11 ms·

Antibiotics and Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in Meat: Not Getting Better

55 points by clicks 14y ago

clicks 14y ago
So basically, you have reasons other than ethical ones now to become a vegetarian. (Sorry to have opened this can of worms :-).
- mistercow 14y ago
  More reasons, and ones that are even more clear-cut. But the silly "I'd rather die young and happy than old and miserable" argument will never die.
  - clicks 14y ago
    I never had the view that 'die young' was a good way to go when I was as a teenager, but I did generally have the idea that being old sucked because you'd inevitably get bogged down by diseases and ailments. That was until I met my neighbor, who's in his late 70s. He is simply the smartest person I know (a biomedical engineer, with knowledge of nearly everything you can bring up)... it seems as if he's still at the height of his intellect. My perception of things since meeting him has changed -- if you take good care of yourself now, exercise, take your vitamins, etc. you can really genuinely enjoy life when you're older. The guy spends the morning of every other day at the gym for about an hour. He can lift more weight more comfortably than I can -- he's almost 80, I'm in my mid-20s. Also see William Shatner: http://www.reddit.com/user/williamshatner http://www.reddit.com/user/williamshatner The guy is 81 years old and so very astute and smart.
    - xenophanes 14y ago
      Thomas Szasz was writing good books past 90.
  - gdubs 14y ago
    Right, but the response to that argument is that most diet based health problems are slow-burning, chronic and painful.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      There are a lot of responses to it, really. After all, eating healthy doesn't just make you live longer; it improves your immediate quality of life. The hypothesis that a healthy lifestyle will make you miserable is easily disproved by simply observing people who live healthy lifestyles.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  Just for scale, ~25 billion pounds of beef is consumed each year in the U.S. (http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/statistics-information.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/s...) So about 1 pound of antibiotics for every 800 or 900 pounds of beef. Apparently a beef steer dresses out to about 60% meat, so those 800 to 900 pounds of beef represent 1300 to 1500 pounds of cattle. So on average each animal is getting a little less than 1 pound of antibiotics each year (edit: Oops, I ignored that the Wired numbers roll up all livestock antibiotics. So there is pork and poultry further diluting that 1 pound).
  - icegreentea 14y ago
    Yes. But the human numbers gives something like 8 million pounds of antibiotics over something like 300 million people, or something like 0.03 pounds per person per year. By weight, there are something around... 8-10 people in a cow. Remember what the antibiotics are being used for here. It's not just 'oh, we're not sure if the animals are getting sick cause we have so many of them so we'll just give them antibiotics in case', it's 'oh hey, if we give them antibiotics, they gain weight faster'. The level of antibiotic use (along with nearly all business practices in large scale animal farming) is almost directly dictated by consumer demand for cheap meat. There's simply no way around that - and this comes from a lover of meat. We really need to adjust our expectations of our food supply.
    - maxerickson 14y ago
      Well, my point was not to dismiss the concerns of the article, it was literally to have a closer look at the scale of things. I didn't do any comparing to human uses because most people are familiar with the facts that they don't usually take antibiotics and that when they do, they take a small amount for a couple of weeks. The human dosing for tetracyclin is ~1 gram per day (http://www.drugs.com/dosage/tetracycline.html http://www.drugs.com/dosage/tetracycline.html), so I would want to look a lot further into the impact of giving that amount to animals before I got too worried about it (I favor careful regulation of animal antibiotic use whether I am worried about it or not). I would also want to see some reliable reporting on the actual administration patterns (i.e., is it literally mixed into the feed or is it simply the case that industrial animal growers have a lot of sick animals to treat?).
- shiny 14y ago
  Or you could just eat pastured meat.
  - graeme 14y ago
    Yeah, I've never understood why people automatically make this argument. Industrial meat != meat It's like saying that because most restaurants are unhealthy (e.g. fast food) you should zealously avoid all restaurants.
  - whyenot 14y ago
    I buy much of my meat and eggs now from Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills. Selection is very limited, and their prices are 2x-4x the cost of similar items in a supermarket, but their farm is literally down the street from my house and their livestock is pastured and well cared for. Money doesn't grow on trees, I eat a lot less meat than I used to, but I find that I enjoy my meals a lot more now.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Yes, if you eat healthy you will live a longer life. But why lenghten the agony?
  - mistercow 14y ago
    If you eat healthy, you'll also feel better. As you get used to different foods, you'll find your tastes shift and that things you previously found unappetizing are actually really delicious. The only real downsides to improving your diet are completely temporary.
- vanderZwan 14y ago
  Or on a similar note, demand better treatment of animals.
DanBC 14y ago
The UK BBC tv programme "Horizon" had an episode called "Defeating the superbugs"[1]. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ms5c6 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ms5c6) It had a great clip showing bacteria developing antibiotic resistance. They became so resistant that the antibiotics had reached the solubility level of the stuff they were using; they couldn't use more antibiotics because it wouldn't dissolve. [1] Yes, the hyperbolic name is unfortunate.
JDDunn9 14y ago
The difficulty is that you need anti-biotics for modern mass production of livestock. When you feed cows corn (too acidic for cows) and ground up remains of other cows (cannibalism is unhealthy), keep them in small pens, living in their own manure, that is a hotbed for bacteria. That's why they have to give the meat an ammonia bath in the meat processing plants. The alternative is to grass feed cows, then they don't get sick very often. Of course that takes longer and requires ~1 acre of land per head of cattle, and people don't want to pay ~1.5-2x as much for meat. So we are stuck with the superbugs.
