5 ms·

> do I let my sick animals suffer so I can sell them? This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why. It is also a giant sou

> do I let my sick animals suffer so I can sell them? This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why. It is also a giant source of antibiotic resistance, which is why it should be illegal, much less the disruption of your gut microbiota from consuming antibiotics.

aldoushuxley001 8y ago
> This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why. Do you have a source for this? Sounds very interesting if true
- pyre 8y ago
  This has been known for quite a while. I'm sure you could come up with quite a few sources if you really wanted to, though I'm not sure how well the phenomena has been studied (seeing as we still don't know what causes it).
- skookum 8y ago
  An answer to your question was already in an immediate sibling subthread half an hour before you posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162574
- louprado 8y ago
  The article links to another article in the fourth paragraph. The use of the word seem implies we don't exactly know why. "That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves." The above raises the question, do antibotics increase the BMI of human children long-term ? According to this article[1] the answer is yes. [1] https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/children-who-take-antibiotics-gain-weight-faster-than-kids-who-dont.t.html https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/children-who-t...
- aviv 8y ago
  Seriously this trend on HN to knee jerk react with "do you have sources for xyz" needs to stop. Googling it in 5 seconds will give you plenty of sources. Do your own research.
  - ouid 8y ago
    Aviv isn't just telling you not to be lazy. The observations that someone includes when they are trying to confirm their hypothesis are scientifically meaningless. Observations are only valid when they are made with good faith effort to discredit the hypothesis. This includes the meta-observations of going out and finding studies on the internet.
  - aldoushuxley001 8y ago
    Lol that's such an aggressive response, no wonder HN has such limited success
aviv 8y ago
Not only that. Animals in factory farms are held in very poor conditions, overcrowded, consuming a very poor diet not designed for them by nature, and spending most of their lives stepping and sleeping on their own manure. So of course they get sick. Do people really need studies and articles to figure out the end product of these sick poor animals will be bad for people?
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  > Do people really need studies and articles to figure out the end product of these sick poor animals will be bad for people? People don't, it's obvious. Please refer to the history of the Tobacco industry in the United States to see how this strategy works. The same technique is being used with climate change by the fossil fuel industries. For enforcable regulations to become enacted, suddenly the burden of the most rigorous scientific proof with zero possible doubt becomes mandatory. It's absurd.
christophilus 8y ago
We don't know why? I thought it was because your body can spend energy on fighting off infection or on other things. If antibiotics reduce the energy required to fight off infections, the "other things" gets more energy. Growth falls into this big second bucket.
- madhadron 8y ago
  It's very easy to tell just so stories like this, and there are a number of plausible ones. That doesn't make them correct. For example, we don't know how antibiotics kill bacteria. All the models such as impeding crosslinking of cell wall and the bacteria bursting from turgor pressure? All wrong. Still taught, but entirely wrong. We don't know how antibiotics work.
  - itstooreal 8y ago
    I am definitely in the bucket of people thinking this is how antibiotics work. Do you have some links I could read talking about how this isn't true?
    - madhadron 8y ago
      I wish I did. The hints in the literature are spread far and wide among older papers, often misinterpreted as something else. A lot of it is unpublished data from my graduate work. First, penicillin does bind to enzymes that cross link cell wall. It's getting from there to dead cells that's the problem. First, if you knock out a set of proteins called autolysins, cultures exposed to penicillin plateau in population, but the population does not decrease. That is, there is a suicide response. Second, changing the external turgor pressure, such as by adding PEG to the medium, doesn't change the rate of death. Third, if you watch a culture under a microscope when you add penicillin, all the cells in the culture stop growing long before they die. So the unbalanced growth model can't work. I have a vague memory that the kinetics don't work out either, but it's been too many years. More interestingly, other antibiotics, such as rifampicin and chloramphenicol, which don't target anything related to cell wall, cause bacteria to stop growing when they are added to the medium. That implies that there are active mechanisms involved, not some random fact about cell wall synthesis that happens to stop when something is inhibited. Rifampicin is supposed to inhibit protein production (and does mess up ribosome activity), but there was an interesting paper that showed that a few mRNAs were translated as normal in the presence of rifampicin, even though most were messed up. And how would inhibiting protein synthesis lead to cells exploding (which they do) by a direct, physical mechanism? I've thought about going back and writing a review article on all this stuff, but biology is a long ways in my past at this point.
will_brown 8y ago
>This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why. I think it’s more along the lines of this: 1. Cows evolved to eat low starch and high fiber grass; 2. We feed them corn and grain based diets that speed up growth but result in certain illnesses (rumen a layer of slime which traps gas they normally release and liver failure both which can lead to death); 3. Antibiotics are mixed in with corn and grain based feeds which help with both those issues (gas/bloating and liver failure). I have never seen a study showing antibiotics lead to accelerated growth where a cow doesn’t also eat a corn/grain based feed. More detail explanation here (not a study): https://www.google.com/amp/s/paleopersonaltrainer.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/what-exactly-happens-when-cows-eat-corn/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/paleopersonaltrainer.wordpress....
- curuinor 8y ago
  Review says that grass feeding makes the antibiotic growth effect different, but it's not a monotonic difference: makes some antibiotics better, some worse. https://www.livestockscience.com/article/S1871-1413(07)00572-0/abstract https://www.livestockscience.com/article/S1871-1413(07)00572...
- bad_user 8y ago
  Both statements are true. Chicken are fed antibiotics because it stimulates some growth hormone.

