Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/opinion/12kristof.html?_r=5


By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

CAMDEN, Ind.

The late Tom Anderson, the family doctor in this little farm town in northwestern Indiana, at first was puzzled, then frightened.

He began seeing strange rashes on his patients, starting more than a year ago. They began as innocuous bumps — “pimples from hell,” he called them — and quickly became lesions as big as saucers, fiery red and agonizing to touch.

They could be anywhere, but were most common on the face, armpits, knees and buttocks. Dr. Anderson took cultures and sent them off to a lab, which reported that they were MRSA, or staph infections that are resistant to antibiotics.

MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) sometimes arouses terrifying headlines as a “superbug” or “flesh-eating bacteria.” The best-known strain is found in hospitals, where it has been seen regularly since the 1990s, but more recently different strains also have been passed among high school and college athletes. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS.

Dr. Anderson at first couldn’t figure out why he was seeing patient after patient with MRSA in a small Indiana town. And then he began to wonder about all the hog farms outside of town. Could the pigs be incubating and spreading the disease?

“Tom was very concerned with what he was seeing,” recalls his widow, Cindi Anderson. “Tom said he felt the MRSA was at phenomenal levels.”

By last fall, Dr. Anderson was ready to be a whistle-blower, and he agreed to welcome me on a reporting visit and go on the record with his suspicions. That was a bold move, for any insinuation that the hog industry harms public health was sure to outrage many neighbors.

So I made plans to come here and visit Dr. Anderson in his practice. And then, very abruptly, Dr. Anderson died at the age of 54.

There was no autopsy, but a blood test suggested a heart attack or aneurysm. Dr. Anderson had himself suffered at least three bouts of MRSA, and a Dutch journal has linked swine-carried MRSA to dangerous human heart inflammation.

......

So what’s going on here, and where do these antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably from the routine use — make that the insane overuse — of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all. That’ll be the focus of my next column, on Sunday.

I like Bittman's idea: restrict meat to half a pound per person per week. The rest should be mostly plants with smaller amounts of grains and legumes.

There's no need to go to any extreme. The standard American diet is making us sick. We need to reassess it.

college kid lives. I often think about the huge factory farms I see (and SMELL in hot weather!!) when driving between here and there. There are billboards everywhere for one huge dairy farm that wants you to come and watch a baby cow being born, visit their gift shop, eat in their ice cream parlor, etc. Their website (http://www.fofarms.com/) says "Fair Oaks Farms is home to 30,000 dairy cows located on 10 separate dairy sites.

To grow silage corn and alfalfa to feed these 30,000 cows, it takes approximately 17,000 acres – that is a extraordinary 1.7 Billion square feet or the equivalent of 56,000 football fields.

Environmentally sound farming practices are used to protect the soil and water for future generations; and, more than 3,000 acres are set aside to protect the streams and watersheds, and to provide habitat for wildlife."

I've driven past that place hundreds of times and have never, ever seen a cow. The homepage of their website has a picture of a cow standing in the grass - I wonder if they tell the kids who visit that the cows are never allowed outside.

These farmers had genuine affection for and treated their livestock like family. When sold they were the healthiest and safest food you could buy.

TELL OBAMA STOP FACTORY FARMS!!!!
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_17040.cfm


It is a new year, we have a new administration, and the time is now to rein in genetically engineered foods and crops once and for all. Recent news and scientific research has underscored the urgent need to take action. For example, the USDA recently admitted that genetic contamination of organic and non-GE crops was 'inevitable,' while the New York Times reported that biotech corporations are thwarting research and that Monsanto is in line to receive millions of dollars in tax credits this year. Meanwhile, family farmers declare bankruptcy in staggering numbers.

You can make a difference. Join the Organic Consumers Association and contact your Congresspersons today and urge them to:

1) Require mandatory labeling of all GE plants and animals
2) Place a moratorium on all efforts to deregulate or approve new genetically engineered plants or animals, and
3) Protect non-GE and organic farmers by assigning liability for injury caused by genetically engineered organisms.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_17040.cfm

My father died from the hospital acquired form of MRSA and apparently it's defined as acceptable health care in East Tennessee where Profit care comes ahead of Patient care. http://www.wisecountyissues.com

and they wonder why people avoid proper medical care.

made harder I'm sure by knowing that it should never have happened. my Mr also picked up a mrsa infection from a hospital visit and was very sick and misdiagnosed before his useless (previous) doctor finally condescended to listen and took a culture of the infection.

Our system in Canada is not for profit, but they've been hacking at it for years trying to set it up so that it can be "harmonized" with yours; in other words allow the for profit crooks in. They've cut services and managed to privatize some services such as housecleaning. The private companies pay minimum wage, and that is reflected in the cleanliness of the institution. In other words, our hospitals are now filthy and you know you will come out with something you don't want.

