3 ms·
This feels like a pretty low hanging fruit to regulate away. Ban antibiotics use in agriculture in civilized countries and ban importing antibiotics grown meat
by vkk8 5y ago
This feels like a pretty low hanging fruit to regulate away. Ban antibiotics use in agriculture in civilized countries and ban importing antibiotics grown meat from the others (I would guess it's easy to test).
- nradov 5y agoThe FDA has already been working to reduce antibiotic use in agriculture. https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/safety-health/antimicrobial-resistance https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/safety-health/antimicr...
- culi 5y agoI wouldn't call it low-hanging fruit considering just how dependent large-scale animal agriculture is dependent on antibiotics
- mdavis6890 5y agoThis would mean either that we would have a lot less food, or we would have to divert a lot of effort from other productive activities to make it up. Maybe that's okay, but still this idea is not free, and not low-hanging fruit.
- exyi 5y agoNot less food, just less meat.
- rkk3 5y agoNot just meat, also dairy & eggs. Thats significant.
- altfredd 5y agoI like how you don't even contemplate reducing profits as solution (as opposite to mass deaths or mass starvation).
- rripken 5y agoHow would you go about reducing profits? If you add costs, the farmers will either pass them along to the purchaser or they will get out of the meat business. That means either higher prices (which should lower demand) or lower supply. In either case it looks like consumers eat less meat. I'm not trying to defend antibiotic usage. I'm curious what a reduced profit solution would look like, maybe I'm imagining it wrong.
- mdavis6890 5y agoI do not see how profits have anything to do with antibiotics and the level of effort required to produce animal products. Antibiotics allow us to produce animal products with reduced effort per unit than otherwise. If we ban antibiotics, it will require more effort to produce the same amount of animal products. That is true regardless of what happens on the money/profit side. This may be a fine tradeoff, but it's still a necessary tradeoff.
- knuthsat 5y agoIt's been this way for decades. IMO it's the main source of antibiotic resistant bacteria. You have billions of chickens being raised every year, each a Petri dish ready for evolution of resistance. You have at least 10 billion fresh "Petri dishes" every year. That obliterates human antibiotic use. When chicken is given an antibiotic, how exactly is that distributed over the body, especially for a sedentary overweight chicken that can hardly walk? There's no way you can tell that a high dosage will result in no bacteria alive when there can be a pocket of sick flesh where antibiotic might not reach its full potential. Similarly, the massive rise in UTI infections in women over the years is a side effect of this problem. I do not believe UTI infections in women were that debilitating in the past. Today you can't even get rid of them with antibiotics and a lot of women develop a decade long recurrent UTI infection problem. Human antibiotics use is not an issue.