- lignuist 14y ago
  > The difficulty is that you need anti-biotics for modern mass production of livestock. Shouldn't we then just stop "mass production"?
  - pyre 14y ago
    Yea. How about going back to the idea that we should eat more other stuff, and less meat instead of the "I want all the meat on my plate right now for pennies on the pound" ideal that people seem to currently have.
- ajb 14y ago
  Overuse of antibiotics for farms was banned in the EU without drastic changes in the price of meat. In fact, even opponents at the time only claimed there would be a 10% increase: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/234566.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/234566.stm
  - whyenot 14y ago
    Based on the recent horsemeat scandal, it appears there are a lot of "cheaters" when it comes to the EU meat supply. How is the ban enforced?
  - icegreentea 14y ago
    That 10% may not be accurate. In any case, the EU actually only banned the use of antibiotics as growth promoters, but not as 'preventative medicine'. Furthermore, the level of reporting on actual EU antibiotic use is somewhat spotty - especially given the multinational nature of it all. At best, the ban on growth promotion resulted in an ~10% decrease in antibiotic use. The massive scale on which preventative antibiotic use is applied likely minimized any negative impacts the removal of growth promotion had on actual growth rates. http://www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2011/a/antibiotics_in_animal_farming.pdf http://www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2011/a/ant...
hooande 14y ago
Farmers feed antiobiotics to their animals because the antibiotics make them bigger. No one knows exactly why, but farmers know a more valuable pig when they see one. This is how capitalism works. If farmers can make more money by giving antibiotics to pigs, then they are going to do it. They'll argue that they have to because the farming market is increasingly controlled by a small number of giant companies, and if one doesn't do everything possible to increase yield then all of the others will. Of course the only bacteria left alive will be the ones that are resistant to the antibiotics. This puts all of us in more danger and over time will cause more bizarre diseases. But that tradeoff is far into the future and no farming executive is going to forgo a quarterly bonus to prevent a problem 20 years from now. I understand the tradeoffs, too. I thinking recently about how amazing it is that we all get to eat meat every day. Just hundreds of years ago it was a rare treat. Even with that said, the idea of overusing a resource in such precious short supply as antibiotics is very disconcerting.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  One of my deluded friends (who read a little too much Ayn Rand for his own good), used to say that he wishes the government would stop policing what kind of food he can buy in the store. Basically FDA should close its doors, and the better products will inevitably emerge when the free market just does its thing. I've heard that from other people in US as well. It seems to be a common motif in some circles (even those of educated people). Usually, I just point out that such "utopian" places, with non-existent regulation exist -- go to any undeveloped country with rampant corruption and thinly taxed government regulatory agencies, and voila -- heaven, effectively no regulation whatsoever. Can go to the market and by dog hamburgers disguised as cow hamburgers. Can buy vegetables that have been sprayed with chemicals that have been illegal in the West for 50 years now. [Now we all know everyone shops with their chemo-bio-radio micro laboratory at hand so they can clearly pick better products, right? Let me stick this hamburger meat in the slot here and see if a picture of a cow blinks or a picture of a cat blinks...]
  - tolmasky 14y ago
    Your argument would be stronger if you didn't have such disrespect for the people you don't agree with. The argument wouldn't be that everyone would test foods with handheld chemo whatever's, but rather that private analogs to the FDA would exist. Think consumer reports for health/nutrition vs product quality. The thinking is that one of the problems with the FDA is that since it is a government agency, it reacts to these things slowly and is prone to corruption. Most people say "I can eat anything on the shelf because the government has taken the time to make sure its not bad for me, they always go on and on about the success of the FDA after all". The problem is that oftentimes there are problems with things even if they are approved. If you instead had independent agencies doing this, there is a possibility that we would have a culture that leaned more towards research and discussion (the same way people ask all the time about which computer to buy). I'm sure you'll argue that corruption would happen here too, but the idea is that having multiple agencies, all of which are reasonably legally liable (unlike a government agency where if they make a mistake its particularly difficult to punish them), allows competition so its harder to buy out everyone when you create an interest in an upstart showing how you were wrong in your analysis. With the FDA, there may be opposing sides (e.g. let's say the "organic" lobby and the "farmers" lobby that could potentially try to convince the FDA of one thing or another), but at the end one decision is made. I am in no way arguing that this point of view is correct, however essentially calling people with opposing viewpoints idiots doesn't convince anyone of your side, it makes you appear like you have not actually taken the time to listen to those arguments, and thus will at best only preach to the choir. Of course if this was only meant to be a rant, then carry on. EDIT: This article shows what I was referring to in terms of "binary decisions": http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/health/use-of-antibiotics-in-animals-raised-for-food-defies-scrutiny.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/health/use-of-antibiotics-... The FDA has been hesitant to tackle this in the past because it feels it hasn't had sufficient evidence. This is why we perhaps need a gradient instead of approved/disapproved. With multiple competing agencies, some would be much more conservative and be willing to speak up sooner. The point I'm trying to make is that people who disagree with you look at the current situation with antibiotics and say "see, here we have the FDA and this is still happening". Whereas you say "See, this is happening and why we need the FDA".

