“We’ve Reached the End of Antibiotics. Period.”
This is from Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, an associate director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said:
“For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about ‘The end of antibiotics, question mark?’ Well, now I would say you can change the title to ‘The end of antibiotics, period.’ We’re in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t.”
But this is a GOOD thing — that is, if you’re an Agribusiness executive. Eighty percent of all antibiotics in America are being sold to factory farms. These antibiotics serve the crucial purpose of fattening up 1) livestock, and 2) Big Ag profits.
Since people can no longer be treated successfully with antibiotics, let’s put them to better use (the antibiotics, not the people). Might as well jack up that eighty percent figure to a hundred percent, and ship all antibiotics directly to the factory farm.
Labels: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, factory farms 80 percent of antibiotics, the end of antibiotics
posted by Tom Harper @ 1:16 PM
4 Comments:
I had an email conversation with a family member who's a Doctor and his response was:
One key is to stop using antibiotics to fatten up farm animals (Holland did this, and has seen a drop in antibiotic resistant infections among humans), and get doctors to quit using the big guns when little guns would do. And change public expectations – you don't need an antibiotic for a runny nose.
This was featured on this weeks edition of PBS Frontline. Most frightening was that all the major Pharmaceutical companies have pulled out of the AntiBiotic Market, the latest being Phizer (who gave us Penicillin) who stopped research when they realized they could make more money in the long term making more ED, Diabetic, Cholesterol, and Hypertension drugs - not that they aren't important but we do have plenty on the Market and none are as deadly as the killer Bacteria.
Well let a few Pharmaceutical executives start dying from this thing OR wait until they tell the Government (taxpayers)to Subsidize their new Research.
Erik
Gene and others,
We should go back to using just grass and grains instead of waste products and meat pieces (other cattle and chickens etc.,) we feed them now and then have to use the Antibiotics to keep their stomachs from bloating (because they don't eat this naturally) and to prevent them from having infections (because it isn't clean).
To think we used to tease Scandinavia of eating Grass Fed Beef!
Erik
Grung: You're right about stopping the use of antibiotics for farm animals. Unfortunately Big Ag is too powerful and Congress is too spineless to look cross-eyed at them. And the public definitely needs to stop overusing antibiotics. Too many Americans automatically reach for a pill to suppress every symptom, even if it's the wrong pill.
Erik: I didn't know that, that Big Pharm had pulled out of the antibiotics market. I was assuming the use of antibiotics on factory farms was a win win for Big Pharm and Big Ag. People should definitely make the switch from factory farms to locally raised grass fed animals.
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