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Meanwhile tons of antibiotics are used in factory farming. I'm not sure why it has ever been legal to use massive amounts of antibiotics on animals that aren't

• wglb 13y ago
  Feeding corn to cows, who are natural grass eaters, keeps them in a perpetual state of sickness, some say.
• sliverstorm 13y ago
  A thought occurs to me- do we know it to be true, that a constant life-long supply of antibiotics results in the development of greater numbers of resistant strains of bacteria? Think about it. We always say humans who don't finish their prescription are allowing some of the most resistant strains to survive, when taking the full prescription would generally finish off everything (even the moderately resistant strains) preventing selection. Farm animals that never stop taking antibiotics never provide that window of opportunity for unresistant strains to take hold and then undergo selection due to antibiotic regimes that are ended too soon. Maybe I've got the wrong idea here, but is this particularly different from, say, a petri dish full of sulfuric acid, and a petri dish that periodically has some acid introduced for a short period of time? Drop a culture in the first dish, and they all die. Drop a culture in the second dish, and they have time to develop resistance.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]