Fw: Check out Antibiotic Resistance at Factory Farms Scares the Hell Out of Joh

[Guest guest]

Excellent article!

 

Here is link to Buzzflash article

http://blog.buzzflash.com/analysis/884

and

link to Johns Hopkins article.

 

http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0609web/farm.html

 

Alobar

 

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 6:47 PM, <donna.neversurrender wrote:

>

> -

> rkymtnmary

> donna.neversurrender

> Tuesday, August 18, 2009 7:08 PM

> Fwd: Check out Antibiotic Resistance at Factory Farms " Scares the

Hell Out of " Joh

Antibiotic Resistance at Factory Farms " Scares the Hell Out of "

Johns Hopkins Scientists | BuzzFlash.org

>

> Antibiotic Resistance at Factory Farms " Scares the Hell Out of " Johns Hopkins

Scientists

> Submitted by meg on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 1:48pm.

> BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

> by Meg White

> I don't like it when scientists feel the need to explain that they're scared

out of their wits, or use exclamation marks.

> I also get a little nervous when they say stuff like, " We're such a dumb

species, we don't deserve to survive on this planet " because of the great

lengths we're going to just to kill ourselves off.

> Nevertheless, I was glued to this shocking piece called simply " Farmacology "

in the most recent issue of John Hopkins Magazine on the devastating effects of

low level, non-therapeutic antibiotics in industrial agriculture.

> It turns out they're making more than just broilers and bacon on your local

factory farm; they're growing germs that are resistant to antibiotics. And don't

think your commitment to organics or vegetarianism will save you: Your exposure

to these superbugs could depend on actions as innocuous as driving behind a

truck bound for a Tyson slaughterhouse.

> Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at the

Bloomberg School of Public Health, has been studying the phenomenon for years.

She's no radical -- she doesn't even necessarily advocate organic meat

production or ceasing the use of antibiotics on farm animals. She simply wants

farmers to stop using antibacterial measures to boost profits.

> Antibiotics are inserted into animal feed not only because they're necessary

to ward of the diseases endemic in the cramped and unsanitary conditions of

concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs); such additives also make animals

grow faster. Silbergeld explains:

> " These are feed additives. It's like using antibiotics as hair dye. " She adds,

" We have this practice of permitting the addition of almost any antibiotic that

you can think of to animal feed, for no therapeutic purpose, under conditions

that absolutely favor the rise of resistance. We have no controls or management

of the wastes. Our food safety system is a shambles. This is a situation that is

widely recognized by the World Health Organization, the American Medical

Association, and by others, and nothing happens! It's astounding to me! "

> One of Silbergeld's studies looked at people in direct or tangential contact

with factory farms:

> 41 percent of the chicken catchers had been colonized by Campylobacter jejuni,

which is commensal in poultry -- it derives benefit from the chicken without

harming it -- but pathogenic in people, where it's the second-leading cause of

gastrointestinal disease in the United States. Among the workers at the poultry

processing plant, the rate of colonization was 63 percent. Of the nine people

who lived near but did not work in the industry, 100 percent had been colonized.

> A different study done by Silbergeld entailed simply driving behind poultry

trucks headed to slaughter. The insides of the passenger vehicles that followed

the trucks, where none of these antibacterial-resistant bugs were found

beforehand, were coated with such microbes afterwards.

> Another study found flies transport microbes from the farms with similar

expediency. Farm workers are perhaps the best vectors, bringing these superbugs

home to their families and spreading them around their communities and in

clinics when they come in with respiratory and neurological disorders linked to

increased exposure on the farm. In fact, some studies cited in the Johns Hopkins

article suggest that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) -- the

staph infection that caused near apocalyptic warnings across the nation in the

last couple of years -- may come from the farm, not from the hospital as is

widely believed.

> Another Johns Hopkins researcher, Kellogg Schwab, says he's more than just

concerned:

> " This development of drug resistance scares the hell out of me. If we continue

on and we lose the ability to fight these microorganisms, a robust, healthy

individual has a chance of dying, where before we would be able to prevent that

death. " Schwab says that if he tried, he could not build a better incubator of

resistant pathogens than a factory farm. He, Silbergeld, and others assert that

the level of danger has yet to be widely acknowledged. Says Schwab, " It's not

appreciated until it's your mother, or your son, or you trying to fight off an

infection that will not go away because the last mechanism to fight it has been

usurped by someone putting it into a pig or a chicken. "

> Let me just say that there's little more frightening than something that

" scares the hell out of " a scientist studying our water supply and health, as

Schwab does.

> Another frightening element to this is the difference between what the

conventional wisdom has been on the ability of microbes to mutate, versus the

more shocking reality. Silbergeld says that the Darwinian idea of evolution

" underestimates the brilliance of microbes " :

> Molecular biologists now understand that within a microbial community, one

microbe can acquire genetic material from another microbe, even a microbe of a

much different type, then incorporate it in its own genome and thus acquire

resistance to an antibiotic it has not yet even encountered. It's as if bacteria

are capable of downloading resistance from a gene database.

> The article does get the views of the animal farming industry, which

predictably shows little concern for the potential trouble caused by antibiotic

use in animals, insisting that not using antibiotics would be more harmful in

terms of disease than using it. They also insist, contrary to the scientific

findings outlined in the article, that the medical industry bears the most

responsibility for the overuse of antibiotics.

> Because the federal government does not require reporting from either the drug

industry or from the industrial agriculture complex on antibiotic use, the

industries' argument of there not being enough data is a somewhat valid one.

> As with many other so-called innovations in the agricultural industry, the

health effects of antibiotic use on CAFOs are poorly understood, which makes me

even more thankful for the work of scared scientists.

> BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

>

>