How Industrial Farming Hurts Us, Even if We Don't Eat It

How Industrial Farming Hurts Us, Even if We Don't Eat It

Even if you don't eat meat or buy organic, our industrial farming system can be seriously bad for your health. The Food and Drug Administration is about to approve the drug cefquinome for use in cattle, where there are more than a dozen other drugs capable of treating bovine respiratory disease, a common ailment in factory farmed cattle. Yet the drug is an antibiotic of last resort for humans. "If a drug is used less, then less resistance emerges," said Patricia Griffin, chief of intestinal disease epidemiology for the Center for Disease Control. The drug, which is the only effective treatment for serious infections in cancer patients and a reliable lifesaver against several other nearly invincible infections, would not be needed "but for the stressful conditions under which U.S. cattle are raised, including high-density living spaces and routine shipment on crowded trains for hundreds or thousands of miles." A shocking story from ::Washington Post and read more from the Sustainable Table on Antibiotics