Better living through chemistry (cont’d)….

It’s a problem that apparently is growing: the wholesale use of antibiotics is causing drug resistant immunities to build-up in humans as well as animals.  We just can’t depend on drugs to battle disease as we once did.  E.coli is one of them.

Industrial agriculture is based on antibiotics.  All commercial animals…cattle, chicken and pigs…are fed them routinely as a preventative.  They have to, because in the way they are raised, they’d die otherwise.  So you get them too, whether you’re buying meat at the supermarket, a restaurant or McDonald’s.  More than that, those cows you see gracing lovely landscapes (unless you’re looking at Thistle Hill and similar farms), are excreting those antibiotics onto the land and then into the streams and rivers.

And yes, meat can be labeled organic and the cow or chicken involved could well have received antibiotics.  Once again, it all comes back to “know your farmer”.  But you can be sure that if you’re buying your meat through the usual channels (a careful choice of words) you are getting not only antibiotics but pesticides and herbicides.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/763657?sssdmh=dm1.783490&src=nldne

They’ve found that antibiotics have one other feature: they cause animals to gain weight.  Any chance that’s a factor in our obesity epidemic?  All young animals have worms, of course, which limit growth.  But that can be treated naturally.

Not in big operations, though.  In commercial farms, they use what’s called a “pour on”; that is, cattle go through a chute on a regular basis and a poison is poured on their back.  It just happens to be a nerve agent….attacks the spinal cord.  The poisoned worms just wind up on the ground.  They’re dead; but the poison winds up in other animals and again, in the water supply.