Oh, Fucking GREAT IDEA! Indian Farmers Using "Last Line Of Defence" Antibiotic To Raise Chickens

[hatrack]

On a farm in the Rangareddy district in India, near the southern metropolis of Hyderabad, a clutch of chicks has just been delivered. Some 5,000 birds peck at one another, loitering around a warehouse which will become cramped as they grow. Outside the shed, stacks of bags contain the feed they will eat during their five-week-long lives. Some of them gulp down a yellow liquid from plastic containers - a sugar water fed to the chicks from the moment they arrive, the farm caretaker explains. “Now the supervisor will come,” she adds, “and we will have to start with whatever medicines he would ask us to give the chicks.”

The medicines are antibiotics, given to the birds to protect them against diseases or to make them gain weight faster so more can be grown each year at greater profit. One drug typically given this way is colistin. Doctors call it the “last hope” antibiotic because it is used to treat patients who are critically ill with infections which have become resistant to nearly all other drugs. The World Health Organisation has called for the use of such antibiotics, which it calls “critically important to human medicines”, to be restricted in animals and banned as growth promoters. Their continued use in farming increases the chance bacteria will develop resistance to them, leaving them useless when treating patients. Yet thousands of tonnes of veterinary colistin was shipped to countries including Vietnam, India, South Korea and Russia in 2016, the Bureau can reveal. In India at least five animal pharmaceutical companies are openly advertising products containing colistin as growth promoters.

EDIT

Timothy Walsh, a global expert on antibiotic resistance, called the Bureau’s findings about the ready availability of colistin in India “deeply worrying” and described the use of colistin in poultry farming as “complete and utter madness”. Walsh, who is Professor of Medical Microbiology at Cardiff University, and his Chinese colleagues discovered a colistin-resistant gene in Chinese pigs in 2015. The gene, mcr-1, could be transferred within and between species of bacteria. That meant that microbes did not have to develop resistance themselves, they could become resistant just by acquiring the mcr-1 gene.

The discovery was met with worldwide panic in the medical community as it meant the resistance could be passed to bugs which are already multi-drug resistant, leading to untreatable infections. Rampant use of the drug in livestock farming has been cited as the most likely way mcr-1 was spread. It has been detected in bacteria from animals and humans in more than 30 countries, spanning four continents. Another four colistin resistant genes (mcr-2 to mcr-5) have been discovered since. Colistin-resistant bacteria, once rare, are now widespread. “Colistin is the last line of defence”, said Professor Walsh, who is also an adviser to the UN on antimicrobial resistance. “It is the only drug we have left to treat critically ill patients with a carbapenem-resistant infection. Giving it to chickens as feed is crazy.”

EDIT

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2018-01-30/a-game-of-chicken-how-indian-poultry-farming-is-creating-global-superbugs

[zipplewrath]

1. What can possibly go wrong?

Gee, who could see any problem here?

[Farmer-Rick]

2. Using low dose continual antibiotics on your live stock can increase growth by 10 to 20%

When you get paid by the pound and are in competition with the likes of Tyson and other huge corporations, every little bit helps.

I raise sheep. There are at least 7 types (the last time I checked about 2 years ago) of injections approved by the FDA that you can use on your sheep to increase growth rate. Everything from steroids, hormones and antibiotics in low dose continual feed or injections.

I don't use them because I pasture raise my sheep on good pasture. I find that most sheep problems are caused by malnurishment. Feed them well, give them access to water and minerals and they grow just fine. But I do such small quantities of lamb that most those chemicals woud not be cost effective for me.

I'm not excusing the use of antibiotics, I'm just explaining why farmers resort to it. I just think our entire farming system in the US, which we are exporting to other countries, is so distorted and adulterated that we need to seriously reconsider it. We need to subsidize small natural farms and not the huge grain exporters and factory farmers.

[lunasun]

4. + Agree 100% . It's an adulterated system .

Smaller farms that producelivestock using regenerative farming practices that build soil health. It's so different now from how farms were for hundreds of years like you mentioned all the injections on overload

[procon]

3. Whichever pharmaceutical company that owns the patent on this drug, is laughing

at your paltery concerns. Ha-ha-ha. They are making lots of money, the agri-corps that run the massive chicken farms are making lots of money, and consumers are spending lot of money to buy better chickens through chemistry. The system is perfect. Fuckoff.

[liberalla]

5. Posting to read later.

Shit.