If you want to lose weight the late comic Gilda Radner used to say, eat your lunch next to a car wreck. But this summer all you have to do is eat the food the FDA approves.
Recent recalls of pathogen tainted milk, meat, chicken and cheese make you wonder if E.coli, campylobacter, salmonella and listeria are the new four food groups.
Of course just because our food harbors harmful microbes doesn't mean it's not also full of antibiotics.
In fact the overuse of agricultural antibiotics and resulting antibiotic resistant microbes is often why the food is tainted--and the impetus behind the pending Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 (PAMTA) introduced by Louise Slaughter (D-NY) this spring, which would prohibit routine use of antibiotics in food animals.
Why do we need such a bill?
In April the FDA wrote Nappanee, IN dairy farmer Lyle J. Borkholder a cow he sold "for slaughter as food" turned out to have 1.78 parts per million (ppm) of sulfadimethoxine in the liver and 0.95 in the muscle--an antibiotic which affects the thyroidhypothalamus axis-- in excess of federal standards.
And in May, the FDA told dairy farmers Alva Carter Jr. and Allen Carter in Portales, NM their cow, also sold as human food, had 0.379 parts ppm of flunixin in the liver and 0.90 ppm of desfuroylceftiofur in the kidney, two other antibiotics.
Both farmers were told "you hold animals under conditions that are so inadequate that medicated animals bearing potentially harmful drug residues are likely to enter the food supply."
Worse, veterinarians who condemn the use of gentamicin, a kidney and hearing destroying antibiotic, revealed in a survey in the current issue of Journal of Dairy Science that they believe Ohio farmers routinely and illegally use the drug in cows.
Nor is mad cow or bovine spongiform encephalopathy a distant fear after the largest meat recall in US history last year, much of it destined for school lunch programs.
In its final report on Chino, CA-based Hallmark Meat Company in November, the USDA found disease-spreading Specified Risk Materials (SRMs) are routinely left on edible carcasses--hello--and Food Safety and Inspection Services staff believe hand sanitizers kill prions. Practically nothing kills prions, the agent that transmits bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
The American Medical Association, Union of Concerned Scientists, Pew Charitable Trusts, Chipotle Gourmet Burritos and Tacos and most of the antibiotic-taking public support PAMTA. But the pharmaceutical industry, which call itself the America Meat Institute when it is selling animal drugs, does not.
Not only would the legislation ban penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, lincosamides, streptograminds, aminoglycosides and sulfonamides except when used therapeutically, the animal drug sector is where the pharmaceutical industry expects its future profits to come from as private and public payers increasingly say YOU WANT US TO SPEND WHAT? about their latest human drug.
Nor is Big Meat happy.
"PAMTA would severely harm a livestock farmer's ability to keep his animals healthy," writes Indiana Pork's Randy Curless in the Indianapolis Star--though some question how factory farmers define health, like Yanna Smith in Namibia's SPACE Magazine.
"Ammonia causes most chickens to engage in what supervisors call 'chicken madness,'" writes the South African critic about a Tyson chicken operation. "The deadly fumes disorient the chickens, causing violent outbursts, resulting in the standard practice of debeaking. At least 11 percent of the chickens die of respiratory insufficiency; their bodies are not found until six weeks later--or on slaughterhouse day."
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