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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

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?).