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It implies that farm animals are refusing to take their tablets...
Why not just go with “Alarm as antimicrobial resistance surges among chickens, pigs and cattle” as per the Nature article?
Source paper https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6459/eaaw1944.ful... >From 2000 to 2018, the proportion of antimicrobial compounds with resistance higher than 50% (P50) increased from 0.15 to 0.41 in chickens and from 0.13 to 0.34 in pigs and plateaued between 0.12 and 0.23 in cattle. >Globally, 73% of all antimicrobials sold on Earth are used in animals raised for food. Jeeeesus. It sure feels like humanity…
One small way consumers can help is to reduce animal consumption. As an industry it releases a decent amount of greenhouse gasses, it creates antibiotic resistance, and it uses a ton of land and water (many of the people burning the Amazon are cattle ranchers). It's also very closely tied to actual consumer demand so consumers can affect it pretty easily.
Well, if course they are. Chinese farmers use antibiotics like candy. Even the stuff that the West considers reserve antibiotics of last resort. There is zero possibility of any Western pressure making them stop. Look also at the CO2 they emit and the plastic they dump in the ocean. The CCP has only two modes, rising living standards by questionable means, and mass die-offs of the population. This is the strategy of…
I've been a vegetarian for a few years. Part of the impetus for my choice was the lack of regulation and health code standards in this country. Recent news that the federal government is reducing inspection of meat really does scare me. How many people need to die (like in the early 1900s) before we re-realize the importance of these regulations on public life? When will the next Upton Sinclair come along?
Its simple to get to know your local rancher. You can even voice your concerns and have them heard by the person raising your beef, while walking the ranch on a nkce day. Factory farms are the bigger problem, not just meat per-se.
I'm working in this space for a tiny company that delivers high quality, low antibiotic use, low environmental impact, pasture raised single-source meat products in California. We're going to run farm education "meet the rancher" events to get people out to where the meat is actually produced, but we have to be realistic: that's more for the instagram photo ops to convince people that we're legitimate instead of to truly change consumer behavior.
The ugly truth is Americans eat too much meat, and we expect it to be dirt cheap. Meat has been heavily subsidized, and all the externalities from industrial meat production have been ignored, for the past 60 years at least. Turning back the clock on those consumer expectations is going to be very painful.
I'm also extremely worried about the rise of industrial meat production in the developing world, but it seems elitist of wealthy Americans to complain about Chinese agriculture standards when we can't even fix it in our own backyard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Resistance to antibiotics would take us back to 1900, not to the brink of annihilation. My point isn't to dismiss the problem, just that it would mean things like surgery being much riskier, not massive die offs.
Population of the UK and Ireland 1900: 40m Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 1900: 295m Population of the UK and Ireland 2019: 68m (+70%) Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 2019: 1,700m (+576%)
Source paper https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6459/eaaw1944.ful... >From 2000 to 2018, the proportion of antimicrobial compounds with resistance higher than 50% (P50) increased from 0.15 to 0.41 in chickens and from 0.13 to 0.34 in pigs and plateaued between 0.12 and 0.23 in cattle. >Globally, 73% of all antimicrobials sold on Earth are used in animals raised for food. Jeeeesus. It sure feels like humanity…
Take this paper for example. See figure 2? Those numbers come directly from the trend lines on those figures. But look closely at the data. The shading effectively represents how much data they have each year. In the "Chickens" figure there is a box plot in 2000 that is barely discernible, but if you look carefully you see that the distribution matches recent years. How convenient that that data was hidden, since it directly refutes their conclusions.
In fact, the fact that they used bar graphs here is extremely questionable when a scatter plot would far better represent the data. We'd easily be able to glean what the box plots are trying to hide: that the data is extremely noisy, that past data is almost non-existent, and that every year the range of their distribution is nearly 0%-100%.
While there might indeed be an effect in the data over time, the fact is that the effect is far smaller than year-to-year variability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Resistance to antibiotics would take us back to 1900, not to the brink of annihilation. My point isn't to dismiss the problem, just that it would mean things like surgery being much riskier, not massive die offs.
Population of the UK and Ireland 1900: 40m Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 1900: 295m Population of the UK and Ireland 2019: 68m (+70%) Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 2019: 1,700m (+576%)
That’s not a great post title IMHO and doesn’t match the article. It implies that farm animals are refusing to take their tablets... Why not just go with “Alarm as antimicrobial resistance surges among chickens, pigs and cattle” as per the Nature article?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Population of the UK and Ireland 1900: 40m Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 1900: 295m Population of the UK and Ireland 2019: 68m (+70%) Population of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh 2019: 1,700m (+576%)
That's due to agriculture and lack of synthetic fertilizer, not antibiotics.
"Earth's phosphorus is being depleted at an alarming rate. At current consumption levels, we will run out of known phosphorus reserves in around 80 years, but consumption will not stay at current levels. Nearly 90% of phosphorus is used in the global food supply chain, most of it in crop fertilizers. If no action is taken to quell fertilizer use, demand is likely to increase exponentially."
Well, if course they are. Chinese farmers use antibiotics like candy. Even the stuff that the West considers reserve antibiotics of last resort. There is zero possibility of any Western pressure making them stop. Look also at the CO2 they emit and the plastic they dump in the ocean. The CCP has only two modes, rising living standards by questionable means, and mass die-offs of the population. This is the strategy of…
No, western pressure could certainly stop the CCP, but there's no political will for it. Especially not when the west is too busy self-flagellating itself over its own real and imagined wrongdoings.