In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.
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As the fruits of three decades of financial-market deregulation and lax oversight ripen on Wall Street, now is a fitting time to mull over our government's efforts to regulate the food industry. Let's think specifically about its actions regarding antibiotics in livestock production.
In industrial meat production, you stuff animals together in close contact with their own waste, essentially ruining their immune systems. To keep them alive until slaughter weight, you dose them liberally with antibiotics.
Not surprisingly, antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains have begun to rise up and infect humans. A nasty bacteria called MRSA has been definitively linked to factory-farmed pork; another one, a widely prevalent one called Camplylobacter jejuni, apparently hails from industrial poultry and cattle farms (see below).
Essentially, industrial feedlots are generating bugs that our antibiotics can't treat. Uh ... maybe it's time to regulate antibiotic use for livestock?
Good news: the House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry held hearings Monday touching on antibiotic use on livestock farms.
The bad news: "The House Subcommittee did not ask any human health experts to testify," writes Daniel Klotz of the Pew Charitable Trusts in a Monday email.
If the committee didn't see fit to consult anyone with knowledge of the threats posed by antibiotic-resistant pathogens to humans, it did round up quite a roster of meat-industry flacks, Klotz informs me. Look who testified:
- Dr. Craig Rowles, DVM, Pork Producer, on behalf of the National Pork Producers Federation, Carroll, Iowa
- Dr. Michael Rybolt, Director, Scientific and Regulatory Affairs, National Turkey Federation, Washington, D.C.
- Dr. Robert D. Byrne, PhD., Senior Vice President, Scientific & Regulatory Affairs, National Milk Producers Federation, Arlington, Virginia
- Dr. Spangler Klopp, DVM, Diplomat, American College of Poultry Veterinarians, Corporate Veterinarian, Townsends, Inc., on behalf of the National Chicken Council, Georgetown, Delaware
- Mr. Blair Van Zetten, Oskaloosa Food Products, on behalf of United Egg Producers, Oskaloosa, Iowa
- Dr. Michael D. Apley, DVM, PhD, Director, PharmCATS Bioanalytical Laboratory, and Associate Professor, Department of Clinical Sciences, Kansas State University, on behalf of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, Manhattan, Kansas
Nice one! Will it take a public-health meltdown, analogous to the financial one now underway, to get Congress to stop stroking its pals in the meat industry?
Update [2008-9-30 14:37:45 by Tom Philpott]:Check out Pew's Save Our Antibiotics web site. Get this: "as much as 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are being fed to cattle, swine, and poultry on industrial animal farms, for purposes other than treating disease." I forgot to note that feedlot operators also use antibiotics because they make animals grow faster.Meanwhile, antibiotic-resistant bugs thrive
So there's this food-borne bacterial pathogen I've never heard of called Camplylobacter jejuni. Evidently, it's a pretty big deal. From MeatProccess.com, reporting on a recent U.S./U.K. study of it:
Camplylobacter jejuni causes more cases of gastroenteritis in the developed world than any other bacterial pathogen, including E. coli, Salmonella, Clostridium and Listeria combined, claims the study.
What's it like to come down with a case of Camplylobacter? Sounds pretty unpleasant. Here's Wikipedia:
It produces an inflammatory, sometimes bloody, diarrhea, periodontitis or dysentery syndrome, mostly including cramps, fever and pain.
Yikes. Did I mention that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has declared it "increasingly resistant to current antibiotic treatments." And by what pathway do you figure this unpleasant bacteria strain is flourishing and making its way into our food supply?
If you guessed industrial-scale beef and poultry farms, you're right.
Previously, researchers had trouble pinpointing the origins of Camplylobacter, since it can live in water and soil as well as in animals' intestinal tracts. But researchers in a recent study compared it to Camplylobacter jejuin DNA sequences collected from wild and domestic animals and the environment, and matched them with samples from 1,231 Camplylobacter sufferers in the U.K., MeatProcess.com reports,
The results, published in the journal PloS Genetics: "in 57 per cent of the cases, the bacteria could be traced to chicken, and in 35 per cent to cattle."
The study jibes with results found by the European Food Safety Authority, which found that "the most common food borne route of campylobacteriosis is through poultry meat," MeatProcess.com reports.
