HER2 Support Group Forums - Are Antibiotics On The Farm Risky Business?

This is potentially a huge issue along with the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in humans.

I have seen a paper suggesting that antibiotic resistance bacteria is quite common in rural water courses in South Africa.

Antibiotics were a huge success - think about some of the serious conditions that we would wish on no one that we used to be able to control with antibiotics,but are now now increasingly seeing resistant bacterial strains viz

TB http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/mdr/en/

Syphilis http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/mdr/en/

These are really 'nasty' diseases,

and a host of others . .

Animals growing faster I suspect means putting on more fat and more quickly; some antibiotics work in part by interfering in energy production pathways, and producing oxidative stress, so diverting feed calories to fat rather than energy - so we get cheaper but fatter meat products.

eg http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00338687 (from the same class as use to increase feed efficiency in animals)

Another type http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1211314

Another huge issue is what we are doing to the food chain at the most basic levels, demineralization of soils and crop breeding, leading to nutrient depleted crops which damage the health of our livestock and ultimately us in part so we can have cheap plentiful meat; and ironically most of these meat fat calories are not going to keeping us healthy but making us fat nutrient depleted and unhealthy.

I am a pragmatist, and a recognize where we are where we are, but surely there has to be a better way of 'industrial" agricultural production, and enormous need for recognition that sometimes less is more if it is truly nutritious because - ! it is nutrient dense! and if food was nutrient dense we would arguably need and probably eat less, so could afford to pay a little more to hard pressed farmers . . .