55 points by clicks 14y ago

So basically, you have reasons other than ethical ones now to become a vegetarian. (Sorry to have opened this can of worms :-).

mistercow 14y ago
More reasons, and ones that are even more clear-cut. But the silly "I'd rather die young and happy than old and miserable" argument will never die.
- clicks 14y ago
  I never had the view that 'die young' was a good way to go when I was as a teenager, but I did generally have the idea that being old sucked because you'd inevitably get bogged down by diseases and ailments. That was until I met my neighbor, who's in his late 70s. He is simply the smartest person I know (a biomedical engineer, with knowledge of nearly everything you can bring up)... it seems as if he's still at the height of his intellect. My perception of things since meeting him has changed -- if you take good care of yourself now, exercise, take your vitamins, etc. you can really genuinely enjoy life when you're older. The guy spends the morning of every other day at the gym for about an hour. He can lift more weight more comfortably than I can -- he's almost 80, I'm in my mid-20s. Also see William Shatner: http://www.reddit.com/user/williamshatner http://www.reddit.com/user/williamshatner The guy is 81 years old and so very astute and smart.
  - xenophanes 14y ago
    Thomas Szasz was writing good books past 90.
- gdubs 14y ago
  Right, but the response to that argument is that most diet based health problems are slow-burning, chronic and painful.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    There are a lot of responses to it, really. After all, eating healthy doesn't just make you live longer; it improves your immediate quality of life. The hypothesis that a healthy lifestyle will make you miserable is easily disproved by simply observing people who live healthy lifestyles.
maxerickson 14y ago
Just for scale, ~25 billion pounds of beef is consumed each year in the U.S. (http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/statistics-information.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/s...) So about 1 pound of antibiotics for every 800 or 900 pounds of beef. Apparently a beef steer dresses out to about 60% meat, so those 800 to 900 pounds of beef represent 1300 to 1500 pounds of cattle. So on average each animal is getting a little less than 1 pound of antibiotics each year (edit: Oops, I ignored that the Wired numbers roll up all livestock antibiotics. So there is pork and poultry further diluting that 1 pound).
- icegreentea 14y ago
  Yes. But the human numbers gives something like 8 million pounds of antibiotics over something like 300 million people, or something like 0.03 pounds per person per year. By weight, there are something around... 8-10 people in a cow. Remember what the antibiotics are being used for here. It's not just 'oh, we're not sure if the animals are getting sick cause we have so many of them so we'll just give them antibiotics in case', it's 'oh hey, if we give them antibiotics, they gain weight faster'. The level of antibiotic use (along with nearly all business practices in large scale animal farming) is almost directly dictated by consumer demand for cheap meat. There's simply no way around that - and this comes from a lover of meat. We really need to adjust our expectations of our food supply.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    Well, my point was not to dismiss the concerns of the article, it was literally to have a closer look at the scale of things. I didn't do any comparing to human uses because most people are familiar with the facts that they don't usually take antibiotics and that when they do, they take a small amount for a couple of weeks. The human dosing for tetracyclin is ~1 gram per day (http://www.drugs.com/dosage/tetracycline.html http://www.drugs.com/dosage/tetracycline.html), so I would want to look a lot further into the impact of giving that amount to animals before I got too worried about it (I favor careful regulation of animal antibiotic use whether I am worried about it or not). I would also want to see some reliable reporting on the actual administration patterns (i.e., is it literally mixed into the feed or is it simply the case that industrial animal growers have a lot of sick animals to treat?).
