Bird Flu - Animal Bugs Forced to Join the Resistance - The Diigo Meta page

• 30 May 07
  

  James Linzel
  • Factory farms are considered such breeding grounds for disease that much of the animals’ metabolic energy is spent just staying alive under such filthy, crowded, stressful conditions;1188 normal physiological processes like growth are put on the back burner.1189
  • The majority of the antibiotics produced in the world go not to human medicine but to prophylactic usage on the farm.1194 This may generate antibiotic resistance.
  • there was a tremendous environmental pressure on the virus to mutate resistance to the antiviral
  • microbiologists are aware of, and understand, the weight of evidence linking the subtherapeutic use of antibiotics with the emergence of resistant bacteria.
  • The poultry industry blames the dramatic rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria on the overprescription of antibiotics by doctors.1215 While doctors undoubtedly play a role, according to the CDC, more and more evidence is accumulating that livestock overuse is particularly worrisome.1216
  • Science editor-in-chief Dr. Kennedy, who served as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, describes the antibiotic debate as a “struggle between good science and strong politics.” When meat production interests pressured Congress to shelve an FDA proposal to limit the practice, Kennedy concluded: “Science lost.”2193
  • The reality is that these birds exist under such grossly unsanitary conditions, cramped together in their own waste, that the industry feels forced to lace their water supply with antibiotics. “Present production is concentrated in high-volume, crowded, stressful environments, made possible in part by the routine use of antibacterials in feed,”
  • bacteria seem to be evolving resistance faster than our ability to create new antibiotics. “It takes us 17 years to develop an antibiotic,” explains a CDC medical historian. “But a bacterium can develop resistance virtually in minutes.

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