Antibiotics in the food chain….
….actually, animals consume more antibiotics than humans. The drugs are given as preventatives for chickens, pigs and cattle in the industrial food industry. Conditions the animals are raised in are so unhealthy that, without big doses of antibiotics every day, they would quickly die. (A side effect Big Ag loves is antibiotics increase weight gain.)
Of course, all drugs fed an animal stay in the meat and for that reason there are specified withdrawal periods on the bottles. (You wanna believe they’re followed?)
What happens to us, those of us who buy our meat at the supermarket, is that our system gradually builds up a set of bugs that are resistant to the antibiotics….even the so-called “super” ones. It stands to reason that the first ones to be affected would be those in the food industry.
http://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2013/heaney-mrsa-farms.html
Dave Pratt of Ranching for Profit wrote about this just the other day: