Photo: sarihuella
If you’ve been following the swine flu news this week–and really, who hasn’t?– you probably know that you don’t need to worry that your taste for bacon puts you at risk of contracting the virus.
Health officials in the U.S. and abroad have repeatedly stated that people cannot contract swine flu from eating pork or pork products.
But that doesn’t mean that the world’s meat supply is safe.
In the U.S. alone, over 70% of all antibiotics used are administered not to people, but to cattle, pigs, and poultry eventually destined for the dinner table.
The antibiotics, which include tetracycline, penicillin, and erythromycin, among others, are routinely given to livestock not to treat existing illnesses, but to prevent illness, thus allowing livestock producers to raise greater numbers of animals in conditions that are not always safe.
Photo: sporkist
The overuse of antibiotics in the food supply has serious implications for human health, as the exposure to antibiotics through the pork, chicken, and beef we eat increases our bodies’ familiarity with infection-fighting drugs, thus making it less likely antibiotics will work when we need them for therapeutic purposes.
The problem is particularly common and pervasive among American hog farmers, according to New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, who wrote about the issue last month.
While public health officials around the world focus on managing the acute problem of swine flu, government officials need to get to work on the antibiotics issue, which may pose far more serious problems over the long run.
One U.S. Representative, Louise Slaughter, is doing just that– last month, she proposed PAMTA, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which will “will phase out the feeding of massive quantities of antibiotics important in human medicine to food animals within two years of enactment.”
Photo: Andrew Stawarz
The bill is currently before Congress. If you live in the US and want to encourage your Representative or Senator to support PAMTA, you can take action here.
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13 Comments... join the discussion!
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Thanks for posting this. It’s such a huge issue just waiting to explode. There’s a lot wrong with our meat production industry. Making it easier for small farmers to slaughter and sell a few animals per year would go a long way towards solving some of the problems inherent in factory farms. It’s ridiculous how hard it is to get a slaughterhouse license.
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Fascinating stuff Julie. So easy for the media to jump on something like the swine flu and scare the pants off everyone – but then ignore issues like the one you raised which overall is a much more serious one.
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Penicillin? Do they even given Penicillin to humans anymore? I think the medical community stopped because they feared we may become too tolerant to it. But we’re getting it anyway because we have to eat. And unlike the current flu thing, this unnecessarily innoculating animals isn’t going to go away so easily.
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My question that I have asked for so long how about the people who are allergic to these medications, what happens to these people?
I had a friend tell me she broke out after eating a chicken breast she bought at a market where she lives.
This is really not good.
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Plenty of people are still prescribed Penicillin. From children to adults, Penicillin is still given, it hasn’t gone away. Amoxicillin is more popular, but is still in the Penicillin family.
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Just to be clear – people don’t get used to or accustomed to antibiotics; the bugs do. When a drug is in the environment (be it a lake, the road, or a human being), the drug will kill all of the bugs that are sensitive to it. But if even one of those bacteria has a freak mutation that makes it able to survive – even barely – the exposure, that one bacteria will reproduce a whole colony all over again, except this time the drug won’t work on any of them, because they’ll *all* have that immunity.
So while I agree, using antibiotics (especially ones as potent as penicillin) on animals is setting ourselves up to breed superbugs, its important to be clear on whats going on.
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Right on, Mark, thanks for the clarification.
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Here’s a good feature in the NY Times about the impact of big U.S. pig farms in rural parts of Eastern Europe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/business/global/06smithfield.html?ref=global-home
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One of my sisters got infected with H1N1 or more commonly known as Swine Flu. Fortunately, she did not have very high fever and she was able to recover fast .
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My brother got infected with H1N1 or Swine Flu in Mexico. He got a mild fever and luckily he did not die.
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If you look at the pandemic of 1977, when H1N1 or Swine Flu re-emerged after a 20 year absence, there is no shift in age-related mortality pattern. The 1977 “pandemic” is, of course, not considered a true pandemic by experts today, for reasons that are not entierely consistent. It certainly was an antigenic shift and not an antigenic drift. As far as I have been able to follow the current events, the most significant factor seems to have been that most people, who were severely affected, were people with other medical conditions.
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We should be thankful that the swine flu did not spread very rapidly. it is not very deadly like Ebola but swine flu can still kill you.
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