something made up by the vaccine deniers.