6 ms·

The most sensible European regulations of those listed in the article kindly submitted here are "What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including

The most sensible European regulations of those listed in the article kindly submitted here are "What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001." and "What Europe did: In the EU, all antibiotics used in human medicines are banned on farms—and no antibiotics can be used on farms for 'non-medical purposes,' i.e., growth promotion." I'd like to see the United States follow that lead immediately, and I write this as a man who has several uncles and cousins who are farmers, including some who raise cattle. It makes sense to me to have lines of defense against transmission of animal-infecting, and especially antibiotic-resistant-animal-infecting, microbes to human beings, by controlling what animals raised as lifestock eat and how they are treated with veterinary medicines. For the other regulatory practices mentioned in the article, especially washing chicken carcasses, I'd like to see more detailed evidence of the safety trade-offs involved in the practices of the United States and of Europe. I'm less sure on some of the other issues that science actually supports the European practice.

paganel 14y ago
> "What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001." I think this came in the aftermath of the Mad Cow Disease that affected the UK in the mid-'90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy#Epidemic_in_British_cattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...). I know that UK does not necessarily mean Europe, but nevertheless, that was really huge no matter where in Europe you happened to live, it showed that an entire industry could vanish over night just because of bad industry practices.
- Gmo 14y ago
  Mad Cow Disease did not hit only the UK (France, for instance, was also significantly hit). But anyway, for this kind of regulations, it is definitely at the European level and it is quite likely MCD is the reason for it
  - Xylakant 14y ago
    UK was hit worst, but other european countries were affected as well. I was pretty young when that happened but I still remember the images of piles of cow carcasses being burned on the open field. The MCD was the reason to ban feeding animal proteins to cows. Before MCD it was common practice to feed ground animal (cow) bones and leftovers from the slaughterhouse to cows.
    - tsmarsh 14y ago
      I did some work with a guy who was asked to figure out how much accelerant was needed to burn a pile of cows. I knew burning them was a last resort, I hadn't figured that it was actually hard to do.
      - gngeal 14y ago
        There's a lot of water in animal bodies. I guess it's like trying to light a log of very wet wood, if not worse.
- bjhoops1 14y ago
  Prions absolutely terrify me. Primarily because they are so difficult to kill, er.. destroy. They are basically the zombies of infectious particles. http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080701/full/news.2008.926.html http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080701/full/news.2008.926.ht...
  - pygy_ 14y ago
    Alzheimer and other dementia are also probably the result of an a priori prion-like phenomenon.
    - alexholehouse 14y ago
      I'm interested to see someone else take this stance. A large part of my PhD is based on ideas relating to this, but it's not a (currently) widely held train of thought. Are you involved in this area at all?
      - claudius 14y ago
        I recall an article a year or so back that implied that Alzheimer’s could be transmitted between mice if certain proteins were moved from a ‘sick’ mouse to a healthy one. I cannot recall the authors or even the journal, but I am sure you read it, if it was of relevance in any way.
        pash 14y ago
        Here's the paper: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/3/1024.full.pdf?sid=c461993d-accc-473c-8d8d-938fc6c9422b http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/3/1024.full.pdf?sid=c461... Open-access version: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575082/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575082/
shabble 14y ago
> For the other regulatory practices mentioned in the article, especially washing chicken carcasses, I'd like to see more detailed evidence of the safety trade-offs involved in the practices of the United States and of Europe. There was the relatively recent story in Forbes[1] (HN comments at [2]) about the difference in US/UK treatment of eggs, where the UK standard is to leave them unwashed to protect a natural anti-microbial coating, and the US policy is to wash and artificially disinfect them (at the cost of removing the original coating) There are some similarities there, and I'm curious about whether the additional cleansing steps are necessary, or part of a process optimisation that allows for more variation in the cleanliness of incoming birds (ie: permitting a faster/messier slaughter or whatever) The alternative, that it's something like the ammonia used to kill dangerous pathogens in 'recovered meat', is (IMO) more of a concern. Purely speculation on my part though. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-american-eggs-would-be-illegal-in-a-british-supermarket-and-vice-versa/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-ame... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325540
- derekp7 14y ago
  I'd lean more toward your second comment. One of the comments on the previous HN coverage inferred that leaving the eggs unwashed was so that dirty eggs would never make it to the consumer -- thereby encouraging farmers to keep a cleaner chicken coop.
- tss20147 14y ago
  This is going to be a bad post because I'm not where I can look up and provide links to the supporting material, but from what I recall the cleansing of eggs also had to with different egg distribution models between the US and UK.
  - jpatokal 14y ago
    No, the different distribution model (refrigerated in the US, not so in the UK) is because washed eggs have to be kept cold, while unwashed eggs do not. As far as I can tell, the only reason for the US clean-disinfect-keep cold regime is that it ensures consumers get pretty-looking poop-free eggs -- and, as a not inconsequential byproduct, don't accidentally get bird poop and its assorted nasties into their food.
mikeash 14y ago
The fact that you have to qualify your comment with your links to farmers puzzles me. I mean, I understand why you did it, but it's puzzling to me that attitudes are such that you need to. The Brave New Antibiotic-Resistant Apocalypse will hurt farmers just as much as the rest of us, after all. The way I see it, farmers should be leading the charge to ban non-medicinal antibiotics use in farm animals. The current situation is causing a tragedy of the commons. The commons in this case is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Every individual farmer is better off if they use non-medicinal antibiotics than if they don't, but they're all collectively better off (along with the rest of us) if none of them do. In short, the current market is forcing them to act in ways that are bad for humanity. If I were a farmer, I'd seriously dislike that, and lobby for laws that made it possible to do the right thing.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  You'd be right, if farmers were free actors. For poultry farms, farmers are essentially sharecroppers. They are paid a fixed fee to grow chickens owned by Tyson/Perdue/etc. For beef farms, ranchers birth and keep cattle for a specific period of time, at which point they are sold to feedlot operators. The feedlots have thousands of cattle are where many of the nasty issues with disease/etc come from. Farmers are not very politically powerful anymore. The next layer up in the agribusiness chain can control pricing and have all of the power.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Surely the same argument applies - mass agri-business can see the coming apocalypse too.
    - run4yourlives 14y ago
      Sorry, you'll need to speak up. I can't hear you over next quarter's share price hitting the floor.
      - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
R_Edward 14y ago
>Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001. Saw a Dirty Jobs segment some time ago in which a Nevada pig farmer picks up all the waste from several casinos' buffets, hauls it out to his farm, hand-picks the plastic and other inedible crud out of it, liquefies it, steams it to kill off some of the bacteria, then feeds it to his hogs. My first thought was that it was pretty clever of him to find a near-zero-cost source of food for his pigs. Then I thought a while longer and realized that those buffets serve a whole lot of pork. Some of which goes uneaten and into the trash... he's turning his pigs into cannibals! And then slaughtering them and selling the meat to the buffets. "Better eat that bacon, boy; three generations of pigs gave their lives for it!"
- latj 14y ago
  I saw that episode but never thought about that part. Waiter! I'll have the eggplant tartine today.
- baddox 14y ago
  Is there a health concern from pigs eating pig meat, or is it just something that seems gross?
  - garblegarble 14y ago
    My understanding is that it increases the risk of an infection spreading - any agent that survives the slaughter/cooking process could infect a much larger number of animals. See the BSE epidemic we had in the UK a number of years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy#Epidemic_in_British_cattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
- protomyth 14y ago
  Of all the animals, I get the feeling trying to regulate what goats or pigs eat is going to be a loss. Pigs have been used as "garbage disposals" for a long time by many groups. There is a decent historical reason for some religions to ban the eating of such animals. Parts of the Old Testaments are after all a health manual for their time period.
nobodysfool 14y ago
Feeding cows chicken litter isn't a big deal, it's not just chicken poo, but the uneaten or spilled food, the bedding material, and pieces of feathers. Runoff from chicken litter causes a lot of issues for rivers and streams, and it can't always be used for fertilizer. Feeding it to cows to improve their mineral uptake, it has about the same caloric value as hay, and it's higher in protein.

paganel 14y ago

> "What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001." I think this came in the aftermath of the Mad Cow Disease that affected the UK in the mid-'90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy#Epidemic_in_British_cattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...). I know that UK does not necessarily mean Europe, but nevertheless, that was really huge no matter where in Europe you happened to live, it showed that an entire industry could vanish over night just because of bad industry practices.

Gmo 14y ago
Mad Cow Disease did not hit only the UK (France, for instance, was also significantly hit). But anyway, for this kind of regulations, it is definitely at the European level and it is quite likely MCD is the reason for it
- Xylakant 14y ago
  UK was hit worst, but other european countries were affected as well. I was pretty young when that happened but I still remember the images of piles of cow carcasses being burned on the open field. The MCD was the reason to ban feeding animal proteins to cows. Before MCD it was common practice to feed ground animal (cow) bones and leftovers from the slaughterhouse to cows.
  - tsmarsh 14y ago
    I did some work with a guy who was asked to figure out how much accelerant was needed to burn a pile of cows. I knew burning them was a last resort, I hadn't figured that it was actually hard to do.
    - gngeal 14y ago
      There's a lot of water in animal bodies. I guess it's like trying to light a log of very wet wood, if not worse.
bjhoops1 14y ago
Prions absolutely terrify me. Primarily because they are so difficult to kill, er.. destroy. They are basically the zombies of infectious particles. http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080701/full/news.2008.926.html http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080701/full/news.2008.926.ht...
- pygy_ 14y ago
  Alzheimer and other dementia are also probably the result of an a priori prion-like phenomenon.
  - alexholehouse 14y ago
    I'm interested to see someone else take this stance. A large part of my PhD is based on ideas relating to this, but it's not a (currently) widely held train of thought. Are you involved in this area at all?
    - claudius 14y ago
      I recall an article a year or so back that implied that Alzheimer’s could be transmitted between mice if certain proteins were moved from a ‘sick’ mouse to a healthy one. I cannot recall the authors or even the journal, but I am sure you read it, if it was of relevance in any way.
      - pash 14y ago
        Here's the paper: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/3/1024.full.pdf?sid=c461993d-accc-473c-8d8d-938fc6c9422b http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/3/1024.full.pdf?sid=c461... Open-access version: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575082/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575082/

