Antibiotic use in Farm Animals

[Catherine]

Quote:Some farmers are quite responsible and only use them when an animal is sick with a bacterial infection. But as you both have said above, the trouble is that intensive (factory) farming practices are such that disease spread like wildfire and the animals, never seeing the light of day or able to move about freely, have very low resistance. That is a powder keg, which the intensive farmers have tried to keep keep under wraps by massive overuse of antibiotics. Some farms even inject antibiotics regularly, just as a preventative measure. That is highly irresponsible and now we are beginning to suffer the consequences.

This is the real problem. The antibiotics are used as a preventive measure. It allows the animals to survive the substandard conditions inherent in factory farming. However this over use of antibiotics has killed off weaker bacteria and allowed stronger strains to survive and multiply and worse, it has "selected" for any strain that is antibiotic resistant. So we have stronger strains of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
We are eating food from factory farmed sources so we are not getting the best nourishment and it comes with a lot of "baggage". Food from stressed animals contains stress hormones and who knows what else.

So we are weaker, the animals are weaker and the bacteria are stronger. It is a very dangerous situation and we have created it.

The wise people are the ones who are vegetarians or who at least look at their food sources. However if we are hit with an epidemic of an antibiotic resistant disease we all could be in danger.