
Pediatricians say farm use of antibiotics harms children - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/pediatricians-say-farm-use-of-antibiotics-harms-children/
======
diogenescynic
80% of antibiotics are being given to livestock animals:

>The proportion of antibiotics sold in the United States each year that go to
animals turns out to be not 70 percent, but rather 80 percent. Here’s CLF’s
Ralph Loglisci, who got the confirmatory numbers from the FDA.

[http://www.wired.com/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-
get-80...](http://www.wired.com/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80-of-
antibiotics-sold-in-us/)

And they also do it because it makes the animals gain weight:

>especially troubling is their use not to cure sick animals but to promote
"feed efficiency," that is, to increase the animal's weight gain per unit of
feed. These drugs are also regularly added to the feed and water of animals
that are not sick in order to prevent diseases caused by overcrowded and
unsanitary CAFO conditions. These nontherapeutic uses translate into
relatively cheap meat prices at the grocery store.

[http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-
food-...](http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-
system/industrial-agriculture/prescription-for-trouble.html)

I wish they'd save the antibiotics for humans so they'd be more effective. I
also wonder if all the antibiotics are making humans gain weight.

~~~
bsilvereagle
> I also wonder if all the antibiotics are making humans gain weight.

I'm wondering this too. Hopefully with the new research that's been happening
with regards to gut flora we'll start to quantify how the amounts and type of
bacteria affect digestive efficiency.

~~~
stephengillie
Cooking meat means our immune system has fewer bacteria to kill off once the
meat has entered our bloodstream, thus it's less work for the same calories.
Would antibiotics have a similar impact?

There was a recent study where one group of mice were fed raw meat, and
another were fed cooked meat. The cooked meat group gained weight while the
raw meat group lost weight.

~~~
dalke
Cooking meat has much more to do with breaking down some of the less
digestible parts of the food.

For example,
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17827047](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17827047)
says "For meat, cooking compromises the structural integrity of the tissue by
gelatinizing the collagen. Hence, cooked meat should take less effort to
digest compared to raw meat. Likewise, less energy would be expended digesting
ground meat compared to intact meat. We tested these hypotheses by assessing
how the cooking and/or grinding of meat influences the energy expended on its
digestion, absorption, and assimilation (i.e., specific dynamic action, SDA)
using the Burmese python, Python molurus."

That abstract concludes "We found cooking to decrease SDA by 12.7%, grinding
to decrease SDA by 12.4%, and the combination of the two (cooking and
grinding) to have an additive effect, decreasing SDA by 23.4%. These results
support the hypothesis that the consumption of cooked meat provides an
energetic benefit over the consumption of raw meat."

For another example, see
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-
calori...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-
counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/) :

> Half the time the sweet potato or meat was presented raw, and half the time
> cooked; half the time it was also pounded and half the time unpounded. ...
> For both meat and sweet potato, Rachel found that when the food was cooked
> the mice gained more weight (or lost less weight) than when it was raw.
> Pounding had very little effect.

> We suspect that there are two major reasons for cooked beef providing more
> calories than raw beef. In cooked beef, the muscle proteins, like the sugars
> in cooked starch, have opened up and allowed digestive enzymes to attack
> their amino acid chains. Cooking also does this for collagen, a protein that
> makes meat difficult to chew because it forms the connective tissue wrapped
> around muscle fibers. However, we do not know the exact mechanisms.

Neither mention killing off bacteria, which makes sense as 1) meat doesn't
enter the bloodstream but only its digestive products, and 2) stomach acids
kill most of the bacteria.

That second paper is
[http://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199.abstract)
.

> The positive energetic effects of cooking were found to be superior to the
> effects of pounding in both meat and starch-rich tubers, a conclusion
> further supported by food preferences in fasted animals. Our results
> indicate significant contributions from cooking to both modern and ancestral
> human energy budgets. They also illuminate a weakness in current food
> labeling practices, which systematically overestimate the caloric potential
> of poorly processed foods.

------
manachar
They touch on it in the article, but it is worth calling special attention to
the use of antibiotics to add weight to the animals. It's not being used to
treat disease, it's being used to "hack" the biology of the animal to increase
yield.

Debate on the use of antibiotics for the agricultural industry seems to
conflate this indiscriminate usage with targeted therapeutic use.

~~~
curun1r
The other half of that sentence is important too:

> ... or prevent future illness

The future illness that they're often protecting the animal from is the
natural result of feeding the animal an unnatural diet (corn, soy, etc...stuff
that's cheaper than what the animal is historically fed). The illness that's
being prevented isn't just possible, it's what would be expected without the
antibiotic. Any controls on using antibiotics would need to include provisions
for banning them in situations where the health of the animal was knowingly
compromised. Otherwise, you create a loophole that allows the industry to make
the animals sick and then use antibiotics to treat the sickness they caused.

~~~
dinoentrails
Do you have any evidence that the diets fed to farm animals increase the risk
of illnesses?

