Factory Farming Practices Breeding Super Pathogens

[MustavaMond]

Johns Hopkins Magazine

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Farmacology

Johns Hopkins researchers are investigating a troubling potential source of resistant pathogens: the American farm. By Dale Keiger

Ellen Silbergeld, Eng '72 (PhD), recalls that she did not want to go to the seminar. She was a professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1999 when her department's chairman needed an audience for the seminar's presenter, a candidate for a faculty position. Silbergeld recalls the chairman saying, "Please, just sit in the room. You can come to lunch." So she sat in the room, and something caught her attention. The seminar was on hospital-acquired infections, but the presenter mentioned in passing that some drug-resistant infections came from food. That seemed odd. Silbergeld knew you could pick up Salmonella from, say, tainted chicken salad. But how would that Salmonella have become resistant to antibiotics? She turned to a colleague and asked. Because, he said, factory chicken farms routinely feed antibiotics to their flocks, to accelerate growth, and the drugs generate resistance. Ten years later, Silbergeld, now a professor of environmental health sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, is one of several researchers at Johns Hopkins and around the world assembling evidence that the industrial farming of chickens, pigs, and cattle is cultivating more than poultry and livestock — it's cultivating bacteria that medicine is losing the ability to fight. Antimicrobial drugs, including antibiotics like penicillin, ciprofloxacin, and methicillin, kill pathogenic bacteria. But they simultaneously drive the resistance that is bacteria's defense, especially when administered in low, subtherapeutic doses. Scientists estimate that 50 percent to 80 percent of all antimicrobials in the United States are not used by doctors to treat sick people or animals but are added to farm animal feed, mostly in such subtherapeutic dosages. Public health researchers like Silbergeld are convinced that this nontherapeutic use of antimicrobials is building dangerous genetic reservoirs of resistance. If they are right, industrial agriculture is fostering and dispersing drug-resistant bacteria that impair medicine's ability to protect the public from them. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that livestock and poultry produce 335 million tons of manure per year, which is one way resistant pathogens get out of animals and into the environment. That's 40 times as much fecal waste as humans produce annually. Farms use it for fertilizer and collect it in sheds and manure lagoons, but those containment measures do not prevent infectious microbes from getting into the air, soil, and water. They can be transported off the farms by the animals themselves, houseflies, farm trucks, and farm workers, and by spreading manure on other fields. Out in the environment, they form a sort of bank of genetic material that enables the spread of resistance.

"This development of drug resistance scares the hell out of me," says Kellogg Schwab.Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health, refers to a typical pig farm manure lagoon that he sampled. "There were 10 million E. coli per liter [of sampled waste]. Ten million. And you have a hundred million liters in some of those pits. So you can have trillions of bacteria present, of which 89 percent are resistant to drugs. That's a massive amount that in a rain event can contaminate the environment." He adds, "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."


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Johns Hopkins Magazine

[Cujo]

Humans can be bloody idiots.

[Dan]

Factory farming is a great example of capitalism turning a solution into a problem; in normal farming, manure is a useful product which helps to improve soil fertility but in industrial farming manure is a toxic waste contained in vast lagoons of rotting shit.

[MustavaMond]

The solution is to stop eating meats, at some point soon, if not already, peolpe are dying so others, fat weel fed others can eat meat, the amount of resources, water , chemicals, etc., damge done in the raising of a kilo of meat..

Soon to be luxury for the wealthy , maybe if everyone stopped now, damage could be reversed .

Plus, those mass butcheries are so violently nauseating.

[Dan]

Industrial meat production is wrong on many levels but traditional mixed farming, which includes a small amount of meat, is actually a rather way of using the land.

[StrontiumDog]

This scares the hell out of me too.

We seem to be intent on designing the mechanism of our downfall.

[kmart]

Recently watched the docu-film "Food Inc". Quite an eye-opener, tbh.

[FlyFree]

Humans can be bloody idiots.

And they don't have to try hard to be, either. It comes naturally

[Cujo]

I had a huge sirloin steak for dinner last night. It was delicious.
Got a freezer full of them.

[Jesus Jones]

Welcome to the 'codex alimentarius'

Codex Alimentarius - the REAL threat to World health

[BugginOut]

Everywhere it's the urban environment and the urban mentality. There are ordinances about keeping livestock in cities. Some places in the states will fine you and give you a citation to appear in court for selling produce from your own garden, fruit tree(s), and even honey. How about the little girl in NY busted for selling lemonade in a public park without a permit?

It's really what I appreciate about Thailand. You could be dirt poor but you can sell food on the street or trinkets or whatever else from a cart you push down the street. Try that in the US.

[MustavaMond]

I had a huge sirloin steak for dinner last night. It was delicious.
Got a freezer full of them.

Dug is a great example of the type of human who is really quite proud they have no other contribution but that of selfish, myopic ways that cause and contribute detriment to all that around them.

Truly, you and your ilk should be culled from the population as a viral intruder.

