Obama Administration Looking to Ban Routine Antibiotics in Animals

I've written several posts about the deleterious effects of antibiotics in the livestock that we raise for food including (but not limited to) the encouragement of drug resistance in strains of bacteria that infect animals and humans. For this reason, the Obama administration is proposing to ban or restrict the use of antibiotics in livestock:

In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.

Both practices lead to the development of bacteria that are immune to many treatments, he said.

The hearing was held to discuss a measure proposed by Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Rules Committee. It would ban seven classes of antibiotics important to human health from being used in animals, and would restrict other antibiotics to therapeutic and some preventive uses.

The legislation is supported by the American Medical Association, among other groups, but opposed by farm organizations like the National Pork Producers Council. The farm lobby’s opposition makes its passage unlikely, but advocates are hoping to include the measure in the legislation to revamp the health care system.

In no way is it considered good medical practice to give antibiotics to otherwise healthy people to prevent illness, and the only reason the same is done with livestock is because doing so helps to hide the damage modern factory farming methods do to the animals they are used upon. Removing antibiotics as a crutch will force an improvement (however slight) in how animals are treated, and is good for the public health. However it's passage comes about, this is legislation that we have long been need of.

Pig Farms and MRSA

Nicholas Kristof writes about a disturbing correlation between factory pig farming in Indiana and a unusual new disease that is in all likelihood the result of the overuse of antibiotics on these farms.   

Seriously?

All my food chiding aside, I like meat as much as any American male. But seriously, this is just gross:

This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness. A fresh audience could be ready to discover it on Super Bowl Sunday.

[...]

Mr. Day, a systems administrator who has been barbecuing since college, suggested doing something with a pile of sausage. “It’s a variation of what’s called a fattie in the barbecue community,” Mr. Day said. “But we took it to the extreme.”

He bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, he thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight.

They then stuck the roll — containing at least 5,000 calories and 500 grams of fat — in the Good-One Open Range backyard smoker that they use for practice. (In competitions, they use a custom-built smoker designed by the third member of the team, Bryant Gish, who was not present at the creation of the Bacon Explosion.)

Mr. Chronister explained that the Bacon Explosion “got so much traction on the Web because it seems so over the top.” But Mr. Chronister, an Internet marketer from Kansas City, Mo., did what he could to help it along. He first used Twitter to send short text messages about the recipe to his 1,200 Twitter followers, many of them fellow Internet marketers with extensive social networks. He also posted links on social networking sites. “I used a lot of my connections to get it out there and to push it,” he said.

The Bacon Explosion posting has since been viewed about 390,000 times. It first found a following among barbecue fans, but quickly spread to sites run by outdoor enthusiasts, off-roaders and hunters. (Several proposed venison-sausage versions.) It also got mentions on the Web site of Air America, the liberal radio network, and National Review, the conservative magazine. Jonah Goldberg at NationalReview.com wrote, “There must be a reason one reader after another sends me this every couple hours.” Conservatives4palin.com linked, too.

Fun and games, and I think experimentation with food is a fine idea. But seriously, this thing is a roll of bacon around a roll of sausage around cooked bacon. That is A LOT of meat. And it's popular because our food habits in this country our founded on how much meat we can possibly stuff in our grills; many families around the world are lucky to see this much meat in one month. The fact that it seems to be so popular with conservatives only further condemns it.

Anyway, try it if you like. But after that, seriously, have a salad or something.

Ouch

One researcher predicts that by 2040, almost half of Dallas County residents will be considered obese:

State demographer Karl Eschbach, the study’s author, predicts that 46 percent of Dallas County adults will be obese by 2040 without a big prevention push.

Eschbach expressed alarm that statewide, more than one-fifth of adults 18 to 25 were obese in 2007 – up from 10 percent in 2000.

“The increases are of tremendous concern,” said Eschbach, a demography professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio.

Well, I'm doing my part. How about you?

Nut Allergies a "Yuppie Invention"

So says Joel Stein (via Boing Boing) filling the niche of "knee-jerk reactionary columnist who over-reacts to a not very important issue and thereby minimizes a real problem." For a considerably more reasonable reponse, try this less entertaining but more informative article instead. 

Interesting Stuff

Because our focus has primarily been on the elections and all that entails, there are several items I've wanted to blog about but haven't had time to. So here I'll try to hit them all at once.

