Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics such as Cipro are often given to animals because they are cheap. They are in no way at all safe for people or animals.
Sadly as the parent article shows, the FDA doesn't care.
The book:
"Taking On Big Pharma: Dr. Charles Bennett's Battle" was released this week.
I was asked to go with Dr Bennett to speak to members of Congress about the dangers of Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics. As these were a significant contributor to my late wife's suicide. Alas that was right as the world changed at the start of the pandemic and derailed those plans.
I have the many FDA warning for Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics here:
I personally experienced the negative affects of fluoroquinolone as well. I did a full course of Cipro and experienced horrible back pain, which was minimized by my doctor until he put me on Levaquin a few weeks later and I had to stop after a few days because the pain was so bad. Six years later I still have some lingering back pain from that incident, seems like it did at least some permanent damage.
It was incredibly hard to deal with, on top of the chronic infection causing me to take the antibiotics in the first place. The most frustrating thing was the seeming indifference I got from many (not all) of the doctors I saw about it.
Condolences for your loss, and my deepest sympathies.
Don‘t forget about the chronic neuropathy! Some people have hands and feet that will burn and sting until their death.
I had to take moxifloxacin and ciprofloxacin at two different times in my life. Besides the achilles, feet and hand tendon pain, both times I would have severe stinging pain in my scalp for months after taking them. Blessed as I am it went away again.
I'm sorry you lost your wife. My wife had a near-death medical experience last year (a stroke, completely unrelated) and I was never as emotionally empty and destroyed as I was during the ten minutes I thought I lost her and subsequent days worrying about her recovery.
You linked an interview with Childrens' Health Defense, an organization whose primary purpose is to argue, categorically, that all vaccinations are dangerous and do not work. They are the largest such organization and their activism has been directly responsible for the growth in resistance to MMR vaccination and later to COVID-19 vaccination.
This does not mean that the point about a class of antibiotics is incorrect, and I understand that there's a possibility of "strange bedfellows" here because of the potential agreement on the matter of, uh, "big pharma". As I see it, one possibility is that you linked the CHD article not knowing this. Another possibility is that you linked the CHD article knowing this, but figuring just because they're wrong about vaccines doesn't tarnish them on this issue. Another possibility is that you generally agree with their position on vaccines.
I'm not here to judge or change your mind, I'm just telling you that I don't have any prior view about whatever fluoroquinolone antibiotics are. I read the first half of your post wanting to do more investigation. Because of the CHD link inclusion, I am now predisposed not to believe this is a real issue. I am a non-medical social scientist but I have spent a lot of the COVID period publishing work about vaccination. Anti-vaxx stuff is a complete deal-breaker for me. And if your reason for posting was to persuade an audience, I think that's the opposite of what you want.
The interview is where it is, which I have no control over. I would have posted Dr. B's interview where ever it was as it is related to the Big Pharma book release. He is considered one of the worlds experts on drug adverse advents.
That there are adverse advents with multiple (All?) Big Pharma products is also something I have no control over.
I supplied a link to my late wife's page where all the FDA warnings are linked to directly. The other links can be ignored if that is your desire.
There are many different numbers floating around, but let me give you a source that claims a 0.14–0.4% "prevalence of FQ-induced tendon injury". That's at least one in a thousand.
They are also absolutely known and proven to cause permanent pain in the hand and feet (neuropathies) in some patients and "long lasting" anxiety, depression, hallucinations.
Those are just a few of the serious long term side effects they can cause.
Let me conclude that sometimes they are the right choice to save someone's life or prevent serious health consequences due to infection, but in the majority of cases there would be alternative antibiotics available.
I agree that when people cite bad sources, it harm's their argument. Yes, dead commenters, the messenger matters.
I'll also state I think deleting vaccine skeptics does more harm on HN than good. Let their ignorance be argued, lest they get a persecution complex and dig in more deeply. Only delete, in my opinion, those that cite disinformation or misinformation.
eh, "Disprove [the situation you just said was emotionally gutting] wasn't caused by [nonsense I can write down in 5 seconds but will take 2+ orders of magnitude to respond to]" is pretty classic sealioning/asymmetric trolling. Maybe if they put up a claim with evidence, otherwise it's just low-effort shit posting and not worth much more than a downvote.
Speaking of Fluoroquinolones and Cipro (Ciprofloxacin) specifically, I personally had bad experiences with it causing tendon damage and severe back pain, though fortunately the damage healed and the back pain cleared within a couple days after stopping my Cipro course early and switching to a different antibiotic.
Interesting. What is the mechanism of action that could be causing this? Are other antibiotics safer in this regard? What are the most commonly used antibiotics?
> What is the mechanism of action that could be causing this?
It is barely understood. Fluoroquinolones are known to cause: Mineral and metal chelation, permanent DNA damage, permanently changed unhealthy epigenetic state changes, increased oxidative stress, permanent damage to mitochondrial DNA.
> Are other antibiotics safer in this regard?
Besides aminoglycosides like gentamicin which is now liberally used topically because internal usage causes permanent hearing loss, most antibiotics in use generally do not carry a notable risk of lifelong disability.
> What are the most commonly used antibiotics?
That very much depends on the infection being treated, but let me just guarantee you that there would almost always be an antibiotic available that is a safer alternative to fluoroquinolones.
Unfortunately, those antibiotics are generally strictly controlled reserve antibiotics you get IV in a hospital, which you would only get to avoid death or other serious consequences, and just won't get for that treatment resistant gonorrhea, where fluoroquinolones can already indeed be the only freely available alternative. Then there are also substances that just aren't available everywhere, like streptogramins which in Europe you can probably only get in France.