Perhaps fattened in filthy environs, butchered alive and fed to animals ?

ELF

[MustavaMond]

Welcome to the 'codex alimentarius'

Codex Alimentarius - the REAL threat to World health

Absolutely, this kind of orchestrated and pinpoint propaganda with effective legislative lobbying is what Big Government and Free Trade is all about- fucking over all those that either too poor or too poorly informed to stop it- all for profit.


So actually, go ahead Dug- keep eating your pesticidal , anti bacterial and hormone poisoned , BSE laced proteins.
Yes, keep eating eating this shit by all means and make sure your eggheaded offspring get their share too would ya, please?

[blackgang]

I had a huge sirloin steak for dinner last night. It was delicious. Got a freezer full of them.

I only have NZ striploin in my freezer so thats what I had and at 21 days aging it is just fantastic.

It's really what I appreciate about Thailand. You could be dirt poor but you can sell food on the street or trinkets or whatever else from a cart you push down the street. Try that in the US.

Perhaps fattened in filthy environs, butchered alive and fed to animals ?

I can see that you two have never been to the village market to see how humanely a Buffalo or a Hog is killed and butchered on the ground behind the stalls and wallered around in the dirt and walked on with flip flops containing all 26,000 kinds of fungal and bacterias and sold in chunks and half cooked and sold from carts that you can push around yourself, no matter how poor,, good healthy chuck without a permit. 555

All cow shit contains E-COLI, and every animal that is butchered and a gut punctured has the Bacteria on it, most animals that are butcher outside professional killing areas have a gut punctured by untrained butchers, and all ORGANIC foods are fertilized with cow shit and contain E-COLI and if eaten without cooking will transfer the bacteria to the person eating those veggies,,
Enjoy.

[Humbert]

Watch the flick Fast Food Nation if you get a chance.

Big business has a lot at stake to protect the status quo.

[blackgang]

I have been around Factory Farming if that is what you want to call it, and I was raised as a child on a Family 9,600 acre beef Ranch, just raised beef cattle and sold, no feedlot.
Spent some time around the areas of large Dairy operations and some fowl rearing ops, so most of it is familiar to me.
Also it is the only feasible way to utilize land and get 100% out of resources that is needed to feed and support todays over populated areas and will continue to be as long as certain areas are above advisable population densities and some areas are almost vacant as the total global surface is not suitable for either people or farming so we have to make do with what we have.

Like it or not, fucking does have its down sides, either accept it or quit it, only 2 ways to go unless you figure in Nuclear Holocaust.

[Dan]

^ Rubbish. Industrial farming is incredibly wasteful and is only profitable because it externalises so many of its costs. It's the cause of a huge range of problems, including loss of top soil, draw down of non-renewable aquifers, obesity, poverty, disease, climate change, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, etc., etc.

[blackgang]

^ Rubbish. Industrial farming is incredibly wasteful and is only profitable because it externalises so many of its costs. It's the cause of a huge range of problems, including loss of top soil, draw down of non-renewable aquifers, obesity, poverty, disease, climate change, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, etc., etc.

OK, Shit it took long enough for it to sink in DAN, I am sorry, I should have figured it out before,, your last name starts with a Q don't it?

[Dan]

No, it doesn't. And what the fuck does that have to do with industrial farming? Are you denying that those are consequence of industrial farming or you simply demonstrating - lest we forget - what a tedious, ignorant, belligerent old cvnt you are?

[blackgang]

No, it doesn't. And what the fuck does that have to do with industrial farming? Are you denying that those are consequence of industrial farming or you simply demonstrating - lest we forget - what a tedious, ignorant, belligerent old cvnt you are?

My, My, My, DAN, did you get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning you poor misinformed boy.
Don't let your blood pressure get the better of you.
You need to get out more and see what the world has to offer and ways of doing things, sink a few dollars and some time into different endeavors and see what the outcome of real life is. Then come back and talk to me.

[baldrick]

free range grain fed meat is devine.

if humans were not carnivores our jaw sizes would have to be massive.

[Dan]

So it's the latter, then.

[blackgang]

if humans were not carnivores our jaw sizes would have to be massive.

Omnivores actually, but if not for eating meat we would still be in the trees eating leaves and nuts.
And thinking the old ways were the only ways and all the while, fucking and having kids to make the problems worse.

[barbaro]

^ I have no opinion on what humans are, but this vegetarian told me because human teach and molars (except for the canines) were flat, and that are intestines were they way they are, that humans were designed to eat veggies only.

He says we are herbivores.

Is this BS?

Pardon my ignorance.

[MegaMannow]

25 years ago, it was estimated that app. 70% of Chickens carried the samonella bacteria, although in small quantities. The Govt. Minister of the day (UK) said it was the eggs. What was her name??

Today, I believe this figure to be down to app 25%.

Correctly stored and cooked, no problems.

One assumes todays intensive farming methods have contributed to the decline in samonella.