First, here's an interesting piece from Newsweek on the "flexitarian", which is sort of a hybrid between the vegetarian and the full-on meat eater. Given the unsustainability of factory farming and our meat-eating practices, any effort to reduct the amount of meat we eat is a good thing. And it has the benefit of reducing the suffering of animals consigned to factory farms. This should be the primary purpose in my opinion, but I realize that most Americans either don't care or aren't aware of how much suffering animals endure to produce cheap meat, dairy products and eggs. So despite the claim of a strident PETA official in the article that eating less meat is "beating one pig down the slaughter ramp instead of two" (as if the suffering of one less animal is something to be dismissed) I'm all for people simply doing the best they can to eat less meat. Change takes time.

Also, via Slashdot, Live Science has an article about a novel theory of the universe, that we live in a "cosmic bubble" that is simply one tiny part of an infinitely larger universe, a theory that provides an alternative explanation to dark matter for why our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. In short, our under-density part of the universe would warp space-time differently than the typically dense part of the universe we're observing when we look at things like quasars that are billions of light years distant; that warp then provides the illusion that those objects are rushing away from us at fantastic speeds. Honestly, I don't know if that's any crazier than the universe being comprised mostly of matter we can neither see no detect (or can we?) but there you go.

Speaking of all things dark, Slashdot has another interesting post on Google's efforts to make the "dark web" searchable. The dark web consist of things like PDF files and or scanned documents (like reports and academic papers) that now do not show up in search results. An even greater wealth of information may be at your fingertips soon.

PRI's The World has a good series of radio articles called "How Wars End." Amateur students of history such as myself, as well as the public at large, have acquired various myths about how wars in our history have ended. PRI, in interviews with historians, complicates our myths to some extent. There are several examples, but I found the one on the end of our civil war to be the most interesting. Most people presume that the war ended all at once that fateful day in April 1865 at Appomattox, and amateur historians like myself are aware that Lee turned down the idea of an insurgency that would drag the war on even longer. But the true story is a little more nuanced. It's not that greater facts are uncovered; rather, it's our understanding of the war's end that should be modified. Though there was no unified insurgency during the occupation and reconstruction of the South, southerners certainly did resist occupation with force, committing acts of terror against emancipated blacks and attacking northern forces. Twelve years of political violence eventually sapped the will of northern politicians to continue occupying the south, but even then the violence did not end, as acts of terror were perpetrated against blacks all the way up until and through the civil rights era. Again, this picture doesn't really present any new facts so much as it challenges our understanding of the end of the civil war, as well as the nature of insurgencies themselves. I recommend listening to the program in full.

Also, by now you've no doubt heard of the numerous instances of wrongly convicted men being freed in Dallas County by virtue of DNA testing. This is the direct result of Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins having launched an ambitious program to review hundreds of convictions to determine if men and women were wrongly convicted. However, not all District Attorneys and law enforcement agencies are as eager to expose or rectify their mistakes. Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that will determine whether convicted criminals have a constitutional right to DNA testing that could prove their innocence. The Ninth Court of Appeals said they do; we'll see what the Supreme Court has to say about that.

Also, the NY Times reported on Monday (feels like two weeks ago) that Afghan officials likely aided the Taliban in an attack on an American outpost in July that was very nearly overrun. This is yet another sign of the increasing nastiness of the war in Afghanistan, though it should hardly come as a surprise that some in the Afghan government (at the local level, or perhaps higher) have loyalties hostile to the Karzai government and our forces.

Infant Mortality Declines

Last year we wrote about the increase in the infant morality rate in the South. There's some good news today; the infant mortality rate nationwide declined in 2006. The bad news? The rate of 6.71 deaths per 1,000 live births still puts the U.S. at 29th in the world, tied with Poland and Slovakia. The U.S. might be doing better but for a rise in pre-term births, and we are apparently not doing so well regarding the number of women who die in childbirth as well:

Women in the United States have a 1-in-4,800 lifetime risk of dying in labor, according to a 2007 United Nations report—much higher than the 1-in-48,000 rate in top-ranked Ireland. In fact, the United States ranked a dismal 41st out of an analysis of 171 nations, which included underdeveloped countries like Sierra Leone. Even more troubling is that our mortality rate is the highest that it has been in decades, according to the latest report from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Both sets of numbers can be pegged generally to the lack of adequate healthcare for many moms in our country, as well as rise in obesity and a rise in the number of c-sections being conducted (many out of convenience) and rising maternal age. Fixing the problem can only be done by addressing the fundamental inadequacies of health care in our country.

