5 ms·

I can understand what he meant: Heavy use of antibiotics in diary and poultry industry is a significant factor contributing to drug resistant bacteria. In other

by nebula 10y ago

I can understand what he meant: Heavy use of antibiotics in diary and poultry industry is a significant factor contributing to drug resistant bacteria. In other words, these industries are actively providing the selection pressure you referring here.

zdkl 10y ago
Well the selection environment is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products. You can't just have a nice chat with the microbe unions and ask them to behave and stay off the meat...
- livestockboy 10y ago
  > is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products one gives antibiotics to one's thousands of chickens to spur growth (body growth - gaining mass), not to protect the consumer from disease. giving antibiotics to poultry extremely increases mass gains. post-slaughter processes add chemicals that keep meat from rotting, eradicating some of those living harmful bacteria that just so happen to turn flesh into unwanted dark piece of s+=t.
  - zdkl 10y ago
    I entirely agree on your opinion of the antibiotic situation regarding large scale farming. The problem is that we could not substitute another method to produce enough food to me(e|a)t demand. If we want to keep eating we must have safe food, and to keep food safe in frankly hostile environments we need to treat it. Until we can do without what passes for modern industrialised food growing and processing, we'll need treatments and colorants so we can pretend this is 'regular' food.
    - mercutio2 10y ago
      There is no need to meet the current demand for meat. If meat was our only food source, then perhaps this syllogism you've drawn would be true. But in reality, meat is an inefficient form of producing food, with complements humans can easily shift to. So the way you get less antibiotic use in livestock in a capitalist decision market is by reducing the demand for livestock. Taxes do a great job at reducing demand.
      - zdkl 10y ago
        Maybe my pun about meet/meat confused you but the problem definitely isn't limited to meat production. You should see the quantites of pesticides/fertilisers/treatment agents used in the extensive culture of plants. The question holds, if you don't intend to back current production levels that are only possible through over intensive exploitation to the detriment of the product and it's growing medium, what alternatives are there to meet current demand for food in general?
        livestockboy 10y ago
        Use of pesticides in plant agriculture is mostly driven by huge demand of meat/dairy industry for feed. GMOs also aren't exactly necessary if you don't have 90 billion mouths to feed every day. There are some vegetables that are easily grown in unsuitable areas with GM, and some people do use pesticides and GMOs to "defeat" the market but if international logistics weren't so hard it would be easier to just import the stuff. Similar industry, completely plant driven, is cotton agriculture for clothes - to ensure proper demand you need GMO or pesticides. When it comes to beans, lentils, soybean for humans (although most of it is for fish farms, poultry and livestock), wheat, corn, rice, all sorts of fruits, pesticides come in hand, but there's more than enough if space was taken from dairy/meat and given to those. 91% of Amazon is cut for animal agriculture. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2004/02/02/000090341_20040202130625/Rendered/PDF/277150PAPER0wbwp0no1022.pdf http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/I... It's just 7 billion people, while you have to raise 50 billion chickens, 1 billion cows, -- about 150 billion animals yearly just to get them from baby form to somewhat of an adult form. That requires a lot of food, way more than 7 billion avg. 150 pound humans. https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ edit: realistically, this problem is unsolvable, just like US and China and others won't really struggle lowering their CO2 footprint, so will not Brazil, USA, India, Australia, Denmark and others when it comes to reduction of their meat/dairy output. If we were some nice unified Humanity maybe things would be different.
        pmoriarty 10y ago
        I would not be so pessimistic. Lots of things that many people thought certain would never happen or would take a very long time have happened in relatively short order. Things like the fall of the Soviet Union, desegregation in the US, man on the moon, etc. Even things that required great international cooperation have happened. Like the eradication of smallpox and polio, the creation of the United Nations, etc. But the reduction of meat consumption and reliance on factory farming need not be done on a global level to be worthwhile. It can happen one country at a time. Even one person or one animal at a time will be helpful, even if it won't solve everything. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      Antibiotics are not given to livestock to reduce loss. They are given to increase mass. Farming without prophylactic antibiotics--where antibiotics are only used to treat sick animals, as they are in humans--could meet the demand for food easily.
- crimsonalucard 10y ago
  To the presses! I have discovered an alternative method of killing all bacteria on all forms of meat! It involves putting said meat under extreme temperatures thereby killing all microbes! I shall call this brand new method: Cooking!
  - zdkl 10y ago
    I spy with my little eye someone who'd die early, in a world without antibiotics. Some contaminations can't be washed or cooked away (Staphylococcus aureus, some Clostridiums...). And there are a lot of ways to mess up and contaminate an otherwise perfectly fine sample.
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      You continue to post as though the only reason antibiotics are given to animals is to keep human customers safe. It's not. > I spy with my little eye someone who'd die early, in a world without antibiotics. This is a joke, right? People ate meat safely for thousands of years before antibiotics were invented.
    - hx87 10y ago
      If the animal is sick enough to make you sick when you eat it, it would have died long before it reached the slaughterhouse. What you'd see without agricultural prophylactic antibiotics, at worst, would be occasional mass die-offs and spikes in meat prices. So instead of chicken always being $5/lb, it would be $5/lb most of the time and $50/lb when the die-offs happen.