shiny 14y ago
Or you could just eat pastured meat.
- graeme 14y ago
  Yeah, I've never understood why people automatically make this argument. Industrial meat != meat It's like saying that because most restaurants are unhealthy (e.g. fast food) you should zealously avoid all restaurants.
- whyenot 14y ago
  I buy much of my meat and eggs now from Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills. Selection is very limited, and their prices are 2x-4x the cost of similar items in a supermarket, but their farm is literally down the street from my house and their livestock is pastured and well cared for. Money doesn't grow on trees, I eat a lot less meat than I used to, but I find that I enjoy my meals a lot more now.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
Yes, if you eat healthy you will live a longer life. But why lenghten the agony?
- mistercow 14y ago
  If you eat healthy, you'll also feel better. As you get used to different foods, you'll find your tastes shift and that things you previously found unappetizing are actually really delicious. The only real downsides to improving your diet are completely temporary.
vanderZwan 14y ago
Or on a similar note, demand better treatment of animals.

DanBC 14y ago

The UK BBC tv programme "Horizon" had an episode called "Defeating the superbugs"[1]. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ms5c6 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ms5c6) It had a great clip showing bacteria developing antibiotic resistance. They became so resistant that the antibiotics had reached the solubility level of the stuff they were using; they couldn't use more antibiotics because it wouldn't dissolve. [1] Yes, the hyperbolic name is unfortunate.

JDDunn9 14y ago

The difficulty is that you need anti-biotics for modern mass production of livestock. When you feed cows corn (too acidic for cows) and ground up remains of other cows (cannibalism is unhealthy), keep them in small pens, living in their own manure, that is a hotbed for bacteria. That's why they have to give the meat an ammonia bath in the meat processing plants. The alternative is to grass feed cows, then they don't get sick very often. Of course that takes longer and requires ~1 acre of land per head of cattle, and people don't want to pay ~1.5-2x as much for meat. So we are stuck with the superbugs.

lignuist 14y ago
> The difficulty is that you need anti-biotics for modern mass production of livestock. Shouldn't we then just stop "mass production"?
- pyre 14y ago
  Yea. How about going back to the idea that we should eat more other stuff, and less meat instead of the "I want all the meat on my plate right now for pennies on the pound" ideal that people seem to currently have.
ajb 14y ago
Overuse of antibiotics for farms was banned in the EU without drastic changes in the price of meat. In fact, even opponents at the time only claimed there would be a 10% increase: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/234566.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/234566.stm
- whyenot 14y ago
  Based on the recent horsemeat scandal, it appears there are a lot of "cheaters" when it comes to the EU meat supply. How is the ban enforced?
- icegreentea 14y ago
  That 10% may not be accurate. In any case, the EU actually only banned the use of antibiotics as growth promoters, but not as 'preventative medicine'. Furthermore, the level of reporting on actual EU antibiotic use is somewhat spotty - especially given the multinational nature of it all. At best, the ban on growth promotion resulted in an ~10% decrease in antibiotic use. The massive scale on which preventative antibiotic use is applied likely minimized any negative impacts the removal of growth promotion had on actual growth rates. http://www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2011/a/antibiotics_in_animal_farming.pdf http://www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2011/a/ant...

