Days after naming a high-profile champion of factory-style animal farms as co-chair of "Rural Americans for Hillary," Hillary Clinton backtracked a little yesterday. She expressed wan and tepid concern about the environmental and social effects of concentrated-animal feedlot operations (CAFOs).
She told the Des Moines Register she would support "local control" over how CAFOs are regulated -- meaning that states and counties would be able to institute regulations more stringent than federal guidelines.
"This is an issue I care deeply about," she declared -- although it was her first pronouncement on the issue this campaign season.
But it's a hot topic in Iowa, the nation's leading hog-producing state and home to some 2000 CAFOs. The Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a group fighting the CAFOization of the state, has been campaigning for what's known as "local control," the right of counties to impose their own regulations on CAFOs, since state code is notoriously lax.
In my trip to Iowa last summer, ICCI people told me that a solid majority of Iowans support local control, but that it always gets shot down in the state legislature, whose members are traditionally lavished with cash by the meat industry.
I wonder what Joy Philippi, co-chair of "Rural Americans for Hillary" and former president of the National Pork Producers Coalition, thinks about Hillary's remarks. Philippi hasn't publicly commented, but the Iowa branch of the NPPC is none too pleased.
The Des Moines Register reports the group's reaction as follows:
Eldon McAfee, a lawyer for the Iowa Pork Producers Association, said control over construction of large-scale operations is a state issue, not a federal issue. "When you have such emotional issues like this, it's just not viable to make those decisions at the local level," he said.
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Erik Hoffner Posted 11:58 pm
14 Dec 2007
Hog-based MRSA infection spreading to farmers in Europe, Canada
A new study published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Emerging Infectious Diseases links a new strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), once found only in pigs, to more than 20 percent of all human MRSA infections in the Netherlands.
The resistant strain--NT-MRSA--emerged in the Netherlands in 2003 and increased steadily until, by 2006, it accounted for more than one out of five human MRSA infections, many of them in either pig farmers or cattle farmers. The cases clustered in regions of the country with high densities of pig and cattle farms. The new strain has high rates of hospitalization, suggesting that it causes severe disease.
Despite these studies and others from Europe dating back to 2005, the United States does not systematically test pigs, cattle or other food animals for MRSA. As a result, the U.S. public health establishment does not know whether the use of antibiotics in food animals in the United States is contributing to the reported surge of MRSA cases.
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