As it turns out, this whole bit about the use of antibiotics in livestock and poultry is a complex issue. It’s well beyond anything that anyone would guess at first blush. The best online summary is the position paper put out by Food Marketing Institute. Curiously enough, it doesn’t have a year on it. Based on the references, I’d guess it was probably around 2005.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of therapeutically low doses of antibiotics in feed. However, very few studies were conducted. They decided that giving little bits of antibiotics to animals would help avoid illness. What this means in practical life is that they will grow faster and produce more meat prior to being slaughtered and eaten.
Everybody agrees that using too many antibiotics in humans can cause humans to become resistant to those antibiotics. This has been blamed on everything from patients who want a prescription for an illness that isn’t caused by bacteria to doctors feeling they need to give a prescription to justify their fee. This kind of talk has been around for a long time. Read more on Antibiotics in Livestock Feed Endanger The Entire World…
Filed under medicine, News, prescription drugs by on Sep 23rd, 2012. Comment. 
I had trouble repressing tears as I read a recent article about conditions in a Mexican psychiatric hospital.
To me, accounts of wartime and man’s inhumanity to man pale next to what people of all cultures have, at one time or another, done with the seriously mentally ill. Read more on Still Some Psychiatric Hell Holes Left In The World…
Filed under News by on Dec 27th, 2010. Comment.
Some of the most vivid and memorable lectures I sat through in medical school were about bacteriology. Our professor was a woman who was a consultant to the World Health Organization and who returned from assignments with dramatic first person stories about how she had collected trachoma samples from children in darkest Africa, and would thus help prevent their blindness.
She told us about Cholera, a horrible disease that killed quickly by diarrhea and subsequent dehydration. A disease of poor hygiene that was found where people lived in congested settings and hygiene was tough to maintain. Did not even need antibiotics to save most of the lives; just hydration and electrolytes. An illness apparently easy to prevent; there were pills to sterilize the water, simple public health interventions. But none of us were likely to ever see it. We would all practice in civilized countries, like France. Vive la France. Read more on How Cholera Showed Up In Haiti…
Filed under Disease, politics, Public Health System by on Nov 4th, 2010. Comment.