Every few months, an outbreak of sickness and death caused by lethal strains of E. Coli\u00a0 and other \u201csuper bugs\u201d makes the headlines.\u00a0 These bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 One reason, according to scientists, is that unlike grass-fed beef, low levels of antibiotics are being routinely fed to industrially-raised cattle to make them grow faster and protect them from diseases caused by their living conditions.\u00a0 Thousands of animals are crowded together into massive feedlots for months at a time, where they stand in their own wastes and gorge on grains that upset their normal digestive systems.\u00a0 The bacteria happily seize the opportunity to multiply and evolve into new strains resistant to the antibiotics.\u00a0 And they aren\u2019t choosy about their hosts– humans do quite nicely.<\/p>\n
Someone must be doing something about this, right?\u00a0 Think again.\u00a0 According to David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA doesn\u2019t even know what antibiotics are being fed to our food animals.\u00a0 Legislation authorizing the FDA to collect this data can\u2019t get out of a Senate committee<\/a>.\u00a0 Too bad.\u00a0 As Kessler says, the problem is rapidly becoming a matter of life and death.<\/p>\n David Jessup<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every few months, an outbreak of sickness and death caused by lethal strains of E. Coli\u00a0 and other \u201csuper bugs\u201d makes the headlines.\u00a0 These bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 One reason, according to scientists, is that unlike grass-fed beef, low levels of antibiotics are being routinely fed to industrially-raised cattle to make them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmjessup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}