How Industrial Farming Hurts Us, Even if We Don't Eat It
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 03. 6.07
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
Really, the faster the human race gets to the collapse point without taking too many other things with it the better. And this certainly looks promising.
We keep applying 'fixes' and 'patches' to the floundering ship we call industrial agriculture, obstinately perservering in a way that's more ignorant than noble. We need to get in a whole other vessel. The sooner we make the inevitable transfer to smaller scale sustainable farming, the easier it will be.
Re the antibiotics in particular - just another sign of the liberties industry will take with our food.
I hate to be depressing, but I really start to agree with you, Alex. You start to say 'Good--it's a good thing we won't be able to escape to some Moon colony because of all the garbage circling earth" and the like. I'm there with ya.