Fort Worth Bans Roadside Sales

The City of Fort Worth has moved to ban the roadside sale of animals:

The council's action makes it illegal to sell, exchange, trade, barter, lease, rent, give away or display for a commercial purpose any live animal on any roadside, public right of way, parkway, median, park, playground, swimming pool, other recreational area, flea market, or commercial or retail parking lot that is generally accessible to the public, regardless of whether such access is authorized. Exceptions are provided for animal rescue organizations, pet stores, and other scientific, educational and entertainment entities that display but don’t sell or give away animals.

Anyone violating the ban on roadside sales could face a fine as high as $2,000 for each offense.

The measure was cited as one of necessity based on public health concerns, as animals have been sold recently that carried diseases dangerous to other animals or to human. But the ability to sell their animals is what encourages amateur "breeders" and irresponsible pet owners to avoid having their animals neutered or spayed. The threat of a hefty fine will discourage the sale of these animals to some extent, as I'm sure these people do their best business setting up outside of malls and large retailers. But other outlets exist, and the measure does not ban the sale of animals from private property. Every little bit helps though.

FDA Regulation of Nicotine On The Horizon

We here at TWM have in the past called for legislation that would grant the FDA authority to regulate nicotine as a drug, and it appears that Congress is finally close to granting such authority. Such a move is long overdue considering the cigarette manufacturer's well-documented lack of regard for human life. The Bush administration is opposed (you expected otherwise) but the best reason not to enact such legislation that Congressional Republicans can come up with is that the FDA already has enough on it's plate, a flimsy excuse even were it to happen to be true (and one that manufacturers like RJ Reynolds have been quick to include in none-too-convincing ads.) Of course, oversight will hardly begin to make up for the enormous cost in life and public money that decades of illegality produced, but it is a start to bringing an end to an era in which American companies could produce a product that, when it works as intended, kills people.

Kidney Theft

When somebody can make a buck by going to India and stealing some poor guy's kidney then yeah, it's time for reform of the organ donation system. A market is one way to go, if you think it's okay to make a buck off an organ as long as it's procured legally. Another method might be for the government to pay donors or their families for their organs. Or there's the approach Britain is considering adopting, instituting presumed consent and requiring people to opt-out of the organ donation system. But a system in which thousands die each year for want of organs that are simply put in the ground to rot, something has to be done.

Work it!

Or in other words, get off your ass and get some exercise!

Physically active people have cells that look younger on a molecular level than those of couch potatoes, according to new research that offers a fundamental new clue into how exercise may help stave off aging.

The study, involving more than 2,400 British twins, found for the first time that exercise appears to slow the shriveling of the protective tips on bundles of genes inside cells, perhaps keeping frailty at bay.

"These data suggest that the act of exercising may actually protect the body against the aging process," said Tim D. Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College in London who led the study, published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Telomeres cap the ends of chromosomes, the structures that carry genes. Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. When the telomeres get too short, the cell can no longer divide. Scientists believe that aging occurs as more and more cells reach the end of their telomeres and die -- muscles weaken, skin wrinkles, eyesight and hearing fade, organs fail, and thinking clouds.

The length of the twins' telomeres was directly related to their activity levels, the researchers found. People who did a moderate amount of exercise -- about 100 minutes a week of activity such as tennis, swimming or running -- had telomeres that on average looked like those of someone about five or six years younger than those who did the least -- about 16 minutes a week. Those who did the most -- doing about three hours a week of moderate to vigorous activity-- had telomeres that appeared to be about nine years younger than those who did the least.

Of course, medical researchers have long told us that exercise can stave off disease. The rationale has been that exercise has macro effects on the body that prevent disease, like strengthening the heart, or reducing insulin resistance, for example. But this appears to be the first large study to document the ways in which exercise can produce change on the cellular level which might actually lengthen the life of cells in our body. So the lesson is clear: eat and drink plenty of garlic and resveratrol, get lots of exercise, and quit eating so much meat, and who knows how long you might hang around?

No More Meat

Or at least less of it. The days of cheap and plentiful meat are coming to an end:

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

Obviously, that rate of consumption is unsustainable. There simply isn't enough room in the world to grow all that meat, at least without devastating side effects on the environment and the world's poor:

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.

This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher prices for feed divert production away from food crops. The demand for ethanol is already pushing up prices, and explains, in part, the 40 percent rise last year in the food price index calculated by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization.

