Antibiotics in Our Food Can Kill Us

by: teacherken

Sun Mar 07, 2010 at 13:16:35 PM PST

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the United States, 70 percent of antibiotics are used to feed healthy livestock, with 14 percent more used to treat sick livestock. Only about 16 percent are used to treat humans and their pets, the study found.

I am not a scientist.  I already am limited in drugs I can use by allergies, for example, I cannot use penicillin (one of many).  Overuse of antibiotics creates resistant strains of bacteria, super bugs if you will.  My allergies perhaps make me more at risk than most people, since I am limited in alternatives

But it does not matter if the strain is resistant to all known antibiotics

MRSA, a kind of staph infection - kills about 18,000 Americans annually. That's more than die of AIDS.

Which is why you should read Nicholas Kristof this morning.

You Can't Fix Rising Health Care Costs Without Fixing Food

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Jul 21, 2009 at 06:16:23 AM PDT

This graph shows the percentage increase in health care costs between 2001 and 2006 for people classified as "Normal" weight, overweight, and obese.

In a recent blog post over at FoodPolitics.com, Marion Nestle summed it up best. Recently released CDC stats show that the percentage of Americans engaged in physical activity is remaining stable, while obesity and diabetes rates are rising in tandem with one another. Our problem is food. And given the fact that the problem is getting worse, we've gotta do something about it. Not just for our wallets, but for our quality of life.

UPDATE: I posted this on DailyKos and some people thought I meant that we don't need a public option or single payer, and we should replace those ideas with national weight loss. Nothing could be further from the truth. No amount of food system reform can provide care to the 50 million uninsured Americans. We need Congress to fix that. What I am arguing is that in addition to that, in order to control costs and improve quality of life, we ALSO need to fix our food system.

What Swine Flu Tells Us About Factory Farms

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Apr 30, 2009 at 19:37:18 PM PDT

A War On Drugs I Can Support

by: Jill Richardson

Thu Mar 19, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM PDT

Following Nicholas Kristof's fantastic op ed Pathogens in our Pork, today Louise Slaughter and Ted Kennedy each introduced bills into the House and Senate, respectively, that would ban 7 classes of antibiotics from nontherapeutic use in livestock.

There are a few reasons why these bills are so good. First, the problem of antibiotic resistance is reversible. It's not "too late" and stopping the practice of nontherapeutic antibiotic use (i.e. giving drugs to animals who aren't sick for disease prevention or growth promotion) WILL make a difference. Second, it's important to not only ban drugs used in human medicine from nontherapeutic use in livestock but entire drug classes as the bill does. This is because a bug that evolves resistance to a drug can easily become resistant to other drugs in the same drug class. In other words, Slaughter and Kennedy really got it right when they wrote this bill.

Rep. Louise Slaughter Will Re-Introduce Livestock Antibiotics Bill

by: Jill Richardson

Sat Mar 14, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM PDT

ACTION: Email your representative and ask them to co-sponsor this bill. (Last time she had 40 co-sponsors so you can check at the link above to see if your congresscritter's already on the list.)