Maryn McKenna
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'Big Chicken': The Medical Mystery That Traced Back To Slaughterhouse Workers
Reimert Ravenholt, a physician at the Seattle Department of Public Health, was puzzled. It was the winter of 1956, and for weeks now, local doctors had been calling him, describing blue-collar men coming into their offices with hot, red rashes and swollen boils running up their arms. The men were feverish and in so much pain they had to stay home from work, sometimes for weeks...
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Antibiotic-Brined Chicken amd Other Bad Ideas from US Farming
These days, the only thing more American than apple pie is eating an animal raised on antibiotics. Eighty percent of antibiotics sold in the US go not to human patients, but to the nation’s plate-bound pigs, cows, turkeys, and chickens. As these wonder drugs became a mainstay of modern agriculture, factory farms began churning out another, far less welcome commodity—antibiotic resistant bacteria. These deadly new microbial threats are expected to claim the lives of 10 million people by 2050. How did this happen? And where does it end?...
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Farm Antibiotics: Still Headed In The Wrong Direction
New federal data released at the end of last week indicates that sales of antibiotics for use in food animals in the United States are still rising, despite public pressure to change the practice and condemnation by medicine that farm misuse and overuse is contributing to antibiotic resistance that threatens human health. That’s not good. It’s especially not good because the numbers just released cover the year 2014—the first year in a voluntary three-year period, set by the Food and Drug Administration, during which use of farm antibiotics is supposed to be reduced. If agriculture and the veterinary pharma industry didn’t manage reductions in Year 1, they have a hard task ahead of them to create significant change in Years 2 and 3...
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FDA Antimicrobial Resistance Guidelines Fail to Address Root Causes
Last December, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published two controversial documents on its website: Guidance 213 and the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD). The guidelines stirred a firestorm of protests from public health offiicials who argue that the guidelines are too weak to prevent the continuing growth of antibiotic resistant germs...the crisis, as outlined by Dr. Joseph Mercola, is that we are now "facing the perfect storm to take us back to the pre-antibiotic age, when some of the most important advances in modern medicine – intensive care, organ transplants, care for premature babies, surgeries and even treatment for many common bacterial infections – will no longer be possible." Read More »
How Congress Ignored Science and Fueled Antibiotic Resistance
The study was being conducted by Dr. Stuart B. Levy, a researcher in Boston. Levy was 36 in 1974. He was the son of a family doctor from Delaware and had grown up accompanying his father on house calls and discussing cases afterward. He was a faculty member at Tufts University School of Medicine, in a part of Boston that is gentrified now but was cheap and seedy then, and he had taken a circuitous route to get there, studying first literature, then medicine, and then microbiology in Italy and France...
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