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

Mark Bittman also documents the deleterious side effects that excessive meat consumption has on us as well. To keep up with the high demand for cheap meat, factory farms raise animals in appalling conditions and drug them with hormone and antibiotics so that they'll grow faster and live long enough to be killed for food. This of course is plainly cruel to the animals raised in such conditions, but it isn't good for us other. And factory farmers have every incentive to get sick and dying animals into the food chain, as this article demonstrates:

Video footage being released today shows workers at a California slaughterhouse delivering repeated electric shocks to cows too sick or weak to stand on their own; drivers using forklifts to roll the "downer" cows on the ground in efforts to get them to stand up for inspection; and even a veterinary version of waterboarding in which high-intensity water sprays are shot up animals' noses -- all violations of state and federal laws designed to prevent animal cruelty and to keep unhealthy animals, such as those with mad cow disease, out of the food supply.

One reason that regulations call for keeping downers -- cows that cannot stand up -- out of the food supply is that they may harbor bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. It is caused by a virus-like infectious particle that can cause a fatal brain disease in people.

Another is because such animals have, in many cases, been wallowing in feces, posing added risks of E. coli and salmonella contamination.

Yes we have plenty of laws on the books banning these sorts of cruel, inhumane, dangerous and short-sighted practices. But if you think these practices are isolated, think again (read Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" or Matthew Scully's "Dominion" if you want to know what really goes on in these places.)This goes on all the time because the Agriculture Department doesn't have the regulations or practices in place to stop it, and because the profit motive of factory farmers encourages them to push dying animals into the food supply, even if they happen to be dying of mad cow disease.

But this system is simply unsustainable. Animals raised for food eat food that many of the world's people desperately need to eat, they compete with us for space, they damage the environment, and our practice of raising them in horrendous conditions is cruel to them and damaging to our public health. Bittman also describes the various alternatives available, including raising animals in more humane and less restricted conditions. Though most Americans will not be willing to consider a change in what's on the dinner table based on environmental impact and cruelty alone, we may all find ourselves priced out of cheap meat whether we're ready to change or not. And that can't happen soon enough.

UPDATE: The USDA has suspended Westland's contracts with the government while they investigate, but if you wish to encourage a most robust investigation, visit the Humane Society's website to send an email to the USDA. Westland Meat Co., the owners of the meat packing plant where these acts took place, has replaced their website with a statement about the video and a pledge to clean up their operations. But if you'd like to send them an email, this address should do: info@westlandmeat.com. Or their phone/fax is available here.

FDA Decision A Bad Idea

You may have heard that the FDA has given a green light to the cloning of animals for human consumption. Like me, you may have cringed at the thought of eating animals that are essentially copies of each other. But what's the big deal, if there's nothing inherently wrong with the products of these animals? Verlyn Klinkenborg explains why we should be concerned:

I think the clearest way to understand the problem with cloning is to consider a broader question: Who benefits from it? Proponents will say that the consumer does, because we will get higher quality, more consistent foods from cloned animals. But the real beneficiaries are the nation’s large meatpacking companies — the kind that would like it best if chickens grew in the shape of nuggets. Anyone who really cares about food — its different tastes, textures and delights — is more interested in diversity than uniformity.

As it happens, the same is true for anyone who cares about farmers and their animals. An agricultural system that favors cloned animals has no room for farmers who farm in different ways. Cloning, you will hear advocates say, is just another way of making cows. But every other way — even using embryo transplants and artificial insemination — allows nature to shuffle the genetic deck. A clone does not.

To me, this striving for uniformity is the driving and destructive force of modern agriculture. You begin with a wide array of breeds, a truly diverse pool of genes. As time passes, you impose stricter and stricter economic constraints upon those breeds and on the men and women who raise them. One by one, the breeds that don’t meet the prevailing economic model are weeded out. By the beginning of the 21st century, you’ve moved from the broad base of a genetic pyramid to its nearly vanishing peak, which is to say that the genetic diversity present in the economically acceptable breeds of modern livestock is minute. Then comes cloning, and we leave behind all variation.

Cloning is not unnatural. It is natural for humans to experiment, to try anything and everything. Nor is cloning that different from anything else we’ve seen in modern agriculture. It is another way of shifting genetic ownership from farmers to corporations. It is another way of creating still greater economic and genetic concentration in an industry that has already pushed concentration past the limits of ethical and environmental acceptability.

