×
Via Grist, Maryn McKenna at Wired highlights a new study about the increasingly terrifying affects of using so many antibiotics in factory farms:
Chickens, chicken meat and humans in the Netherlands are carrying identical, highly drug-resistant E. coli — resistance that is apparently moving from poultry raised with antibiotics, to humans, via food.For anyone who thinks about these issues — anyone interested in sustainability, organics or small-scale farming, anyone working to combat foodborne disease — this may seem like a foregone conclusion. And it should. The first observation that giving antibiotics to animals spreads antibiotic-resistant bacteria to humans was made in 1976, and there has been a steady accumulation of evidence since. Nevertheless, the argument keeps being made that the connection is not water-tight , and that antibiotic use outside agriculture — in human medicine, perhaps — can be blamed for the vast rise in antibiotic resistance.One of the things science isn't good at is sifting out cause and effect when we're talking about entire food system changes over a long time. We probably won't ever sort out exactly which causes what, but it's increasingly clear that the way we produce food has a profound effect on our bodies: not all chicken is just chicken. But we are also locked into this myth that massive, industrial scale farms and genetically-modified foods will feed the world. In fact, they'll only make companies richer.