aldoushuxley001 8y ago

> This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why. Do you have a source for this? Sounds very interesting if true

pyre 8y ago
This has been known for quite a while. I'm sure you could come up with quite a few sources if you really wanted to, though I'm not sure how well the phenomena has been studied (seeing as we still don't know what causes it).
skookum 8y ago
An answer to your question was already in an immediate sibling subthread half an hour before you posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162574
louprado 8y ago
The article links to another article in the fourth paragraph. The use of the word seem implies we don't exactly know why. "That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves." The above raises the question, do antibotics increase the BMI of human children long-term ? According to this article[1] the answer is yes. [1] https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/children-who-take-antibiotics-gain-weight-faster-than-kids-who-dont.t.html https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2015/children-who-t...
aviv 8y ago
Seriously this trend on HN to knee jerk react with "do you have sources for xyz" needs to stop. Googling it in 5 seconds will give you plenty of sources. Do your own research.
- ouid 8y ago
  Aviv isn't just telling you not to be lazy. The observations that someone includes when they are trying to confirm their hypothesis are scientifically meaningless. Observations are only valid when they are made with good faith effort to discredit the hypothesis. This includes the meta-observations of going out and finding studies on the internet.
- aldoushuxley001 8y ago
  Lol that's such an aggressive response, no wonder HN has such limited success

aviv 8y ago

Not only that. Animals in factory farms are held in very poor conditions, overcrowded, consuming a very poor diet not designed for them by nature, and spending most of their lives stepping and sleeping on their own manure. So of course they get sick. Do people really need studies and articles to figure out the end product of these sick poor animals will be bad for people?

newnewpdro 8y ago
> Do people really need studies and articles to figure out the end product of these sick poor animals will be bad for people? People don't, it's obvious. Please refer to the history of the Tobacco industry in the United States to see how this strategy works. The same technique is being used with climate change by the fossil fuel industries. For enforcable regulations to become enacted, suddenly the burden of the most rigorous scientific proof with zero possible doubt becomes mandatory. It's absurd.

christophilus 8y ago

We don't know why? I thought it was because your body can spend energy on fighting off infection or on other things. If antibiotics reduce the energy required to fight off infections, the "other things" gets more energy. Growth falls into this big second bucket.

madhadron 8y ago
It's very easy to tell just so stories like this, and there are a number of plausible ones. That doesn't make them correct. For example, we don't know how antibiotics kill bacteria. All the models such as impeding crosslinking of cell wall and the bacteria bursting from turgor pressure? All wrong. Still taught, but entirely wrong. We don't know how antibiotics work.
- itstooreal 8y ago
  I am definitely in the bucket of people thinking this is how antibiotics work. Do you have some links I could read talking about how this isn't true?
  - madhadron 8y ago
    I wish I did. The hints in the literature are spread far and wide among older papers, often misinterpreted as something else. A lot of it is unpublished data from my graduate work. First, penicillin does bind to enzymes that cross link cell wall. It's getting from there to dead cells that's the problem. First, if you knock out a set of proteins called autolysins, cultures exposed to penicillin plateau in population, but the population does not decrease. That is, there is a suicide response. Second, changing the external turgor pressure, such as by adding PEG to the medium, doesn't change the rate of death. Third, if you watch a culture under a microscope when you add penicillin, all the cells in the culture stop growing long before they die. So the unbalanced growth model can't work. I have a vague memory that the kinetics don't work out either, but it's been too many years. More interestingly, other antibiotics, such as rifampicin and chloramphenicol, which don't target anything related to cell wall, cause bacteria to stop growing when they are added to the medium. That implies that there are active mechanisms involved, not some random fact about cell wall synthesis that happens to stop when something is inhibited. Rifampicin is supposed to inhibit protein production (and does mess up ribosome activity), but there was an interesting paper that showed that a few mRNAs were translated as normal in the presence of rifampicin, even though most were messed up. And how would inhibiting protein synthesis lead to cells exploding (which they do) by a direct, physical mechanism? I've thought about going back and writing a review article on all this stuff, but biology is a long ways in my past at this point.

will_brown 8y ago

>This isn't what the antibiotics are for. They increase growth. We don't know why. I think it’s more along the lines of this: 1. Cows evolved to eat low starch and high fiber grass; 2. We feed them corn and grain based diets that speed up growth but result in certain illnesses (rumen a layer of slime which traps gas they normally release and liver failure both which can lead to death); 3. Antibiotics are mixed in with corn and grain based feeds which help with both those issues (gas/bloating and liver failure). I have never seen a study showing antibiotics lead to accelerated growth where a cow doesn’t also eat a corn/grain based feed. More detail explanation here (not a study): https://www.google.com/amp/s/paleopersonaltrainer.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/what-exactly-happens-when-cows-eat-corn/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/paleopersonaltrainer.wordpress....

curuinor 8y ago
Review says that grass feeding makes the antibiotic growth effect different, but it's not a monotonic difference: makes some antibiotics better, some worse. https://www.livestockscience.com/article/S1871-1413(07)00572-0/abstract https://www.livestockscience.com/article/S1871-1413(07)00572...
bad_user 8y ago
Both statements are true. Chicken are fed antibiotics because it stimulates some growth hormone.