It always bears repeating that humans are only as rich as the diversity that surrounds them, whether we mean cultural or economic diversity. The same is true of genetic diversity, which is an essential bulwark against disease.

So, although there may nothing different about the meat that comes from a cloned animal as opposed to a "naturally" born one, the cloning of animals for human consumption will only further weaken the health of our food supply. Already, factory farms pump animals full of hormones and anti-biotics because of the conditions in which these animals are raised, and the extent to which they desire these animals to grow is extremely unhealthy for the animals and produces animals that are more prone to disease. As Klinkenborg states, cloning will reduce genetic diversity, by gradually reducing the number of genetic lines that are used to breed offspring. Reduced genetic diversity increases the risk of disease (as this example illustrates) as diseases adapt to a particular lineage, and reduces the ability of a species to adapt to unknown diseases that may fell most individuals of a species, except for those that are disease resistent as a result of genetic variation. For example, imagine that a majority of America's chicken products come from a single line of chickens bred for their ability to bulk up or lay bigger eggs. Then imagine that small change in the DNA of avian flu allows the disease to exploit a vulnerability in that specific lineage. Where before you might have had only a substantial number of poultry dying from a disease, now you face the possibility of all of them dying, as the genetic diversity that provides hope that some members will be able to resist a particular disease is missing.

And Klinkenborg alludes to the fact that farming corporations will not stop at merely cloning animals. They will want to genetically modify them as well, as we already do with plants, in an effort to get at the same results that breeding does, only faster. They will manipulate them in a manner that produces the most productive and efficient animal, even if that animal looks like a freak to our eyes. Should our aesthetic sensibilities be the only thing that stands in the way of such animals, modified and cloned to serve as food? No, not when such manipulation may result in whole lines of animals that are dangerously vulnerable to diseases that will kill them, or us.

Lastly, cloning animals for food betrays a wanton disrespect for those animals and for nature. Yes, I know that a cloned animal could be raised on a free-range farm just as easily as a naturally borne one. That's not what's going to happen, because cloning is indicative of an attitude that values the animals only for what they provide to us, an attitude in which any treatment of an animal is permissible so long as it results in better tastes or cost savings.

So don't buy into any hysteria about cloned animals being "monsters" and unfit for consumption. It's not true. But there are very real and serious problems with cloning animals that we ought to be concerned about, and maybe it would be wise to take a pass on eating them after all if that's what it takes to get the big farm corporations' attentions.

Your Babies Are Not Safe...

...from political corruption and influence:

In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.

Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.

The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter, the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were "grateful" for his staff's intervention to stop health officials from "scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding," and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads.

Some senior HHS officials involved in the deliberations over the ad campaign defended the outcome, saying the final ads raised the profile of breast-feeding while following the scientific evidence available then -- which they say did not fully support the claims of the original ad campaign.

But other current and former HHS officials say the muting of the ads was not the only episode in which HHS missed a chance to try to raise the breast-feeding rate. In April, according to officials and documents, the department chose not to promote a comprehensive analysis by its own Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of multiple studies on breast-feeding, which generally found it was associated with fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome.

The report did not assert a direct cause and effect, because doing so would require studies in which some women are told not to breast-feed their infants -- a request considered unethical, given the obvious health benefits of the practice.

A top HHS official said that at the time, Suzanne Haynes, an epidemiologist and senior science adviser for the department's Office on Women's Health, argued strongly in favor of promoting the new conclusions in the media and among medical professionals. But her office, which commissioned the report, was specifically instructed by political appointees not to disseminate a news release.

So, "senior officials" at HHS-political appointees, of course-weakened the power of the ads because they believed the science didn't "support" the claims made in the ad. It's only coincidence that infant formula lobby just so happened to want the ads softened as well and quite vigorously told Thompson and his staff of their desires. I'm sure had they not, Thompson and his staff would have changed the ads anyway-in accordance with their own beliefs-after rigorous study of the scientific evidence available. Or not.

See, the thing about breast-feeding is that it is actually better for an infant. So much so that the radicals at the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that women should exclusively breast-feed their infant for at least the first six months of its life, unless they have a compelling health reason not to. Breast-feeding rates are lower in American than in the rest of the developed world, but they are rising steadily. Of course this is a problem for the manufacturers of infant formula who, who see their revenues dropping with each successful public health campaign to raise breast-feeding rates.