by nebula 10y ago

zdkl 10y ago

Well the selection environment is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products. You can't just have a nice chat with the microbe unions and ask them to behave and stay off the meat...

livestockboy 10y ago
> is a requirement to not getting sick from eating the products one gives antibiotics to one's thousands of chickens to spur growth (body growth - gaining mass), not to protect the consumer from disease. giving antibiotics to poultry extremely increases mass gains. post-slaughter processes add chemicals that keep meat from rotting, eradicating some of those living harmful bacteria that just so happen to turn flesh into unwanted dark piece of s+=t.
- zdkl 10y ago
  I entirely agree on your opinion of the antibiotic situation regarding large scale farming. The problem is that we could not substitute another method to produce enough food to me(e|a)t demand. If we want to keep eating we must have safe food, and to keep food safe in frankly hostile environments we need to treat it. Until we can do without what passes for modern industrialised food growing and processing, we'll need treatments and colorants so we can pretend this is 'regular' food.
  - mercutio2 10y ago
    There is no need to meet the current demand for meat. If meat was our only food source, then perhaps this syllogism you've drawn would be true. But in reality, meat is an inefficient form of producing food, with complements humans can easily shift to. So the way you get less antibiotic use in livestock in a capitalist decision market is by reducing the demand for livestock. Taxes do a great job at reducing demand.
    - zdkl 10y ago
      Maybe my pun about meet/meat confused you but the problem definitely isn't limited to meat production. You should see the quantites of pesticides/fertilisers/treatment agents used in the extensive culture of plants. The question holds, if you don't intend to back current production levels that are only possible through over intensive exploitation to the detriment of the product and it's growing medium, what alternatives are there to meet current demand for food in general?
      - livestockboy 10y ago
        Use of pesticides in plant agriculture is mostly driven by huge demand of meat/dairy industry for feed. GMOs also aren't exactly necessary if you don't have 90 billion mouths to feed every day. There are some vegetables that are easily grown in unsuitable areas with GM, and some people do use pesticides and GMOs to "defeat" the market but if international logistics weren't so hard it would be easier to just import the stuff. Similar industry, completely plant driven, is cotton agriculture for clothes - to ensure proper demand you need GMO or pesticides. When it comes to beans, lentils, soybean for humans (although most of it is for fish farms, poultry and livestock), wheat, corn, rice, all sorts of fruits, pesticides come in hand, but there's more than enough if space was taken from dairy/meat and given to those. 91% of Amazon is cut for animal agriculture. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2004/02/02/000090341_20040202130625/Rendered/PDF/277150PAPER0wbwp0no1022.pdf http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/I... It's just 7 billion people, while you have to raise 50 billion chickens, 1 billion cows, -- about 150 billion animals yearly just to get them from baby form to somewhat of an adult form. That requires a lot of food, way more than 7 billion avg. 150 pound humans. https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ edit: realistically, this problem is unsolvable, just like US and China and others won't really struggle lowering their CO2 footprint, so will not Brazil, USA, India, Australia, Denmark and others when it comes to reduction of their meat/dairy output. If we were some nice unified Humanity maybe things would be different.
        pmoriarty 10y ago
        I would not be so pessimistic. Lots of things that many people thought certain would never happen or would take a very long time have happened in relatively short order. Things like the fall of the Soviet Union, desegregation in the US, man on the moon, etc. Even things that required great international cooperation have happened. Like the eradication of smallpox and polio, the creation of the United Nations, etc. But the reduction of meat consumption and reliance on factory farming need not be done on a global level to be worthwhile. It can happen one country at a time. Even one person or one animal at a time will be helpful, even if it won't solve everything. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    Antibiotics are not given to livestock to reduce loss. They are given to increase mass. Farming without prophylactic antibiotics--where antibiotics are only used to treat sick animals, as they are in humans--could meet the demand for food easily.
crimsonalucard 10y ago
To the presses! I have discovered an alternative method of killing all bacteria on all forms of meat! It involves putting said meat under extreme temperatures thereby killing all microbes! I shall call this brand new method: Cooking!
- zdkl 10y ago
  I spy with my little eye someone who'd die early, in a world without antibiotics. Some contaminations can't be washed or cooked away (Staphylococcus aureus, some Clostridiums...). And there are a lot of ways to mess up and contaminate an otherwise perfectly fine sample.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    You continue to post as though the only reason antibiotics are given to animals is to keep human customers safe. It's not. > I spy with my little eye someone who'd die early, in a world without antibiotics. This is a joke, right? People ate meat safely for thousands of years before antibiotics were invented.
  - hx87 10y ago
    If the animal is sick enough to make you sick when you eat it, it would have died long before it reached the slaughterhouse. What you'd see without agricultural prophylactic antibiotics, at worst, would be occasional mass die-offs and spikes in meat prices. So instead of chicken always being $5/lb, it would be $5/lb most of the time and $50/lb when the die-offs happen.