Letters to the Editor
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Another reason to be careful about eating meat
Excellent article. Makes scientific sense.
Besides periodic e-coli poisoning, this hints that factory farmed pigs are going to lower your resistance to infection too, or infect you. Time to eat more meat! Than I can have a colon cleanse right afterwards... and I'll clean the counter with anti-biotic cleansers, and take penicillin for a snack.
Over-using antibiotics has been done for years, on all factory farmed animals, not just pigs. Not a secret. Especially when the food and living arrangements make the animals sick in the first place, as one researcher pointed out here.
Yum.
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Real easy to avoid this.
Eat organic.
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Even easier way to avoid all this.
Go vegetarian.
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"Go vegetarian."
Why? Man is an omnivore and nothing could be duller (or sillier - tofu "burgers"?) than a vegetarian diet.
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@ikuiku
Did you read the article? "Why?" Because eating meat isn't the same process anymore.
Yes, man evolved to eat both plants and animals. But that was when he was eating animals that lived in the wild and had to be hunted. They weren't filled with antibiotics, crammed into boxes, terrorized and abused (thus making all those great fear chemicals to fill their flesh with), etc. The animals man evolved eating were healthy creatures that took a lot of effort to bring down, not passive, pathetic lumps of flesh pumped full of poison to make them look even passably edible.
If the kinds of animals we evolved to eat were still around to eat today, then there'd be no problem. But they aren't. Instead, we get offered this stuff that can (and according to more and more researchers, does) kill you. Strangely enough, I and many others think that maybe we aren't supposed to eat SHIT like that.
And that's just the issue of health. There are, of course, whole other issues as well that don't pertain to this discussion.
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@ikuiku
One other thing:
Vegetarianism is only "dull" if you have no imagination or no interest in learning anything about food. I've been vegetarian for a great deal of my adult life, and I've never been bored with my food. Hell, in just one of the cookbooks on my shelf, there are over 500 recipes from all over the world, all of them vegetarian. There are whole cultures of cuisine that are entirely vegetarian.
There's simply no excuse for claiming that this mode of eating is "boring". All it takes is a little change of thought, and most of the time, the effort it takes to look two aisles over in the grocery store. BFD.
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@ikuiku
One other thing:
Vegetarianism is only "dull" if you have no imagination or no interest in learning anything about food. I've been vegetarian for a great deal of my adult life, and I've never been bored with my food. Hell, in just one of the cookbooks on my shelf, there are over 500 recipes from all over the world, all of them vegetarian. There are whole cultures of cuisine that are entirely vegetarian.
There's simply no excuse for claiming that this mode of eating is "boring". All it takes is a little change of thought, and most of the time, the effort it takes to look two aisles over in the grocery store. BFD.
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Whoops
Sorry about the double post. Page loading gummed up for a minute there.
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Response to Ikuiku
Why go vegetarian, you ask? Compassion for other living beings. It's better for your health. It's far less stressful on our land, water, and air resources. It involves less fuel. It contributes far less to global warming than the meat industry (according the U.N., the meat industry creates more greenhouse gases than the auto industry). It permits the feeding of more people at lower cost. It's delicious.
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Not a scientist, but am I missing something?
I'm a vegetarian, but I'm pretty sure the antibiotic-resistant bacteria don't know that. They can still find a way to make me sick, can't they?
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The next big scare
As a biologist, I've noticed over the decades that the media really like to use health scare topics to sell their rags. The issues are real enough - people do die from these things - they just aren't as threatening as the media would have us believe. I'm thinking specifically of killer bees, EBOLA, and SARS. High path avian influenza was the previous one - it MAY mutate or reassort into a virus that's easily transmissible between humans, but it's had several years in densely populated countries to do so and hasn't shown any signs of it yet. But I actually have a relative who's stockpiled months of food because she's sure a pandemic is coming momentarily and she won't be able to leave her house. Thanks, Dateline. Now we have MRSA...which is treatable with the right antibiotics. I even get email announcements from my kids' schools about it, everyone is so panicked. Calm down.
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MRSA is Multi-Drug resistant
A note to Carrie who didn't read the whole article. MRSA is a catch-all term that refers to a multi-drug resistant strain of S. aureus, and in no way is intended to infer that the organism is resistant only to methicillin. MRSA also will show resistance to penicillin, trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole, erythromycin and their derivatives. We are even seeing cases resistant to vancomycin, making them virtually impossible to cure. Every strain of MRSA has different antimicrobial sensitivities, making selecting the correct treatment crucial and necessitating extensive sensitivity screening.
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It's scarier than you think...
We in the microbiology community have been screaming about these problems for years, and no one is listening. Animals are fed massive amounts of antimicrobials, which are released into the water in their waste and into the population in their products. Doctors over prescribe; patients demand antibiotics when unnecessary and even useless. Then they don't use their scrips as directed, and yes, most of the antibiotics we ingest are excreted in our urine, and enter the water, etc.
There are now multi-drug resistant versions of many organisms that we thought we had licked. MRSA, Vancomycin Resistant Enterococcus (VRE), resistant Streptococcus pneumonia (and kids with impossible to treat ear infections) and resistant Gonorrhea. If you think MRSA is scary, try out multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis, which has yet to hit the U.S. in large numbers, but soon will. Our lack of care with drugs is leading to drug resistant viruses, such as HIV and influenza. We're even seeing resistant fungal infections, such as athlete's foot.
It's long past time for our legislators, our regulators, the medical system, and the lay population to step up and make changes.Unfortunately, we love our cheap animal products, we hate hearing that there isn't a pill that can fix every little sniffle we have and we're pretty damn lazy. I doubt we'll make real changes until people are more afraid of dying of infection than cancer or heart disease. Sadly, once resistance genes are in a microbial population, we can't just wish them away. It is a hell of a lot easier to prevent resistance than it is to create novel antimicrobials.
Uggh.. I'm going to go and wash my hands.