Any other antibiotic is safer. These should have been removed from the market a long time ago. Just read the other comments in this tread for examples.
The FDA warnings read like any other medication. This article does not point out why this is specifically worse, or how "rare" of an occurrence it is is or isn't. I can't know from this article wether the cause is this antibiotic.
I'm afraid this earns a "well, duh" from me. For a minimal cost to ranches, they can increase both their output and the reliability of that output. And the externalized costs? The ranches aren't held accountable for those, so they may as well not exist.
And you can bet those ranches will fight tooth and nail against being held accountable; it is, after all, the most "logical" way to spend their resources to protect their revenue. Imagine the shareholder response if the profits were to drop significantly, and permanently.
It's simply how we've trained corporations to behave.
This our biggest problem in the US, externalities are never priced in. Always easier to pay fines for pennies or to declare bankruptcy and start again.
Not to stir the pot, but I’ve long believed that a big problem with conservative ideology is that it does not seem to believe in externalities—either good or bad. Positive societal effects couldn’t possibly arise from investments in education or infrastructure. Likewise negative externalities from increased emissions
As someone who is not a conservative, but is interested in what and why people think and believe thing, I don't think that's a fair characterization. It seems to me that conservative care a great deal about negative externalities that effect the existing social order, or may do so in the future. I think the problem is two-fold some of those negative externalities were baked into existing institutions or don't directly effect them, and the "culture wars" in the US cause people to take up positions that don't make any rational sense in their worldview.
You can make really good conservative arguments for say fighting climate change as it could upend traditional social order, but partisan polarization has made it an issue of "the other side" so mainstream conservatives aren't making those arguments IMHO.
Genuinely curious, in a conservative world, how do you deal with externalities without some kind of intervention that distorts the market or the natural order?
It makes total sense to have debates over what things rise to the level of problem and what the best fix is but, at least in my state politics, Republican's seem to just abandon their principles for pragmatism (which is good) but I can't seem to figure how this doesn't cause an identity crisis. Having a "how a conservative evaluates market interventions" seems less taxing than getting pushed to a breaking point and then begrudgingly doing things not in line with your ideals.
Can you provide an example of a government regulation that you see as a net positive? Or private market action that had a negative impact on externalities?
Because IME markets in general are so short-sighted they literally plow ahead with profit over all until the river is burning (pollution in Cleveland) or thousands are poisoned for decades (Flint water crisis). And often don't stop or self correct even in such extremes.
Some governments have certainly overreacted to market failures, but I don't think that means every conversation has to qualify that.
The classic externality is pollution. Some industrial process produces valuable goods, but the air becomes unhealthy to breathe for everyone.
A good government solution to this has been emissions trading¹. The government sets up a maximum allowed emission rate, and producers can trade those rights between them. By making it costly to pollute, producers have incentives to lower pollution, and the allowed rate can be lowered over time, improving the air for everyone.
If markets are so stupid and short sighted, it's hard to understand how they've generated 250 years of huge and sustained increases of material wealth all over the planet. 10x as many people now live far richer and healthier lives than 250 years ago.
True, a river burned in Ohio 50 years ago, but that's very, very small potatoes in the big picture as I see it.
Not so sure you can attribute 250y of gains solely to markets. In fact much of the health gains come from government funded research.
Now, you admit collective action is needed. Great. Because unbridled markets gave us slavery, child labor, 12h-7d work schedules, company towns, the food pyramid, greenwashing, and robber barons.
So the solution to externalities is largely collective action. Because obviously the market alone didn't make emissions trading happen. Markets were backed into a corner. And it feels like a half assed solution considering we don't need to burn coal any more. The market just values profit more than quality of life of those near the site of production.
If we look solely to markets and careless regulation then the biggest companies will capture regulators. Then we're on the path to modern day feudalism. Seeing Amazon hollow out local competition only makes this feel more and more real here in the Midwestern US.
Even the most die-hard libertarians I know (which I'm using here as a proxy for the most conservative) recognize one of the fundamental roles of government is to account for and price in externalities.
The OP indicates that the incentives of corporations driven by a profit motive is not to price in externalities. If not the government, what other mechanisms do you suggest?
Nah man, externalities here means externalities. In this specific instance the meat producing corporations are not paying for the increased risk of producing antibiotic resistant pathogens, which is a cost the rest of the planet has to bear. Price them in the same way any insurance model prices in risk.
> how would you do so and retain a nominally free society?
Nominally free doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, as the saying goes. If you want to take actions that affect everyone negatively then you should be paying for that. Inversely there are also positive externalities and we should probably subsidize/pay groups who produce those
Externalities refers to the economic concept of external costs:
"An external cost is a cost not included in the market price of the goods and services being produced, i.e. a cost not borne by those who create it".
The less real costs are factored into a product, the less the market able to efficiently price it. Many of our greatest modern problems could be ameliorated if we handled external costs better: pricing industrial runoff, CO2 emissions, antibiotic resistance, etc.
We mostly choose not to price in those costs, because the consequences of such are generally delayed, and it allows us greater standard of living for the moment. When given the options "meat will be cheaper but infections harder to cure in 20 years", or "energy will be cheaper but large scale climate disasters will be common in 50 years", we've chosen cheap meat and energy.
>The less real costs are factored into a product, the less the market able to efficiently price it. Many of our greatest modern problems could be ameliorated if we handled external costs better: pricing industrial runoff, CO2 emissions, antibiotic resistance, etc.