I'm so sorry for your loss of your Dad.

Letting that one soak in over here. That is just incomprehensible.

What would you do now, knowing what you do now, if God forbid someone had to go to a hospital?

Wishing your family's hearts heal, aloha.

Now this thread can legally drink.

;)

here (in Burbank, CA)

I was absolutely shocked and horrified at the story. She woke up with her entire side having turned black (not black and blue type black, but black like dead tissue.)

Horrible tragedy and I've since learned, not as rare as I would have imagined.

Just this one thread has really made me take another look at things.

Is there a way to gather the data for how many times this happens at our hospitals?

What would you reccommend to someone who unavoidably had to go to stay at a hospital?

Stop buying it.
Look around our own local for farmers growing and raising healthy food and animals and buy from them. As it becomes more profitable to sell to individuals more will get in to it.

itself. Nature always builds in safeguards. Between climate change, our cavalier approach to polluting the land and water, and our ignorant, short-sighted overuse of chemicals and antibiotics, we're going to self-eradicate most of the human tumor that's engulfing Terra. And it's not gonna be a pretty sight.

Homo sapiens is a an oxymoron and we're reaffirming that every day.

The Greatest Fear--Vancomycin Resistance

http://www.fda.gov/Fdac/features/795_antibio.html

When microbes began resisting penicillin, medical researchers fought back with chemical cousins, such as methicillin and oxacillin. By 1953, the antibiotic armamentarium included chloramphenicol, neomycin, terramycin, tetracycline, and cephalosporins. But today, researchers fear that we may be nearing an end to the seemingly endless flow of antimicrobial drugs.

At the center of current concern is the antibiotic vancomycin, which for many infections is literally the drug of "last resort," says Michael Blum, M.D., medical officer in FDA's division of anti-infective drug products. Some hospital-acquired staph infections are resistant to all antibiotics except vancomycin.

Now vancomycin resistance has turned up in another common hospital bug, enterococcus. And since bacteria swap resistance genes like teenagers swap T-shirts, it is only a matter of time, many microbiologists believe, until vancomycin-resistant staph infections appear. "Staph aureus may pick up vancomycin resistance from enterococci, which are found in the normal human gut," says Madden. And the speed with which vancomycin resistance has spread through enterococci has prompted researchers to use the word "crisis" when discussing the possibility of vancomycin-resistant staph.

Vancomycin-resistant enterococci were first reported in England and France in 1987, and appeared in one New York City hospital in 1989. By 1991, 38 hospitals in the United States reported the bug. By 1993, 14 percent of patients with enterococcus in intensive-care units in some hospitals had vancomycin-resistant strains, a 20-fold increase from 1987. A frightening report came in 1992, when a British researcher observed a transfer of a vancomycin-resistant gene from enterococcus to Staph aureus in the laboratory. Alarmed, the researcher immediately destroyed the bacteria.

Ricki Lewis is a geneticist and textbook author.

won't say is that the easiest, most effective to help re climate change is to be a vegetarian if not a vegan.

In many cases, the antibiotics come in 5 gallon buckets for an insanely low price. This was documented in the recent outbreak of Bird Flu in china a few months back.

These CAFO's cannot operate without the antibiotics, or the losses would put them out of business.

So, all they need to do is keep that animals alive long enough to make it to marketing stage and then they are dumped on the market.

The pasty, muchy chicken you buy in the market is an example of a bird that has spent it's life crammed into a pen with hundred of other birds with barely enough room to move. It is fed super high nutrition food in order to make it grow to an enormous size.

It is becoming common knowledge that benigh bugs have the ability to change into more virulent forms depending upon their environment. I am seeing more and more desearch that shows that Royal Rife in the 1930's, was correct in asserting that bacteria and virii are pleiomorphic, meaning they can change and adapt to different conditions. He was ridiculed and the imformation was suppressed. Now I find a book about Dr. Weston Price, and Dentist about the same time frame that also discovered this phenonemenon. He linked the normally benign and ever present Streptoccus bacteria to focal infections of the teeth, which would ultimately affect other organ of the body with disease.

Bruce Lipton in his wonderful video Mind over Matter also relates an experiment that showed a Bacteria changing it genetic structure in order to survive in a media where it normally should not have survived, basically proving that organism can direct their evolution depending upon the environment.

The animals in Cafo's are stressed out, filthy, unhappy and confined against their wishes. No exercise, fresh air or even sunlight. No wonder the bugs have a field day in these environment. The birds are weakened, fed with antibiotics, and present a wonderful incubator for new strains and mutations.

Chickens do just fine frollicking in a field, raising their own young, foraging for food and doing chicken thing. We don't need factory farms.