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Comments
View as Flat
Green Granny Posted 10:10 am
30 Sep 2008
Thanks Tom
I'm pretty sure that our legislators will not act to prevent a public health crisis. They do best in a reactionary mode. But the public is resisting. Consumers are demanding "organic foods", grass fed meats, free range (not just "cage free") foods. Look what happened when PA tried to forbin the "hormone free" labels on milk.
If you don't get to the farmer's market near me by 8:30 or 9 am on Saturdays, you won't get your eggs and the best cuts of beef, lamb, chicken. On Put-in-Bay last week I was pleasantly surprised to hear more than one person use the phrase "vote with your dollars."
And the Big Guys (WalMart, Krogers, etc.) are getting the message (sort of) and increasing their stock of organic (albeit industrial organic) foods. Tyson now sells chicken with package labels proclaiming hormone and antibiotic free chicken. . .
I think the internet (and sites like grist) will help revive democracy, democratic priciples, and give a voice back to the people.
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." -- Mahatma Ghandi
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Annimal Posted 6:21 pm
30 Sep 2008
Antibiotics and Animals
All health care people try today to diminish the use of anti biotics due to the scare of resistance. So it's scary that vets still prescribe widely anti biotics to the meat industry. ( Though many deny this).
I grew up with horses and have had a license to train race horses in Sweden. It was a well known fact that horses who didn't go out in the paddocks were more sensible to viruses, so if you wanted to keep your horses healthy they needed the outdoor keeping as much as possible.
I have a blog on animal and enviro issues:
http://annimal.bloggsida.se/
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Annimal Posted 6:24 pm
30 Sep 2008
Animals and antibiotics
OOps, read " sensitive" instead of " sensible"
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mrh4 Posted 7:31 am
01 Oct 2008
Campylobacter
It is interesting to see that the people infected were from England where antibiotics and growth promotants have been withdrawn from use in poultry for other than disease situations for the past 10 years.
I have not seen a similar trend for the data collected in the US. Part of the reason for the lack of a link with poultry has always been that poultry is not consumed in a less than well done manner which tends to eliminate the bacterial infection. It makes you wonder what is going on in the UK with the handling of the meat prior to cooking. That might be a bigger story than simply assuming that the problem is with feeding of antibiotics to animals.
Another hypothesis could be that the animals have increased numbers of bacteria than previously found. It was assumed that removing antibiotics from the feed would make the meat more "wholesome". Maybe it has had the reverse effect and allowed more bacteria to be present on the the processed animals. Perhaps the animals previously feed the antibiotic had decreased bacterial numbers present on the carcass (no slaughtered animal is sterile)and was therefore "more wholesome" than what we are currently producing.
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Tom Philpott Posted 8:52 am
01 Oct 2008
Interesting point, MRH4
It may well be that eliminating antibiotics while retaining cramped CAFO conditions leads to increases in food-borne illnesses.
But get this, from the USDA, dated June 16, 2008:
Victual Reality
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Annimal Posted 7:48 pm
01 Oct 2008
The best enviro meat
The best enviro meat is reindeer meat . Check my blog post on this with picture:
http://annimal.bloggsida.se/diverse/803
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MAD MAC Posted 3:19 am
06 Oct 2008
Too early Green Granny
0830 or 0900??? Man, I don't get out of bed before ten. Hope that trend doesn't start here or I am going to have to start sending my maid to buy my meat and poultry products.
Victory in Pattani
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karruda3 Posted 11:37 pm
13 Oct 2008
Campylobacter
This bacteria is a serious threat to people in the US. My boyfriend almost died from it this July. We think he ate a chicken sandwich from a fast food restaurant and that's what caused it. He was in and out of the ER throughout July and eventually ended up in the ICU being given 5 units of blood due to all of the internal bleeding. His doctor's thought he had a serious and chronic gastrointestinal disease because of the severity of his condition. Fortunately, they ran some cultures and found the C. Jenuni and were able to treat him. There needs to be some serious changes to the way these animals are treated before they are served at our dinner tables or more and more people will become seriously ill.
"I have never been afraid to change the circumstances of the world." Happy Rhodes
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