11 ms·
Chile’s salmon farms may use more antibiotics than any other meat industry
- notadoc 9y agoHumans are squandering antibiotics for the most inane uses, rapidly growing superbugs and resistance along the way. This will become a major public health crisis if nothing is done about it sooner than later.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> rapidly growing superbugs We can outsmart them. We have biochemistry and flocks of 30 year old PhD students. They have a random number generator.
- okket 9y agoBut they have huge, I mean really, really huge numbers. And their generation time is measured in hours.
- dokein 9y agoNot "a" random number generator, but rather trillions of random number generators running in parallel.
- throwaway5752 9y agoThe sad thing is that this understates the parallelism of the evolutionary process by ... many orders of magnitude. A single human gut has on the order of 100 trillion bacteria. Also, the gp poster seems to be unaware of plasmids and conjugation process, too. (unless it was sarcasm that went over my head, which it very well may have been)
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI would gladly take 1000 vacuum tubes over 100 trillion random number generators.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoSame thing
- sandov 9y agoAnd a natural machine learning algorithm.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoUnfortunately many from the 30 year old flocks are finding the best ways to optimize ad revenue because that pays many times more than biochemistry.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoThose who resist the temptation and stay focused on disease eradication will be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams
- jdietrich 9y agoTell that to Edward Jenner or Jonas Salk. Unless you're referring to spiritual wealth, nobody has ever got rich by eradicating a disease.
- whyenot 9y agoFor the "they" side you elided natural selection, lateral gene transfer, and generation times measured in hours.
- notadoc 9y agoSo why aren't we then? The market is failing on this.
- enord 9y agoIn an age of increasing nationalistic sentiments and military escalation, it's become a common trope that there's almost no one left to remember the tragedies of WWII. Coincidentally there's certainly nobody alive who remembers the previous pandemic, Spanish Flu. (I say "previous" - there's an ongoing pandemic of HIV/aids, albeit a more gradual affair, but that's happening to Other People (TM))
- swombat 9y agoDo you feel helpless to stop the problem of antibiotics use in the meat industry? You’re not! Here’s a simple easy trick you can use to reduce its impact on the world: eat less meat. You don’t need meat in 3 meals a day. Reduce it to 1 meal a day and you’ve already reduced your antibiotics impact by 2/3. Cut down to one meat meal a week and that’s a 96% reduction. You’re not powerless. Vote with your wallet and your stomach.
- linkmotif 9y agoNot to go totally Adam Smith here, but if everyone did this, wouldn’t this just drive the cost of meat down? Making it even cheaper than it already is? Wouldn’t it make more sense to explicitly seek out “better” meat? Anyway, I agree, definitely no need to eat meat more than once a day, if not every other day etc.
- swombat 9y agoTemporarily I guess it would drive the price down, and then production would adjust to meet the lowered demand. Think about it this way: if the number of meat eaters halved overnight, meat would be really cheap for a while, then a bunch of producers would go out of business and prices would rise again, and prices would stabilise again once production was half what it used to be.
- barrkel 9y agoYou're assuming that the remaining meat eaters' consumption would remain constant. It would almost certainly increase (I know mine would increase, or rather, I'd eat more expensive cuts of meat more often, like cote de boeuf); and I'd expect substitution effects - it's hard to predict what the final outcomes would be. Lobbying for regulation would be a more effective use of your time. Or something that converts individual action into collective action with an enforcement mechanism, like group shaming - but it's hard to get these to spread reliably.
- greglindahl 9y ago
- sifoo 9y agoFish farms are concentration camps for fish, same goes for the rest of the meat industry. The reason they need all the antibiotics is because the animals are so sick they just wouldn't survive without. Many still don't, it's just more effective to let 20% or so die if it allows stuffing more animals in the same space. Did anyone really think we would get away with treating animals like that and not have to face the consequences? Just say no, really. It's a disgusting, harmful habit; much more so than tobacco and alcohol. And down-voting me for telling you what you already knew isn't going to save you.
- linkmotif 9y agoI don’t think you need to invoke concentration camps here, true as it may be in some cases. They use antibiotics to make them grow faster. That’s half the reason.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoMy understanding is that this practice is now banned in both the US and EU.
- sifoo 9y agoSounds like a bedtime story in my ears. We're eating more and more meat, and demanding that it gets cheaper and cheaper while the stock market index needs to go higher and higher. It won't stop until the majority is willing to look beyond the bullshit we're being fed and start using their brains.
- Raphael_Amiard 9y agoWe (french) are not https://www.planetoscope.com/elevage-viande/1587-consommation-de-viande-en-france.html https://www.planetoscope.com/elevage-viande/1587-consommatio..., pretty much the opposite actually
- sifoo 9y agoWhat's the difference then? Piling up living beings in awful conditions to kill them in the most cost-effective way is pretty much the definition of a concentration camp. And making them grow faster than they're supposed to at the expense of everything isn't very nice either.
- petecox 9y agoSalmon seemed abundant and cheap, relatively, at Chile's coastal restaurants and I guess now I know why. Perhaps I'll pick something else on the menu the next time I visit. I wasn't a great fan of deep-fried seafood empanadas or ceviche but paila marina was tasty!
- partycoder 9y agoIn 2016, Chile had a massive algal bloom that killed an unprecedented amount of fish. The salmon industry was held accountable for it, but the issue was just deflected and blamed on El Nino.
- jorgec 9y agoHow about Tilapia? IMHO, even when i think that Chile's salmon is filled with antibiotics but i don't think that its the worst.
- jp555 9y agoWhat is the antibiotic? How long does this compound last when deployed? If something is highly reactive (causing the death of bacteria) is it not a reasonable starting assumption that it would not last long once deployed? If it is long active, where is the evidence of this compound causing antibiotic resistance?
- partycoder 9y ago"The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism." - Sir Alexander Fleming
- fpoling 9y agoThe article does not mention that Chile received a lot of investment from Norwegian fish farm industry. After strict regulation and enforcement in Norway started to affect profits the industry looked for other countries where local laws are not that strict or can be ignored.
- jopsen 9y ago> Consumers are key to change Consumers are given responsibility for too many things. When I buy something I have to check how it impacts the environment, animal welfare, fair trade, worker impact, company social responsibility, price, antibiotic usage, palm oil usage, health impacts, allergens, various toxins, suspected list of toxic substances, company reputation, etc. When will it end? IMO this doesn't scale... This needs regulation, I'm fairly sure the EU is doing it's part, where is the US?
- macspoofing 9y ago>When will it end? When you want it to end. You're putting those burdens on yourself.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jopsen 9y agoNo, the people who say that this is up to the consumers, rather than being a regulatory issue. Those people are doing big-corporations a favor, by trying to shift the burden to me, who we all know can't possibly do this.
- macspoofing 9y agoExcept we don't operate in some sort of unrestricted free market. There are agencies like the FDA that enforce food and pharma standards - so you can trust that nothing at a grocery store will poison you. There are laws, regulations and trade deals that govern how commerce is conducted. What you're doing is injecting personal, arbitrary and capricious standards on top of the already existing massive regulatory framework and then complaining it is too hard. No kidding! Don't do that then or at least don't be a martyr about it.
- pishpash 9y agoYou're right it is completely not scalable, and not only that, but incompatible with present-day market economics. One of the most important things we give up for the abstraction of market transactions with interchangeable goods is information outside the transaction.
- sandov 9y agoOk. so, as a Chilean, what can I do, other than stop eating salmon altogether?