I'll add to this that in many cases this also eliminates a lot of the subjective/contextless moralizing around spending of energy/mass surplus that goes on, resulting in more individual freedom. It's common in environmental discussions for example for someone to complain about <xyz> form of transportation, often cars or aircraft but I've also seen it come up in rockets. This can lead down all sorts of rabbit holes in terms of cost/benefit etc. But the entire discussion could be avoided as far as AGW if we'd simply make all hydrocarbon fuels CO2 net neutral (either via producing them directly from atmospheric CO2 with renewable energy or scrubbing an equal tonnage of emissions from the atmosphere for every ton CO2 released). Then whatever price the fuel was would fully reflect the CO2 cost, which would naturally filter out to all users, and everyone would be free to spend on that or not as they wished. All sides would optimize to the pricing, producers would search for ways to make the net neutral hydrocarbons cheaper, users would seek ways to use them more efficiently, and those buying services would do the same. That's a Free Market at work, the emergent result of lots of decentralized individual decisions is a much more efficient allocation of resources, and without any central judgement around "oh, that's not a worthy usage" needed.
Yeah, the question isn't so much "can't" as "prefers not to". Unless the premium that people will pay for meat without antibiotics is more than the reduced output costs them they won't do it. Alternatively if they are forced to pay for the externalities and that costs them more than the extra profit.
It's simple math to do. Expecting "big meat" to change it's behaviour without changing the inputs to the equation is ridiculous. That isn't how businesses work.
Its always a choice - here is some cheap junk with mediocre taste. Here is some significantly more expensive, less junky stuff with +-same taste, sometimes worse. Rest is sales history.
If we want to actively shield population from eating shit, we would have to remove more than half of items in shelves in most supermarkets, I suspect even more in typical US one. But then why the heck should things like cigarettes or even sugar be legal, we know now pretty well how they slowly kill everybody involved.
Cigarettes are heavily regulated in fact California just banned flavors.
There's also been proposals about a sugar tax and limits on the size of soft drinks but they are difficult to implement due to conservative/right wing pushback.
Your comment is whataboutism but not even that good of a counter since actions are being taken
No idea, what does that have to do with my comments? I'm pointing out that actions are being taken to curtail usage to counter the person who what using whataboutism with sugar and cigarettes
Just quickly comparing prices, wholesale chicken is $1.01 per kilogram in the USA and $1.31 per kilogram in Australia. Much better conditions in Australia and no antibiotic use for growth (need a vet to authorize use with a sick flock). 30% wholesale price jump, but it is still cheaper than tofu.
I encourage people to look for alternative sources for their meat, for all food, really. Local food systems get you a better product, and nowadays they can also be quite cheaper with all of the profit taking and fuel/energy cost driven inflation in the industrial food supply chain.
We are blessed to be in Vermont, which has strong local food systems. We can get nearly all our produce and meat from local farms. We have been purchasing grass fed, pastured beef from Squier Family Farm, in Wallingford VT for years. We can get lamb and pork from the Bur-Ger family farm or any of a half dozen other families that show up at the local farmers market or sell in the coop.
We recently had some Omaha steaks, claiming to be grass fed, shipped to us by a family member. They absolutely sucked in comparison. I have had Butcher Box steaks that were comparable, but also much more expensive, and way more material in packaging.
For produce, we have a half dozen farms to choose from. It means eating more seasonally, but the quality of the veg is just so much greater.
Now you can see this as privilege, but it's also the result of hundreds of neighbors making the conscious decision to support their local food system. While everyone was complaining about food price increases, the local food systems were WAY more stable in their pricing, and we even saw the price of grass fed ground beef drop around here. It requires more thought and planning, but it really pays off, IMO.
I hear you, but I also think that something must be said for the fact that I am getting all the meat I want, at prices that are competitive with and in many cases cheaper than the heavily subsidized industrial farms, but I am doing it with a family that gets none of those subsidies, and processed at a butcher in my county that doesn't get those subsidies either.
This could not scale to feed my old neighborhood in Chicago, for example. In that place, sourcing this way would be so much more expensive. I pay other prices for living in a very small city in the mountains, but this is a perk.
I guess I just want to caution us from applying the usual "privilege" critiques and pretending like only super-scalar universal solutions are worth considering.
I agree with the whole of your comment. Subsidies of industrial food systems shape our collective diets.
My diet includes bulk purchased lentils and chickpeas, rice, home-ground wheat and other very cheap staples that are the majority of my calories. We're eating lentils, beans, rice, making our own bread, and the meat is in about 1/4 our meals. I feel like we eat very well, perhaps better than I have in my whole life if I measure it by health and ethics. I spent years in Chicago where my corner bar had a Michelin star, and there were dozens of equally good places and man did I enjoy my privilege of being a well paid single remote working hacker there.
>The subsidies, both explicit and implicit, in the meat industry in the US helps disguise income inequality
This right here is the key and its just not meat. So many foodstuffs are nothing but sugar and corn. It makes you think that you are wealthy since you have so much food to choose from. The reality is that it is disguising the increasing devaluing of the dollar + decades of income stagnation.
Now you got me on a rant:
With the rising costs of everything due to what CEOs claim is "inflation", we are seeing this reduction in quality in everything we buy.
I would protest this by only buying locally and spending as few dollars as I can just to stick it to the man and this captured government that we have but the fact that year after year the currency is being whittled away to 0 means I lose no matter what I do.
So what can I do to preserve the effort spent to earn that wealth? Can't invest in stocks, the market is down and so I could lose, don't want to spend the money and reward all these CEOs who have been price gouging and selling us products with quality fade. Maybe buy real estate? I will probably lose on that as well. There seems to be no escape, I am trapped with no recourse.
I think you are just recognizing that capital is not wealth, and that the instinct to grow and preserve it is alienating you from solving the problems and generating the wealth thru cooperation with your neighbors. Buying locally, keeps more money circulating locally.
It wont offset inflation, but it makes a bigger impact on the people around you, who grow your food, ship and transport your food, sell you food and goods, install your heat pumps or wood stove, maybe even build the wood stove. The fabric of social relations that drives modern production, light industry as they sometimes call it, is what makes us collectively wealthy.
Fair enough, I seen "money" as a store of the work effort that was done to earn it...sort of like storing energy in a battery. Yes the "energy" needs to be able to flow. And yes it is a net benefit of the community to circulate the money among itself. I didn't rule this out as in my comment I did mention buying locally.
However what you describe is largely out of my control and this is where my frustrations lie. The locally sourced money eventually finds its way heading in one direction: the portfolios of all these elites who have the capacity to shape policy and help accelerate this one way flow of capital. In my 30+ years of living I have not seen this trend reverse. Like I mentioned, any attempts to stem this flow is futile since even my outflow is reduced to 0, I lose that "energy" stored in the battery anyway in the form of inflation. I guess in a way if you think about it, a real battery cannot hold energy indefinitely (as far as I know) but still...how do I reconcile with the fact that the effort used to generate that money is either stolen by these people, either by it moving in one direction from me to them or by their monetary policy that makes it eventually worthless?
Yah, I mean, that's one take on it. A take that I still think confuses money with wealth and energy. That kind of metaphor works because it's still putting money as a stand-in, a generalization, an abstraction, for the social relations that reproduce our culture, that feed and clothe and educate and entertain us. It's a useful metaphor sometimes, but we should not mistake the map for the territory, the accounting for the experience.
The wealth is in the social relations and material goods even (you are not wealthy because you have the money to buy a house, you are wealthy because you have a well insulated, sturdy house). Turn the abstract capital into the means of production and (social) reproduction.
Just trying to give a pep talk, not disagreeing with your sentiment 8^)
"If meat production was all done humanely, then a large section of society wouldn't be able to afford to eat meat"
We might eat less meat, but you can buy meat today that is humanely raised for marginally more expensive than the factory farmed stuff. And that's with the overhead associated with small producers in a niche industry. If we were to make humane standards universal, cost savings would obviously follow. Just look at Europe.
This is a solved problem that only persists due to mass American indifference to how our meat is tortured and poisoned before we eat it.
I think regulatory capture and the power of absolutely massive monopolies in our industrial agriculture systems are what makes the problem persist. Awareness of the issue is not the obstacle. We can all be aware of it, people regularly complain about this or that part of the food system, but when we organize and fight to improve it, we meet incredible power arrayed against us. We can win, and do, but that poeer, not our lack of awareness, is the problem, IMO
This is an important perspective. We all have to find our own peace with how the food we eat is produced.
Temple Grandin discusses this in "Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals" [1]. She discusses the distress she felt when the first slaughter house that she had designed opened, and she watched the cows calming going to be slaughtered. Even with the reduced distress, or perhaps because of it, that she felt like a betrayer. But she also talks about how she comes to terms with consuming ethically produced meat. Prey species like cattle — or the nearest wild equivalent — live with high stress levels, with threats from predators, and the constant search for food. On a farm the food is assured, and the environment is less stressful. Her thesis (which I hope I am representing correctly) is that this can be a trade. The animal lives a calmer safer life, without cruelty, and in return, we eat it.
Not everyone will be happy with that argument. The world would be arguably be a better place if more people thought about this
Interesting. If all animals currently consumed would be treated like that - then yes suffering overall would be reduced. But it's not realistic to feed the world with these farming methods.
And 'ethical farming' is not without cruelty. Cruelty is still applied at the end.
And I wouldn't call it a fair trade either.
These cows are being bred because we want to eat them. If there wasn't a demand then the cow on the ethical farm wouldn't exist or experience cruelty.
Animals in nature are free and yes are being hunted by other animals who need to eat other animals to survive. It's the nature of things.
Most of humanity don't need to eat meat anymore and hence have the choice of not causing suffering or being cruel.
Interestingly, on my last visit to the farm stand picking up beef, the owner was talking about how made their choice of butcher based on those principals. They take them to one whose operation was designed with consultation from Temple Grandin. She takes the cows she has raised there herself, and witnesses the operation.
I've processed chickens and ducks that I have raised. Much smaller scale, and actually when it comes to duck I'm much more about the eggs than the meat 8^)
If there is no other way to survive - yes raising or hunting animals and doing the best we can to minimise suffering is essential.
There are videos of farmers who gave up farming animals because they realized 'there is someone in there'. In the BBC docu series 'dark side of dairy' a farmer starts crying when he's asked to explain what happens to the baby cow.
Chickens are deeply social animals and can create deep bonds with humans. You might have seen the video of a hen waiting for her human friend coming back from school and running towards him.
Or how about Monique - the hen that traveled around the world and 'kind of saved my life' [0] of her human friend.
Cows are these gentle and curious giant creatures and yet we betray their trust by killing them in the end. [1]
Also, why are we not using the actual words like killing and butchering vs processing. The meat industry comes up with all these words to soften what is actually happening to animals.
Humanity will eventually give up killing & consuming animals for pleasure and future humans will see what we are doing now to other sentient beings as barbaric [2]
I disagree with your prediction about future humanity, but respect your perspective. I guess one way to put it would be to say that I have a bit more of a Tibetan Buddhist perspective.
I've had my hands in a carcass, pulling out organs. I have tried to make sure I made death and quick and painless as I could for chickens. I have not butchered anything bigger than that. I don't do that for all my meat.
I think we differ more about how much death and life are intertwined and inseperable, than we differ on how sacred and considerate that relationship should be.
> I disagree with your prediction about future humanity
In what way?