hooande 14y ago

Farmers feed antiobiotics to their animals because the antibiotics make them bigger. No one knows exactly why, but farmers know a more valuable pig when they see one. This is how capitalism works. If farmers can make more money by giving antibiotics to pigs, then they are going to do it. They'll argue that they have to because the farming market is increasingly controlled by a small number of giant companies, and if one doesn't do everything possible to increase yield then all of the others will. Of course the only bacteria left alive will be the ones that are resistant to the antibiotics. This puts all of us in more danger and over time will cause more bizarre diseases. But that tradeoff is far into the future and no farming executive is going to forgo a quarterly bonus to prevent a problem 20 years from now. I understand the tradeoffs, too. I thinking recently about how amazing it is that we all get to eat meat every day. Just hundreds of years ago it was a rare treat. Even with that said, the idea of overusing a resource in such precious short supply as antibiotics is very disconcerting.

rdtsc 14y ago
One of my deluded friends (who read a little too much Ayn Rand for his own good), used to say that he wishes the government would stop policing what kind of food he can buy in the store. Basically FDA should close its doors, and the better products will inevitably emerge when the free market just does its thing. I've heard that from other people in US as well. It seems to be a common motif in some circles (even those of educated people). Usually, I just point out that such "utopian" places, with non-existent regulation exist -- go to any undeveloped country with rampant corruption and thinly taxed government regulatory agencies, and voila -- heaven, effectively no regulation whatsoever. Can go to the market and by dog hamburgers disguised as cow hamburgers. Can buy vegetables that have been sprayed with chemicals that have been illegal in the West for 50 years now. [Now we all know everyone shops with their chemo-bio-radio micro laboratory at hand so they can clearly pick better products, right? Let me stick this hamburger meat in the slot here and see if a picture of a cow blinks or a picture of a cat blinks...]
- tolmasky 14y ago
  Your argument would be stronger if you didn't have such disrespect for the people you don't agree with. The argument wouldn't be that everyone would test foods with handheld chemo whatever's, but rather that private analogs to the FDA would exist. Think consumer reports for health/nutrition vs product quality. The thinking is that one of the problems with the FDA is that since it is a government agency, it reacts to these things slowly and is prone to corruption. Most people say "I can eat anything on the shelf because the government has taken the time to make sure its not bad for me, they always go on and on about the success of the FDA after all". The problem is that oftentimes there are problems with things even if they are approved. If you instead had independent agencies doing this, there is a possibility that we would have a culture that leaned more towards research and discussion (the same way people ask all the time about which computer to buy). I'm sure you'll argue that corruption would happen here too, but the idea is that having multiple agencies, all of which are reasonably legally liable (unlike a government agency where if they make a mistake its particularly difficult to punish them), allows competition so its harder to buy out everyone when you create an interest in an upstart showing how you were wrong in your analysis. With the FDA, there may be opposing sides (e.g. let's say the "organic" lobby and the "farmers" lobby that could potentially try to convince the FDA of one thing or another), but at the end one decision is made. I am in no way arguing that this point of view is correct, however essentially calling people with opposing viewpoints idiots doesn't convince anyone of your side, it makes you appear like you have not actually taken the time to listen to those arguments, and thus will at best only preach to the choir. Of course if this was only meant to be a rant, then carry on. EDIT: This article shows what I was referring to in terms of "binary decisions": http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/health/use-of-antibiotics-in-animals-raised-for-food-defies-scrutiny.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/health/use-of-antibiotics-... The FDA has been hesitant to tackle this in the past because it feels it hasn't had sufficient evidence. This is why we perhaps need a gradient instead of approved/disapproved. With multiple competing agencies, some would be much more conservative and be willing to speak up sooner. The point I'm trying to make is that people who disagree with you look at the current situation with antibiotics and say "see, here we have the FDA and this is still happening". Whereas you say "See, this is happening and why we need the FDA".