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.
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