Humanity has agreed that human slavery is bad, so why would future humans not apply this same principle to other sentient beings - since the need to exploit and kill other animals becomes ever more redundant.
Most of us here in the West eat animals either because of culture or tradition and because we enjoy the taste, not because we need it to survive.
Will there be small pockets of humans in the future that still eat animals? Yes, tribal folks living with nature or people who choose to live in areas where there are no other food sources.
But I believe most future humans will reject the idea that exploiting and killing animals is necessary for our survival, when there are so many other food sources available. In the future we'll probably have meat substitutes that are healthier and with a smaller carbon and cruelty footprint than animal meat.
> Tibetan Buddhist perspective
I don't know what this perspective really means. I read some time ago the Dalai Lama was advised to eat animals, because his health depended on it. And maybe other Buddhists and people in Tibet have to eat animals because their survival depends on it.
Also my understanding of Buddha's teachings is to end suffering. A core principle of Buddhism is non-violence, kindness and compassion. Killing an animal when it's not necessary is neither of those.
I also understand that it's ok for Buddhists to eat animals if they weren't killed specifically for them. But buying animal meat from shops does not qualify that criteria. Eating roadkill does.
We can choose between causing suffering or not causing suffering. A tiger for example can't.
So when we can avoid the exploitation and killing of animals - why don't we?
My grandparents ate tons of meat despite their income level. Why? Because they lived in a small rural town. City folks not wanting to pay the true cost of living in a city and be able to live like they live in a small rural ag town (while making fun of people who chose to live in rural ag towns) is just like meat producers not wanting to pay the true costs of creating antibiotic resistance, it is an unspoken cause of these sorts of discussions.
For those who live a little father out from the source, these are two labels that actually mean something:
Certified Humane
Animal Welfare Approved
Of course lots of small producers cant afford these certifications, which doesn't meat they don't have high standards for how they raise their animals.
When I see a graph like [1] with the y-axis not zeroed I stop reading. Furthermore, the assertion that it "ticked back up" is not really supported by that graph any more than saying "it ticked back up and then it ticked down again"
I agree it is totally unnecessary in this case, but sometimes truncating the y-axis serves a purpose. Many times it is for stylistic reasons, but also if the trend is more interesting then the scale, e.g. most stock charts truncate the y-axis because people don’t really care how much a stock has dropped relative to the value, but are more interested in the overall trend in the time period and the specific times when the trend reversed (I think, I don’t trade in stocks).
It is unnecessary to do that in this case because the scale isn’t that vast and you can easily see the trend on an absolute scale. However, this graph serves the same purpose as—I gather—stock charts do. They are interested in what happened while the trend was downwards, and the specific time at when the trend stopped (or at least halted).
There’s a lot of red flags in the article for me as well.
I’m genuinely amenable to the idea that mass antibiotics is bad because it makes intuitive sense. But the article starts out with “For decades…” and then the relevant plot has the X-axis start in 2012 for some reason. I strongly suspect, but don’t have time to confirm, that if you extended that axis back to, say, the 90s you’d see more nuanced trends that would threaten the doom-porn nature of the standard Vox “explainer”.
What I would like to see a break down by animal mass. For meat production the US produces almost equivalent amounts of beef and pork. But the US also has about 10 million dairy cows. The FDA report is for food producing animals – which includes dairy cows.
Unfortunately the FDA report does not include mass either, but I reckon if you were to look at the antibiotics/animal mass you would see that swine is a huge outlier.
It is my understanding that you quitting big meat, doesn't affect your risk. If you are exposed to a new drug resistant pathogen that was the result of anti-biotics in cattle, chicken, pork, etc, it doesn't matter if you even eat meat.
That said am I interpreting this right? How much of a risk does the use of antibiotics in meat present to a vegetarian?
> How much of a risk does the use of antibiotics in meat present to a vegetarian?
Whatever the exact value, it's most likely much lower. At least you're not ingesting whatever is left in the meat which, by reading some of the responses here, seem to come with significant risk.
If we follow the EU lead on this and it does take, I expect in short order the US government to pass some Farm aid bill that further passes the cost on to taxpayers, and for enforcement to be haphazard for ~decade or more.
We can't regulate anything correctly in the US, it seems. Only recently have I ever seen, in my entire adult life, the FTC have any real teeth, and I doubt it'll last
Thats my point in not so many words (typical American fashion!). We'll likely pay for both while the businesses don't actually have to bear any real due to subsidies but they won't get passed on to the consumer, they'll just capture the profits
>in my entire adult life, the FTC have any real teeth, and I doubt it'll last
It's one of those situations where the people involved are so over powered by those they are meant to govern/regulate, that there's little chance of them being anything but toothless. The only time they seemingly act is when the acts are so large and publicly visible, that the only way to save any face is to publicly react. For the things that slide under the public's radar, they don't have resources for it and just let it go. At least, that's how it appears to me.
Don't worry, the EU can't regulate effectively either, they just end up making life harder for everyone, while the insiders, large producers and corrupt politicians continue to make out like bandits, just like here. They are just better at throwing you a couple of morsels to distract you at what's really going on. Prime example my relatives experience daily: they can't do anything to stop trade fraud with extra virgin olive oil or cheeses.
I'm tired of everyone romanticizing the EU here, it's full of all the same corruption and regulatory capture issues as America. I question whether even a fraction of you have ever lived there.
A significant chunk of people in this country would give up (or at least wayyy reduce) meat consumption if they toured an average factory farm. Opening up this industry for public scrutiny would be a great first step, but many states now have laws banning people from even photographing them.