Who knows whether stronger ads would be more effective? Perhaps they would be, perhaps not. The problem is all scientific evidence indicates that breast-feeding is better for infants, and political considerations should not be a factor in how soft or strong an ad campaign is. Of course that's completely obvious to you or I; it's only in the hyper-politicized current administration that this fact bears reminding.

"Sanctuary"

An article in today's NY Times reports on the growing success of the animal rights/welfare movement in altering the nation's eating habits:

...all of these believers have learned that with less stridency comes more respect and influence in food politics. So they no longer concentrate their energy on burning effigies of Colonel Sanders and stealing chickens. They don’t demonize meat — with the exception of foie gras and veal — or the people who produce it. Instead, they use softer rhetoric, focusing on a campaign even committed carnivores can get behind: better conditions for farm animals.

Activists have adopted a variety of approaches:

Certainly, concerns over health and food safety, and a growing interest in where food comes from among consumers and chefs, has made animal welfare an easier sell.

Technology has helped savvy activists deliver their message, too — specifically mass e-mail, easily concealed cameras and the ability to quickly distribute images online, like footage of slaughterhouses and the 2004 spoof “The Meatrix.”

They have also learned to harness the power of celebrity in a tabloid culture, courting as spokespeople anyone famous who might have recently put down steak tartare in favor of vegetable carpaccio.

Beyond image polishing, animal rights groups also learned how to marshal resources and set up a classic “good-cop, bad-cop” dynamic to put farm animal welfare on legislative agendas. The Chicago foie gras ban was passed because the nation’s largest animal rights groups coordinated their strategies, according to several who were involved.

Like PETA, the Humane Society has purchased enough stock in corporations like Tyson, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Smithfield’s to have the legal clout to introduce resolutions.

[Head of the Humane Society] Mr. Pacelle understands that not everyone is going to stop eating animals, so he focuses on what he calls the three R’s: refinement of farming techniques, reducing meat consumption and replacement of animal products. That way, he hopes, the Humane Society tent is big enough to include both ardent meat eaters and hard-core vegans.

And that's a laudable goal. I think in the past animal rights activists have been guilty of the same hubris that sometimes infects idealogues of all stripes. Believing themselves to be on the morally correct side of what they see as a critical issue leads them to be strident, obnoxious and morally righteous. This has been a problem for PETA, whose members have difficulty learning the lesson that you can't disgust people into not eating food by waving chicken bones and blood in their face. I think a lot of people who adopt that approach have trouble remembering that if you can convince just a small percentage of people to not eat animals, or to choose to eat humanely raised animals, you've still improved the conditions for untold numbers of animals, even if you haven't improved the conditions for all animals everywhere. And I think animal welfare activists have to accept that there's a percentage of the American people who really don't care about animals or the horrible conditions they can be raised in; they just don't care what happens to their food before it arrives on their plate. But I firmly believe that a majority of Americans would alter their eating habits to one degree or another if they were more fully informed of how animals are raised for food and the negative consequences the food industry has on our health and the environment. But to change their eating habits requires a balanced approach of educating the public and confronting companies that stubbornly resist changes in how they raise animals. I strongly doubt that Americans can ever be persuaded to give up animal products entirely (nor do I believe they should) but I think we are witnessing the very beginning of the end of the ear of "factory farming", even if that ultimate end is still decades away.

Hormones and Milk

Dr. Henry Miller, writing in today's NY Times, tells us not to worry about the use of a bovine growth hormone, rBST, to increase milk production in cows:

One way to ease the shortage and lower the prices is to take greater advantage of a proven 13-year-old biological technology that stimulates milk production in dairy cows — a protein called recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), or bovine growth hormone. The protein, produced naturally by a cow’s pituitary, is one of the substances that control its milk production. It can be made in large quantities with gene-splicing (recombinant DNA) techniques. The gene-spliced and natural versions are identical.

When rBST is injected into cows, their digestive systems become more efficient at converting feed to milk. It induces the average cow, which produces about eight gallons of milk each day, to make nearly a gallon more. More feed, water, barn space and grazing land are devoted to milk production, rather than other aspects of bovine metabolism, so that you get seven cows’ worth of milk from six.

This may not seem like a big deal, but when applied widely the effects are profound. For every million cows treated with rBST each year, 6.6 billion gallons of water (enough to supply 26,000 homes) are conserved, according to Monsanto, which makes rBST. With much of the nation enduring a drought and many cities in the West experiencing water shortages, this is a significant benefit.

