| The thing is it is easy to cut corners and proactively give your animals antibiotics. After all cows are milk producing machines and if they get sick, even for a few days that milk you still have to take from the cow but you can't use. A dairy cow produces between 150 and 180 pounds of milk every single day. That is about 18 to 21 gallons. That milk is lost if the cow is sick, but all the costs associated with getting it are still there. You have feed the animal, you have to milk her and you have to do it in the same order every day as cows are very much creatures of habit and don't like change.
So it is easy to see how some farmers might start just giving their cows antibiotics to prevent this. The problems with doing so are big. First and foremost there is the issue of development of resistant strains of bacteria. Cows have lived with humans so long that we are the only mammals who can easily digest milk in adulthood. We have literally evolved to take advantage of our partnership with cows. The downside of that is all this close contact over long periods of time has made it rather easier for bacteria that infects cows to make the jump to their partners humans. If a strain of bacteria that can infect us both becomes resistant to antibiotics it is a much bigger problem than some lost milk.
There is also the issue of drinking milk with antibiotics in it, especially low levels acts as kind of a breeding ground for resistant bacteria. When you are prescribed antibiotics you are getting big doses that are designed to hammer the invading bacteria. This does not allow very much chance of mutant slightly resistant strains to survive. But if you have low levels of antibiotics in your system it is analogous to vaccinating bacteria against that antibiotic. You kill off the weak bacteria, and leave the stronger resistant ones. Not a good situation for anyone.
This is where the FDA comes in. They have wanted to start checking milk more closely for quite a while. The impetuous comes from checking dairy cows at slaughter houses and finding that there are some that are tainted with antibiotics. This can happen in a lot of ways, from overdosing the cows, to injecting them in the muscle instead of a vein to just failing to wait the required amount of time before selling the cow for slaughter.
The numbers of cows that test positive for antibiotic contamination is not high. According to the New York Times article today there were 788 cows who where antibiotic tainted out of 2.6 million slaughtered in 2008. What has the FDA concerned is that the antibiotics detected have not been approved for bovine use and that fact that there are consistent levels of violations.
It sounds like it would be easy to just go and test the 900 or so suspected dairies milk but there are some complicating factors. Milk does not last very long, in product terms. You get it from the cows, keep it maybe a day or two and then the big truck comes to take it for processing. It has to move like the dickens before it is pasteurized since it is a great place for bacteria to grow. The current test of antibiotics takes a few minutes to process. If the milk is "hot" (contains antibiotics) it is quite literally dumped out.
To test of the drugs the FDA is finding at the slaughter houses currently take up to a week. That is a lot of time to lose when you are talking about a perishable product. This leaves the industry open to a couple of scenarios that farmers don't like. In a week milk from old Bessie is already on the shelves at the local Megamart. It has been processed into cheese and other products already (I told you it does not have a long life) if milk is allowed to be sold while the tests are in flight it would mean recalls of all the milk and products made from it. Not exactly the way you keep your customers thinking your product is healthy.
The other choice is to just dump all the milk that the FDA decides to test. As I explained above that is a pretty expensive proposition, but it is better than having your milk get a reputation for being tainted.
I have sympathy for both sides of this issue. The real problem is there are unscrupulous farmers who are cutting corners to make a cheaper dollar. They are not following the rules on which antibiotics to use and how much to give their cows. They are taking chances by putting the cows back into the production rotation before the drugs can wash out of cows systems.
The problem is that the affects of the bad apples, however many there are, are so great on society as a whole we can't just shrug and look away. Almost none of us remember a time when things like strep throat regularly killed people, a time when getting an infected cut could mean losing a limb or when the biggest danger in surgery was dying of post operative infections. This is because we have antibiotics. As bacteria evolve and become resistant to antibiotics we get closer and closer to going back to that state of affairs. Anything that helps that evolution has to be curtailed if it is possible at all.
This puts us in the position of having to test a lot of the practices at dairy farms. We don't really want sick cows, but we can not afford to have milk or meat tainted with antibiotics being consumed by humans who rely on those antibiotics for their health.
In the end it is going to probably drive up the cost of milk and milk products somewhat, but the cost of doing nothing about this problem is a hell of a lot higher.
The floor is yours.
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