The, now famous, video of the guy trying to get kids to not eat chicken nuggets after showing them what they're made of and failing miserably I think means it won't be as much of a slam-dunk as you predict. Doubly when you ask them to give up milk, butter, cheese. Because were a cow I would take slaughter to milk producer every day of the week.
Up front- I'm all for opening these "farms" up to more public scrutiny but I'm not sure sneaky activists with cameras is the answer. The USDA should do a better job and Congress could pass more animal welfare guidelines.
The problem is that factory farming doesn't harm people and it keeps meat cheap. Expensive meat hurts poor people and minorities the most. It's a disturbing and tough issue.
Isn't the point that they aren't and that the Congress is in the pocket of the meat industry? Saying that they should do something seems like a cop out.
I don't think they're in the pocket of the meat industry. As I've said- the meat industry doesn't harm actual humans and regulating it would raise prices for actual humans.
In what world is providing insight into an ethically questionable business comparable to revealing someone’s private home? Businesses are held to higher levels of accountability.
I feel like we're living through the death of democracy because a list of issues (from gerrymandering to demographics) mean that small groups wield oversized power. Agriculture is <6% of the US economy and only about 10% of the US workforce is related to it. Yet whole federal elections are decided based on candidates comments about corn and it receives huge pointless subsidies and is very badly under regulated. The same is true here in the UK. The same is true of other groups too.
A core political issue in the 2020s will be how to deal with tiny groups holding oversized political power as we cannot afford to just keep paying them off (or worse, letting them "wag the dog" as they did with Brexit) anymore.
If you wait until after animals are sick to treat then depending on what disease it is you've lost all or most of a herd due to the way existing regulations require them to be handled.
Human living conditions are nowhere near those of livestock.
If we want to drop antibiotics, we're going to end up with significantly increased prices of meat due to increased land usage requirements. This would be ecologically good, but socially disastrous.
Central Europeans eat a lot of meat and somehow they manage to keep prices under control without slamming animals with antibiotics prophylactically. Land and regulatory compliance costs are much higher than in the US too.
US farms are also subsidised. Maybe to a lesser extent than the EU but it's significant.
There are plenty of farms in the EU that house animals permanantly. I can't speak as to the differences in conditions between US and EU regulations regarding animal housing.
It's not at all clear that banning indiscriminate antibiotic use in the US would render farms financially unviable. There are significant trade barriers that mean that meat producers are somewhat insulated from world competition.
There would probably be a rise in the price of meat, but how significant is hard to say - there may be some research done on this, maybe not.
I don't believe that meat in the EU is significantly more expensive than in the US
Given a choose between faster onsets of more antibiotic resistant bacteria and a higher price of meat, I think a smart policy choice would be the latter, as the former disaster seems a lot harder to manage then the latter.
Antibiotics are used to make the animals grow faster. This is not a case of "we want to keep these animals healthy" it is "we want more meat per animal, and this is a cheap way to get it."
You're being down-voted, but you're describing exactly how the U.S. handles outbreaks like this. The avian flu egg shortage is a good example [1][2]
I'm not saying those rules are bad, I honestly don't know, but I do wonder how necessary they would be if high concentration livestock operations weren't so prevalent in the U.S.
The article reports that US producers want this because their stock handling is weak, and improving their practices would be inconvenient. Lots of people raise chickens, swine, and cattle without prophylactic antibiotics. But running the herd through to vax is tougher work than adding cipro to the feed.
I'm awfully late to the party, but: that isn't true. They wouldn't spend huge sums on preventative antibiotics if they didn't work. The problem is the negative externality of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Yes, but in negligible amounts that should not cause illness or emergence of antibiotic resistance in consumers.
"Although intake was estimated to be low and exposure can be considered safe, the dietary habits among consumers vary and increased consumption of several foods that are burdened with antibiotics can raise the risk. Furthermore, low and long-term exposure can have severe effects for gut microbiota which in turn is related with severe consequences for health and diseases that sometimes are not directly correlated with antibiotics exposure."
For a slightly higher cost we can rear animals like cattle and chicken humanely and produce better quality eggs, beef etc. I don't understand this factory farm model.
Seems to me like you understand it just fine. Or maybe you are underestimating the cost difference or people's ability/willingness to spend more on these items.
IMO the only solution to the big "meat problem" be it CO2, land use, antibiotics resistance, ethics of slaughtering animals, treatment, is probably cultured meat.
More government sponsored investment is definitely needed. The CO2 externality alone of cattle is a significant portion of humanity's CO2 emissions, something like 15%.
The land use for meat production between feed and grazing is very large as well, google says 33% of farmland is dedicated to animal feed production. That's a huge amount of land consuming water resources, steadily losing topsoil, and removal of natural habitats and potential carbon sinks.
Grazing is 35% of US land. Again, just a huge amount of land that is denied natural habitats.
You can buy meat sourced from ethical ranchers. You don't need to bite the bullet and be an early adopter for some science experiment. And you seem to have no issue with the millions of acres of land dedicated to growing genetically modified soy crops. That genetically engineered habitat killed off the original "natural habitat". And the answer to C02 has always been simple. Nuclear power.
"More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh"
You don't fix industrial food systems with more industrial food systems. It's the industrial scale and the drive of capitalism to externalize costs and risks, and aggregate profits that is the problem.
I would prefer a traditional vegetarian diet to a "cultured meat" diet. I don't want industrial food poducts in my body.
Well, another solution to the industrial meat system is the industrial fake meat system. That may be a lot more viable in the short term than cultured meat.
Vegetarianism is a far far harder sell to Americans than "give up your practically worthless pointlessly large Trucks/SUVs that you almost never use for what the advertising portrays you using them as". It may be harder than "give up soda", "use bikes more", "don't live in the suburbs", etc.
I like tofu and seitan and tvp, but my stomach has some limits on it's ability to process them. I really appreciate what vietnamese cuisine can do to imitate meat, but in general I find it best to not try and to let the ingredient do it's thing.
I know I'm talking about meat in this thread, and sourcing it, but just wanna also acknowledge that reducing intake of it, and making sure it's good is the strategy I think is best and scalable. Seems to be some consensus forming around it too.
At one point in my life I was an avowed socialist. It look years for me to see through the bullshit to understand that "Capitalism" is really just negotiated (unplanned) order and sometimes that order is high-jacked by moron's. In the case of food production in the US the USDA is severely restricting the ability for small to medium sized operations to survive in the market and have tipped the scales in favor of giant multi-national corporations. those company's can have the on-site inspection overhead. A small business cannot. Thus they cannot sell their product across state lines. And so you wind up with aggregated industrial food systems.
We run into that very issue in our local food system. It's a cap on the ability to grow the local food economy. The solutions people have tried include making shared USDA kitchens for food processing, but that is very complicated and I have heard more of them fail than succeed.
In capitalist systems, "sometimes" seems to be happening very often. Frequently enough now, and over history, that some very believable and actionable critiques of capital have been written, re-written, re-discovered and re-packaged -- at their root being the insight that this alienation, capture and monopoly is the result of class differentiation, capital accumulation, and production under the commodity form. That's not bullshit.
By all means start the business. You'll soon realize that the regulatory overhead is draining your resources (can't pay the bills) and the FDA doesn't have enough mobile inspectors available to inspect the beef. Of course these aren't problems for Tyson Foods Corp... Crony capitlism is heavily entrenched in the US.
Take chickens, you can simply have them walk around in a yard and have a coop for them to go to sleep in at night, rather than keep them in caves their entire life and feeding them antibiotics. It's a bit more space, which there's plenty of in South Africa and the USA, but otherwise your capital expenditure shouldn't be more.
Add to that, practices like silviculture are proving to be very productive and actually beneficial to ecosystems rather than damaging. We could have net positive meat...
Common sense would suggest to use probiotics instead because, like AI, they adapt and overcome with the same genetic variations these pathogens use to mutate and create their offensive capabilities. Bacteria are advanced biological machines that evolve so it does not make sense to fight them with static defense mechanisms.
antibiotics aren't just used to treat disease. They're specifically used because they kill probiotics. Those probiotics help ungulates like digest food matter better. Without them, they tend to store that food as fat instead of using it for more useful (from the cow's perspective) things like building muscle
It's the same as the link in humans between obesity and gut microbiome dysbiosis
Another excellent overview of the wider problem that's behind the usage of antibiotics in that scale can be found in the Meat Atlas, published by Heinrich Böll Foundation.
It delivers an excellent compilation of the issues at play that will keep the problem going. As long as there's no change in policies, consumer behavior and/or some mad disease that brings down the meat industry, it's going to keep continued.
The FDA banned the use of human antibiotics for any other purpose than treating disease in 2017.
You can’t get away with not using antibiotics in livestock any more than you can do away with them in humans.
And using non-human approved antibiotics on livestock won’t increase resistance because they aren’t the same drugs.
And as for concerns about antibiotics in meat, there is a required “wash out” period when animals are treated. Exposure to humans consuming meat is minuscule. And meat is routinely tested on a random basis.
Not to say reducing antibiotic use isn’t an important goal, but the article just brushes off the 42% reduction in use in 2017.
I am not a doctor - I just write code... I remember being up in arms about weird stuff in my food when I first heard about it but now I think about the wellbeing of the animals while they're alive and shit, man, if I were sick I'd want antibiotics too. When is it excessive? Is it because they're all so close together in the factory "farm"? What do the veterinarians say about this?
It's not given to sick animals, it's constantly given to all livestock because it's cheap and it's seen as a sort of "preventative maintenance". Which is bad for all kinds of reasons 1) a lot of it makes it into your meals 2) it reduces the efficacy of antibiotics by constantly exposing it to bacteria (allowing them to eventually become resistant).
Probably other reasons it's bad as well (I'm also not a doctor and just write code).
Giving antibiotics to animals also makes them grow bigger.
It's billions of Petri dishes. It's a white swan in the making.
It's really a shame that now humans are not given antibiotics to combat antibiotic resistance, when humans do not even consume most of the antibiotics produced.
Not all antibiotics and diseases are the same. It still makes sense to not overprescribe powerful antibiotics that humans use for human diseases. Even if agriculture is recklessly using cheap antibiotics in animals.
It's because they are close together in the factory farm. I don't think you need to consult what veterinarians say - seeing photos of how animals are treated should be enough for you to just stop consuming meat (if you "think about the wellbeing of the animals").
Consider watching Earthlings (2005) - http://www.nationearth.com/ - I'd say a must watch film for anyone who cares about animals.
Ranches surrounding me (I live in relatively rural Montana) don't even come close to resembling the kinds you mention. The cattle are given the run of hundreds of acres, and also they often graze from those fields, etc.
Yeah, there are a shitty minority of ranches that produce a large amount of meat in terrible conditions. But they are not the norm, not in my experience.
And for a tangent, I'd like also call out that it's not just beef being produced by ranchers. We're not just tossing carcasses in the landfills. We use the whole animal. Calcium, leather, feed, gelatin, medicine, etc.
You are going by your personal experience which is very dangerous. As far as I understand statistics (taken across the US), If I remember right, at least 97% of all meat comes from factory farms (depends on animal, this may not be aggregate across all animal types).
