Along with hyper-sanitized home countertops, along with use of toxic cleansers for cleaning hands, along with the over prescription of antibiotics for infectious diseases that are viral, and not bacterial, one of the major factors, in the critical public health issue of development of super bacteria, is the issue of feeding low levels of antibiotics to farm animals grown under severe and unnatural conditions.
Antibiotic abuse in livestock is an obscene abuse of a very valuable super drug that should be saved for people and animals that need it, not given out like candy for every viral infection or to animals to make them grow faster, a use, whose effects, we have no idea what are now or will be in future.
Great article about this pressing issue in today’s the New York Times by the former commissioner of the FDA, David Kessler
And I quote:
This is a major public health problem, because giving healthy livestock these drugs breeds superbugs that can infect people. We need to know more about the use of antibiotics in the production of our meat and poultry. The results could be a matter of life and death.
And the following ASTOUNDING FIGURES:
In 2011, drugmakers sold nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics for livestock — the largest amount yet recorded and about 80 percent of all reported antibiotic sales that year. The rest was for human health care. We don’t know much more except that, rather than healing sick animals, these drugs are often fed to animals at low levels to make them grow faster and to suppress diseases that arise because they live in dangerously close quarters on top of one another’s waste.
