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‘Unsafe’ levels of antibiotics found in rivers in 72 countries
- solotronics 7y agoWell at least they will have very clean fish, right up until a hyper bacteria evolves and strips all biological matter from the water.
- monieseee 7y agoIf such a hyper bacteria were possible it would have happened a long time ago. Bacteria must adapt and compete on many axes, there is no silver bullet. Don't forget that antibiotics were invented by nature (penicillium).
- wkearney99 7y agoBut not delivered in anywhere near the same concentrations and across as many different delivery systems. It's one thing for a natural bacteria or virus to develop. It's another to have them artificially transported in ways which nature could only dream about having. THAT's the bad thing.
- gumby 7y agoA nice choice of metaphor as there literally is an anti microbial “silver bullet”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Mechanism_of_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Mechani...
- r00fus 7y agoI’d like to know how much was from people vs livestock. Could we correlate based on types and concentration of the antibiotics found?
- callmeal 7y agoPlease stop with this fud. 80% of antibiotic production goes to the livestock industry[0] and that is where all the antibiotic resistant bacteria evolve. >Antimicrobials are widely used for disease prevention and growth promotion in food animals. In the United States, antimicrobial use in food animals is estimated to account for ∼80% of the nation’s annual antimicrobial consumption, a significant fraction of which involves antimicrobials that are important in human medicine in the treatment of common infections and also necessary to perform medical procedures such as major surgeries, organ transplantation, and chemotherapy. Read some of the tables in [1] (data from 2017) on how antibiotics are administered, they are shocking: Feed : 3,432,373 Kg (62% of total production) Water: 1,655,410 Kg (30% of total production) [0] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/18/5649 https://www.pnas.org/content/112/18/5649 [1] PDF: https://www.fda.gov/downloads/ForIndustry/UserFees/AnimalDrugUserFeeActADUFA/UCM628538.pdf https://www.fda.gov/downloads/ForIndustry/UserFees/AnimalDru...
- r00fus 7y agoThanks for your data and citations. That's what I was trying to get at. The article needless conflated the two - which leaves readers wondering if they are personally to blame when it's clearly Big Ag.
- natmaka 7y agoThose who know how Big Ag acts and nonetheless buy their products are to blame. Therefore most of us are to blame, especially considering indirect channels (food served at work/school cafeteria, many/most restaurants...).
- ohiovr 7y agoAntibiotics are given to animals to improve their growth. I assume this is because the animal does not have to dedicate a lot of its metabolism to its immune system.
- anonymouz 7y agoIs anybody able to find the actual study? The best I could find is the news release from the University of York from May [1]. [1] https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2019/research/antibiotics-found-in-some-of-worlds-rivers/ https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2019/research/an...