The amount of animal feed consumed each year by those million rBST-supplemented cows is reduced by more than three billion pounds. This helps to keep the lid on corn prices, even as much of the nation’s corn harvest is diverted to producing ethanol for cars. And the amount of land required to raise the cattle and grow their food is reduced by more than 417 square miles.

At the same time, more than 5.5 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel (enough to power 8,800 homes) are saved, greenhouse gas emissions are lowered by 30,000 metric tons (because fewer cows means less methane produced by bovine intestinal tracts), and manure production is decreased by about 3.6 million tons, reducing the chances of runoff getting into waterways and groundwater.

Comprehensive studies by academics and government regulatory agencies around the world have found no differences in the composition of milk or meat from rBST-supplemented cows.

He goes on to dispute assertions that rbST isn't safe for people, and concludes thusly:

Cynical activists have unfairly stigmatized a scientifically proven product that has consistently delivered economic and environmental benefits to dairy farmers and consumers. In a more rational world, they would embrace — and enlightened consumers would demand — milk with a label that boasted, “A Proud Product of rBST-Supplemented Cows.”

That will never happen. Why? Because for all of the supposed benefits, there are some significant drawbacks that Dr. Miller fails to mention. It's true that no study shows that rBST can be detected in milk produced by cows given the hormone. However, Dr. Miller leaves out the fact that cows treated with rBST are not as healthy, and are more prone to conditions that require treatment with antibiotics than cows that are not treated with rBST. Now you may not care much about the welfare of the cows that produce milk, but the the antibiotics used to treat them certainly do survive the pasteurization process and end up in the milk we drink, thus promoting antiobiotic resistence not only in cows but in us as well. Those antibiotics-and hormones-also end up in groundwater, so that even if you're not getting them in your milk, you might be getting them in the water you drink. And as you can well imagine, drug companies-like Monsanto, which produces rBST-are not encouraging dairy farmers to use the hormone out of the goodness of their hearts.

The problem is not one of bovine milk production. The problem is one of unsustainable factory farming. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a glass of milk. Humans have been consuming the products of other animals for as long as they and those animals have been around. But we're not entitled to cheap milk ("got milk?" campaigns notwithstanding) and our efforts to keep it cheap and plentiful are damaging to the environment, damaging to us, and harmful and cruel to the cows we use to produce the milk. All of the benefits to the environment that Dr. Miller touts above as a benefit or rBST could just as easily be obtained by drinking less milk. If reducing the use of hormones in cows reduces the use of antiobiotics and raises the price of milk, thus reducing our exposure to antibiotics and growth hormones, this is a good thing for us (and the cows.)

UPDATE: As they say, great minds think alike.

Infant Mortality Up

NPR reports that the infant mortality rate in some Southern states (specifically Mississippi) is on the rise:

The most recent statistics show Mississippi had the biggest increase in the number of babies dying in their first year of life.

Historically, the state has had a higher infant-mortality rate than most of the country. But between 2004 and 2005, the number of babies dying in the state increased almost two points — to 11.4 deaths per 1,000 births.

No one seems to know exactly what the cause is, but there appear to be several contributing factors:

[Social worker] Johnson says even though Brown is on Medicaid and considered high risk, she can't see a specialist. "It's so rural that women have to travel 36 to 40 miles one way to see a doctor," Johnson says. "When they go in, patients see a nurse practitioner. They see a physician in the eighth month [of pregnancy]."

Another problem, according to Johnson, is that many doctors in rural areas do not accept Medicaid.

To apply for Medicaid, women now need an original birth certificate, and they must appear in person. Many critics say this new policy is preventing women and babies from getting the medical care they need.

Race is another factor that contributes to the higher infant-mortality rate in Mississippi and the rest of the South. Nationally, black mothers are twice as likely to lose their babies as white mothers, and in Mississippi, about half of all babies are born to African-American women.

Even well-educated, affluent black women are more likely to have problem pregnancies than their white counterparts, but it's not clear why.

What can be done about it?

Getting high-risk women medical and prenatal care when they are pregnant is not enough, Dr. Brann says. Medical experts should also monitor women between pregnancies to make sure they stay healthy and take care of any ongoing medical issues. A pilot program launched in Atlanta is addressing this need.

The cost of providing ongoing medical care for these women is about $2,000 a year. The cost of treating babies born prematurely — some with severe health problems — is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per child. Many never leave the hospital.

And why should we do this?