shabble 14y ago

> For the other regulatory practices mentioned in the article, especially washing chicken carcasses, I'd like to see more detailed evidence of the safety trade-offs involved in the practices of the United States and of Europe. There was the relatively recent story in Forbes[1] (HN comments at [2]) about the difference in US/UK treatment of eggs, where the UK standard is to leave them unwashed to protect a natural anti-microbial coating, and the US policy is to wash and artificially disinfect them (at the cost of removing the original coating) There are some similarities there, and I'm curious about whether the additional cleansing steps are necessary, or part of a process optimisation that allows for more variation in the cleanliness of incoming birds (ie: permitting a faster/messier slaughter or whatever) The alternative, that it's something like the ammonia used to kill dangerous pathogens in 'recovered meat', is (IMO) more of a concern. Purely speculation on my part though. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-american-eggs-would-be-illegal-in-a-british-supermarket-and-vice-versa/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-ame... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325540

derekp7 14y ago
I'd lean more toward your second comment. One of the comments on the previous HN coverage inferred that leaving the eggs unwashed was so that dirty eggs would never make it to the consumer -- thereby encouraging farmers to keep a cleaner chicken coop.
tss20147 14y ago
This is going to be a bad post because I'm not where I can look up and provide links to the supporting material, but from what I recall the cleansing of eggs also had to with different egg distribution models between the US and UK.
- jpatokal 14y ago
  No, the different distribution model (refrigerated in the US, not so in the UK) is because washed eggs have to be kept cold, while unwashed eggs do not. As far as I can tell, the only reason for the US clean-disinfect-keep cold regime is that it ensures consumers get pretty-looking poop-free eggs -- and, as a not inconsequential byproduct, don't accidentally get bird poop and its assorted nasties into their food.

mikeash 14y ago

The fact that you have to qualify your comment with your links to farmers puzzles me. I mean, I understand why you did it, but it's puzzling to me that attitudes are such that you need to. The Brave New Antibiotic-Resistant Apocalypse will hurt farmers just as much as the rest of us, after all. The way I see it, farmers should be leading the charge to ban non-medicinal antibiotics use in farm animals. The current situation is causing a tragedy of the commons. The commons in this case is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Every individual farmer is better off if they use non-medicinal antibiotics than if they don't, but they're all collectively better off (along with the rest of us) if none of them do. In short, the current market is forcing them to act in ways that are bad for humanity. If I were a farmer, I'd seriously dislike that, and lobby for laws that made it possible to do the right thing.

Spooky23 14y ago
You'd be right, if farmers were free actors. For poultry farms, farmers are essentially sharecroppers. They are paid a fixed fee to grow chickens owned by Tyson/Perdue/etc. For beef farms, ranchers birth and keep cattle for a specific period of time, at which point they are sold to feedlot operators. The feedlots have thousands of cattle are where many of the nasty issues with disease/etc come from. Farmers are not very politically powerful anymore. The next layer up in the agribusiness chain can control pricing and have all of the power.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Surely the same argument applies - mass agri-business can see the coming apocalypse too.
  - run4yourlives 14y ago
    Sorry, you'll need to speak up. I can't hear you over next quarter's share price hitting the floor.
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago

R_Edward 14y ago

>Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001. Saw a Dirty Jobs segment some time ago in which a Nevada pig farmer picks up all the waste from several casinos' buffets, hauls it out to his farm, hand-picks the plastic and other inedible crud out of it, liquefies it, steams it to kill off some of the bacteria, then feeds it to his hogs. My first thought was that it was pretty clever of him to find a near-zero-cost source of food for his pigs. Then I thought a while longer and realized that those buffets serve a whole lot of pork. Some of which goes uneaten and into the trash... he's turning his pigs into cannibals! And then slaughtering them and selling the meat to the buffets. "Better eat that bacon, boy; three generations of pigs gave their lives for it!"

latj 14y ago
I saw that episode but never thought about that part. Waiter! I'll have the eggplant tartine today.
baddox 14y ago
Is there a health concern from pigs eating pig meat, or is it just something that seems gross?
- garblegarble 14y ago
  My understanding is that it increases the risk of an infection spreading - any agent that survives the slaughter/cooking process could infect a much larger number of animals. See the BSE epidemic we had in the UK a number of years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy#Epidemic_in_British_cattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
protomyth 14y ago
Of all the animals, I get the feeling trying to regulate what goats or pigs eat is going to be a loss. Pigs have been used as "garbage disposals" for a long time by many groups. There is a decent historical reason for some religions to ban the eating of such animals. Parts of the Old Testaments are after all a health manual for their time period.

nobodysfool 14y ago

Feeding cows chicken litter isn't a big deal, it's not just chicken poo, but the uneaten or spilled food, the bedding material, and pieces of feathers. Runoff from chicken litter causes a lot of issues for rivers and streams, and it can't always be used for fertilizer. Feeding it to cows to improve their mineral uptake, it has about the same caloric value as hay, and it's higher in protein.