~~~
curun1r
Googling produces a ton of results, but here's one that looks pretty reputable
(USDA, based off many other studies):
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010511074623.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010511074623.htm)

------
jensen123
It never ceases to amaze me how irrational most people are. On September 11,
2001 about 3000 people died in a very dramatic way, and the US launches the
whole war on terrorism boondoggle, pretty much throws out the Constitution
etc. But here 23000 people die every year, in a rather undramatic way, and not
a whole lot is being done.

~~~
saiya-jin
there are whole businesses based on human irrationality/outright stupidity
(just few random examples - short term loans, gambling, smoking tobacco). We
tend to think we are better than in reality, and tend to sidetrack evidence of
contrary (maybe to be more happy with ourselves, who knows)

------
rtl49
The increase of antibiotic resistance is a matter of legitimate public
concern. But this article abuses the same "think of the children" meme that
worldly people everywhere despise in politics and journalism of every sort.

Children are more susceptible to infection than healthy adults, but so are the
elderly and people with compromised immune systems. We don't need to pull at
the heartstrings to justify a conservative approach to the use of antibiotics.

~~~
mirimir
Children are also going to live longer than the rest of us, and so will be
getting old after most antibiotics become useless.

~~~
rtl49
The same could be said about every problem facing the species.

~~~
robomc
Only ones with a presumed irreversible tipping point.

~~~
rtl49
To be clear, the issue of antibiotic resistance is not such a problem.
Generally, resistant bacteria are less fit than their nonresistant
counterparts in the absence of the antibiotic, so we should expect that after
a period of disuse antibiotics would once again become useful.

~~~
TeMPOraL
"Period of disuse" may mean hundreds of years when people die of simple cuts
and there's no point of even having a hospital. Biology has a lot of intertia.

~~~
jagerific
We may not need to wait nearly so long.

This is a quote from a book by Nick Lane that I think would be relevant here.

"studies show that bacteria can lose superfluous genes in a matter of hours or
days. Such fast gene loss means that bacterial species tend to retain the
smallest number of genes compatible with viability at any one moment."

The main reason he claims is that for bacteria, the speed of DNA replication
is generally the limiting factor in speed of cell division and proliferation
of said bacteria, so selection pressures lead to more favorable outcomes for
the bacteria that maintain the smallest functional genome.

The book is _Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life_ if you
or anyone else is interested. Fascinating read I would recommend it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Interesting, haven't heard of that observation or the book. Thanks!

------
geezer
Don't mess with complex systems we don't understand. Whether it is GMOS,
global climate or administering antibiotics to animals.

It should be incumbent upon those tinkering with complex systems to provide
proof of non-harm. Right now, its the other way around, where those who are
harmed have to provide proof of harm.

~~~
bpodgursky
Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with
unscientific fearmongering (GMOs).

It drags the legitimate concerns down and makes them look like crackpot
conspiracies.

~~~
tzs
There are reasons to be concerned with GMOs that are not at odds with science.
Let me quote something from a comment from a few weeks ago:

\---- begin quote ----

GMOs aren't inherently dangerous to human health or inherently environmentally
destructive. But they do let producers do things faster and more extreme than
they could do via conventional breeding techniques.

They've used those conventional techniques to reduce crop diversity, and
select for things like uniform time to grow and uniform size/shape to make
mechanical processing easy, over selecting for things like nutrition and
flavor.

Is there any good reason to believe that the increased power GMO techniques
give them won't be used to go even farther in those directions?

With great power comes great responsibility. I'm skeptical that the big food
companies are responsible enough for GMO, and with government food regulation
more determined by industry lobbying than by actual science I have little
faith that the government will do anything to make sure GMO techniques are
only used for good.

\---- end quote ----

~~~
TeMPOraL
Those, I agree, are legitimate concerns worth discussing. But 'bpodgursky is
right that it's harder to discuss those when people are mostly vocal about
some invented fear-inducing non-issues. This also holds for discussions about
nuclear power.

About your concerns - it's worth noting that they're political/economical in
nature and have nothing to do with genetic modifications itself. I agree with
most of them, but personally believe that it's not enough to shut down the
entire branch of science, as some of the opponents seem to want. But those
issues definitely need to be addressed.

------
sdrothrock
With antiobiotics so prevalent in livestock feed, why aren't they leading to
the rise of a drug-resistant strain of something in livestock? Have they?