So, most people want to believe their meat comes from somewhere nice, but on average, basically all meat in the US comes from animals that are living in horrible conditions (I suspect living lives not worth living -- a life of suffering).
"We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms."
Being honest though, it's sus as fuck, and not just because of the source, or that these are "rough estimates" to use their terms.
A simple read through the spreadsheet shows some pretty odd (and significant) discrepancies. A single example: A row with "2500-4999" animals per farm has farm counts and "total animals" that amounts to over 6.5k animals per farm.
Also, note that CAFO - the farms we're (legitimately) concerned about - is not based solely on the animal counts†, though that's the only part of the definition that the "Sentience Institute" uses because "the public may consider it bad too".
It strikes me as straight up lying with numbers - presenting real numbers in a way which tells the story the institute wants to tell.
† "has a manmade ditch or pipe that carries manure or wastewater to surface water; or the animals come into contact with surface water that passes through the area where they’re confined."
This is why I super appreciate and love the book Animal Liberation (1975) by Peter Singer -- a classic that started modern-day vegetarianism.
The author, my favorite philosopher, uses industry booklets and instruction manuals as examples of what happens at the farms (and you know worse things happen than what is described). It's horrific stuff, enough to make the reader want to decrease their meat consumption. I'm 99% sure that since its publication, the % of animals coming from CAFOs has increased. And since then various other problems appeared (chickens genetically engineered to grow so fast that often their bones break -- resulting in more suffering than before).
i am not a doctor, i am a programmer, i used to be a microbiologist. the big problem with stuffing domestic or wild animals or humans with antibiotics for no good reason (ie without testing if they actually have an infection that the antibiotic can or should treat) is that it encourages the development of antibiotic resistance in _all_ bacteria in the treated animal/human.
it's only been 100 years since the very first development of effective antibiotics. before this, bacterial diseases were deadly. if we go on with this misuse, they will become deadly again.
If its not clear to you that the FDA was captured by big business years ago, I dunno how to help you. Get off the Facebook and tiktok. Forget homophobia and racism, your country is being stolen out from under you.
I hear about antibiotics in meat constantly, but all of the biggest meat suppliers I know don't use them. For example, Perdue and Tyson both don't raise chicken with antibiotics. So where are antibiotics being used?
I think that this is sometimes misleading marketing-speak.
For example, Perdue says, "All of the animals for our branded products are raised in no-antibiotics-ever programs"; as a big company, surely this leaves enough vagueness for them to raise and sell animals with antibiotics under other brands/products. Since it's a private company, consumers can't know really what percentage of animals fall under one category or the other.
The sea change in chicken production demonstrated it was possible to quickly scale down antibiotics in farming, but it didn’t do much to reduce overall use, as the chicken industry only used 6 percent of antibiotics in agriculture in 2016. And the momentum didn’t spread to other parts of the meat business, like beef and pork, which together account for over 80 percent of medically important antibiotics fed to farmed animals.
Sibling comments point out some pretty serious conditions that have been caused by antibiotic resistance. However, antibiotic resistance is more likely to cause isolated problems than pandemics. We haven't had antibiotics for very long, and most of the pandemics before we had them were viral, not bacterial. However, before we had antibiotics, we had the problem that cuts, scratches, surgery, and similar could get infected, and then you would lose a limb or likely die. We are slowly returning to that state.
We live with a huge amount of bacteria around us, and in our guts. Our skin generally protects us from them very well, but those same bacteria that are harmless outside the body can kill when inside the body.
Antibiotics not only improved survival rates from silly trivial injuries. They enabled a whole world of surgical interventions, because after surgery you can just give antibiotics to kill off any inadvertent infection you may have introduced. (Yes, sterile operating conditions help too.)
it is here, and as it grows, much of the pain of drug resistance won't be chaos and screaming in the streets. It won't happen all at once. It will increasingly impact people getting routine procedures, or otherwise minor injuries. Someone who got a wisdom tooth removed or a a deep cut stitched up may find it doesn't heal, and there is no longer a magic pill available to clear an infection.
It has been a challenging economic problem. There are poor/complicated incentives for R&D or venture investment into this area.
Childbirth will once again be the most dangerous thing an average woman does, when a Caesarean becomes far too risky for any but the most dire cases and tears that have to be sewn up will often lead to childbed fever again.
My understanding is that even before the EU ban it was much less common in the EU than in the US because most EU countries regulate antibiotic use in agriculture.
Also there's less need for it in the first place as welfare conditions are usually better. Who could have expected that livestock that's not kept unhealthy conditions tends to be healthier.
No doubt; same in Netherlands (more pigs than people in the country). But there's been improvement over the last 20 years on the animal welfare front, at least in the Netherlands and presumably Denmark too. And routine administration of antibiotics is banned everywhere in the EU now, AFAIK without too many exceptions.
No one is calling for a total ban on antibiotic use. They're calling for a ban on routine mass administration, along the lines of what the EU has done.
There are very compelling public health reasons for this.
They could quit using antibiotics on animals that are not sick; quit using them just to make animals grow faster. But that would hurt their bottom line, so they won't do it unless regulated to do so.
The book: "Taking On Big Pharma: Dr. Charles Bennett's Battle" was released this week.
I was asked to go with Dr Bennett to speak to members of Congress about the dangers of Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics. As these were a significant contributor to my late wife's suicide. Alas that was right as the world changed at the start of the pandemic and derailed those plans.
I have the many FDA warning for Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics here:
https://www.kpaddock.com/fq
People just don't expect side effects like permanent psychoses to come from their antibiotics, as one of the most recent FDA warnings documents.
Dr Bennetts new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Big-Pharma-Bennetts-Childrens/...
His related interview:
https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/shows/doctors...