Sandy Reynolds' son, Jeremiah, weighed just 1 pound, 15 ounces when he was born. He lived 11 months in a neonatal intensive care unit in Jackson, Miss.

Reynolds and her husband spent at least three days a week with their son.

"We dressed him up for Halloween and we had Christmas with him," she says. "We never treated him like he was a sick baby."

But Jeremiah's underdeveloped lungs were so susceptible to infection that he died the day after Christmas last year, without ever going home. Reynolds still grieves.

"God gave us 11 months, and I don't take back any of that time, because we enjoyed every day that we went with him," she says.

This is the fourth child she has lost in 12 years.

If that doesn't break your heart, then you're not human.

I could launch into an anti-Bush screed here at this point, but the truth is problems like this are the fault and the responsibility of all of us. Poor people have enormous hurdles to overcome, but they have to be motivated to overcome them. Public health experts need to study this issue and inform the public as to possible solutions. We all need to understand that there's really no excuse for infants to be born too soon, or sick, or die as a result of a lack of health care for their mothers. This is only one symptom of the terribly inequitable state of health care in this country today, but it's perhaps the most tragic of all.

UPDATE: Here's some context for those numbers above, from Heather Hurlburt at Democracy Arsenal:

Mississippi's rate, 11.1 deaths per thousand babies, is worse than post-Communist states like Hungary and Poland, and Latin American countries like Costa Rica and Chile, all of which have lower per capita incomes. What country most closely matches Mississippi's rate, I wondered while listening to the story? So I went and looked it up.

Russia.

Yeah, it's that bad.

Reprehensible

I'm not sure that this is an indictment of the health-care system in America (awful as it is) so much as it's an indictment of man's inhumanity to man, but either way it's disgusting.

Grass vs. Feed

No, this post is not necessarily a survey of agricultural techniques. Well okay, it is. But in the context of an earlier discussion I had on the unwise course of giving a powerful antibiotic to cows, is this post from Brad Plumer on the unsustainability of current farming techniques, and a surprising fact about the amount of energy feedlot vs. grass-fed cows consume:

Lipow points out that grass-fed cattle actually produce about the same amount of food per acre as feedlot cattle (once you factor in all the corn and grain needed to feed the latter). Grass-fed cattle use a fraction of the fossil fuel energy that feedlot cattle do. It's a more sustainable farming technique. And on the whole, it costs less. So why are feedlots so popular?

The obvious answer is that government policies favor the existing large feedlot ranchers. Obscene farm subsidies make corn and soy exceedingly cheap—and hence, lower the costs of feedlots. Large ranchers tend to have a good thing going, and see no reason to mess with it; instead it's easier just to lobby for regulations that favor large industrial farms. This is partly what Michael Pollan was alluding to in his fab New York Times Magazine piece on the madness of Congress' annual farm bill. Fiddling with that wouldn't solve all the world's problems, but it'd be a nice start.

In other words, it's not so much our eating habits that have us consuming vast herds of cows raised on feedlots, but deliberate legislative efforts on the part of Congress. This is actually quite encouraging as we are more likely to change Congressional policy than we are our desire for cheap and tasty hamburgers anytime soon.

Human Antibiotic Considered for Use in Cows

Giving powerful antibiotics to animals that serve as food is not something we should be doing, as this LA Times editorial points out:

The drug, cefquinome, belongs to a class of antibiotics used as a last line of defense for patients with weakened immune systems, such as the elderly or children with cancer. The veterinary drug company Intervet wants to use cefquinome as a treatment mostly for bovine respiratory disease, a common illness in cattle that are shipped and corralled in feedlots. Crowded and stressed, these cattle are more susceptible to the disease.

Unlike other antibiotics that are routinely added to livestock feed to prevent disease and promote growth, cefquinome must be injected and could be used only with a prescription. But so-called shipping fever is common and costly enough in cattle that medical groups are rightly alarmed that the use of cefquinome would become routine or even preventive. The American Medical Assn. and American Public Health Assn. are among several health organizations opposing cefquinome as a treatment for cattle.

Changing farming practices would go a long way toward reducing the spread of the disease, but that's not on the livestock industry's agenda.

No it's not, because that would be more expensive and would raise the cost of beef. But our current system is unhealthy for the animals, unhealthy for us, and is unsustainable and immoral. That the livestock industry even wants to give to cows an an antibiotic that's reserved for people with cancer-and trust me it will become routine-is a sign that it's past time for our practices to change.