Tag Archives: food

Advocacy Project: The Untreatable Epidemic

Posted on by
Reply

When people talk about factory farming and modern agricultural practices, we tend to think about pollution, animal cruelty, and fattened, hormone-filled meat. These are definitely important concerns; but there is an even more insidious problem that can become a major threat to public health– antibiotic-resistant infections.

Right now, 80% of the antibiotics made in the U.S. are fed to factory-farmed animals to promote growth and to counter unsanitary living conditions. Most of this ends up in manure, which is used to fertilize our vegetables. The rest of this 80% remains in the meat that we will eat. Throughout this process, bacteria have countless opportunities to be exposed to antibiotics in small amounts. The low concentrations of these drugs don’t wipe out all the germs in the animal/region/food, but they kill enough non-resistant bugs that the ones who happen to be resistant would have less competition for resources. With more space and nutrients available to them, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are free to grow out of control and completely take over whichever animal/region/food the antibiotics happen to be in. In addition, resistant bacteria have the ability to copy their DNA and transfer it to their non-resistant peers.

Here’s the CDC’s illustration of the chain of resistance and infection:

(Courtesy of the CDC)

                                                            (Courtesy of the CDC)

If there are high enough numbers of these bacteria, they will become pathogenic and cause diseases. And the most concerning part is that these are the same medicines that are used to treat human diseases. So if someone shows up to the hospital with resistant infections, the drugs would no longer work.

This is exactly what’s been happening with the recent outbreak of Salmonella in the United States. So far, about 500 people have been infected in 25 states. There are seven strains of bacteria involved, all of which are resistant to antibiotics. This has been traced back to a poultry producer in California that – you guessed it – use antibiotics in their animal feed.

The CDC estimates that at least 2 million Americans end up in the hospital with antibiotic-resistant infections each year, and this number is increasing.

resistant_infections

                     (Via steiros.com)

There is no doubt that antibiotic resistant is a major problem. But New York representative Louise Slaughter proposed a bill last year called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA) that, if passed, would require the FDA to re-review its approval for seven major classes of antibiotics used in agriculture that are also important for human infections. This could mean huge changes in the way factory farms work. Unfortunately, there has been so much lobbying against this bill that it has been referred to committee and pretty much forgotten. My advocacy project is trying to drum up support for PAMTA through a petition and a letter to our representative, Glenn Thompson. But even if this bill is never passed, hopefully people will become more aware of this issue and more things will be done to address it.

 

Partial List of Sources:

http://www.steiros.com/Antibiotic_Stewardship.html

http://www.fosterfarms.com/about/raise.asp

The Ripple Effect of Oil

Posted on by
3

We probably all remember the disastrous BP oil spill of 2010, when over 4.1 billion barrels of crude oil spewed into the ocean over the course of three months. This has become old news– I personally haven’t heard about this oil spill for a long time and the media rarely talks about it anymore. But even though the leak has been stopped and the panic has died down, some of the more serious effects of this event are only just starting to be felt.

This past fishing season has unearthed an extremely high number of deformed animals, including eyeless, clawless, or shell-less crabs, fish with lesions and tumors and no livers, and clams with soft shells.

The Simpsons called it years ago (Picture courtesy of taringa.net)

The Simpsons called it years ago        (Picture courtesy of taringa.net)

In fact, according to Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy Kuhns, more than half of the shrimp caught in a popular shrimping area by the Gulf of Mexico had no eyes. One fisherman caught 400 pounds of shrimp at the height of the shrimp season, none of which had eyes (or even eye sockets).

In the meantime, researchers from the US and Australia discovered that embryos of large commercial fish (including herring, salmon, tuna, etc.) also tended to develop deformities and have shorter lifespans after being exposed to crude oil.This study was done in a lab, and although people haven’t noticed major dents in commercial fish populations due to these deformities, it’s a little alarming that oil can have long-lasting effects that go beyond just coating someone’s feathers or gills, and that can appear a long time after the disaster.

But why are these effects only showing up now? It turns out that crude oil is a mutagen that damages the DNA of many different animals. After several generations, these changes actually become part of the species’ genome and can lead to birth defects or cancer.

Shrimp with tumors and no eyes
(Photo courtesy of thinkprogress.org)

This raises even more concerns— how can this affect beachgoers in Florida and other places in the South? What did the fishermen do with all the deformed animals they caught? What about dolphins, whales, and sharks that depend on these creatures for food? Are there any other less visible effects that could be even more dangerous? One thing we can be sure about is that the consequences of the spill are turning out to be much messier than we had thought.

So what does the government plan to do to address this issue? Go back to offshore drilling as soon as possible, of course. In fact, oil companies have pretty much gone back to doing whatever they were doing before the spill, and Senator David Ritter of Louisiana is currently advocating for more drilling permits for the Gulf of Mexico. “Mother Nature has proved amazingly resilient with recovering from the spill,” he cheerfully observed.

 

Sources:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/18/466660/legacy-of-bp-oil-spill-eyeless-shrimp-and-fish-with-lesions/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/us/fish-embryos-exposed-to-oil-from-bp-spill-develop-deformities-a-study-finds.html?ref=science

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140310090615.htm

Turkey With a Side of Guilt

Posted on by
3

Every Thanksgiving, I come across at least one ad or article about “heritage turkeys.” And I always get the impression that they are just another vegan-super-expensive-high-quality-psuedo-organic fad. This year I’ve seen at least six ads on Facebook alone, so I finally caved in and decided to do some research on heritage turkeys—after all, it might have something to do with science!

Screen Shot 2013-11-23 at 11.40.20 PMScreen Shot 2013-11-23 at 11.37.40 PM

Basically, there are two types of turkeys: white industrial turkeys, and several breeds of “heritage” turkeys that closely resemble the wild ones hunted by Pilgrims and Native Americans. Both descended from the same wild ancestors, but the white turkeys have been selectively bred over hundreds of years to grow as fast as possible and produce the most amount of meat. As a result, they can no longer fly. Because they are so top-heavy and it’s hard for them to walk or even stand up after a certain age, they can’t mate, so they have to be artificially inseminated. And while wild turkeys are intelligent and aggressive (Benjamin Franklin considered it a symbol of “the temper and conduct of America”), white industrial ones are apparently very dim-witted because of all the inbreeding.

Bill Niman, who raises both breeds on his ranch, observed that “not only did the industry breed the ability to fly and [procreate] out of the white birds; they bred the personality out of them too. It’s hard to interact with them—they have limited cerebral capacity.”

In addition, white turkeys are dramatically less healthy—they are more prone to disease and require a lot of antibiotics in their diet, and have a lifespan of twelve months while heritage turkeys can live for seven years.

Selective breeding seems to have done some crazy things in this case; heritage and white turkeys are about as similar as German shepherds and pugs. Finding out all of this has made me really interested in getting a heritage turkey this year. Not surprisingly, they are extremely expensive and can cost as much as $7 per pound because they take so long to raise and require so much living space. But it might be a worthwhile investment, especially compared to the moral baggage of buying (and supporting) something that’s the product of extreme industrialization and shady farming practices and messing with biology in a way that’s not really beneficial to anyone. We should definitely look into this more!

Sources:

http://www.localharvest.org/features/heritage-turkeys.jsp

http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/genetically-modified-turkey1.htm

100% Certified Lab-Grown

Posted on by
3

As the population continues to increase exponentially, world hunger is becoming a much more widespread and serious issue, and more extreme measures are being taken to solve it. One of those ways is growing meat in petri dishes.

This August, a completely lab-grown burger was fried and eaten in London after having been grown from cow stem cells in a lab. This burger is all muscle– because there were no fat or skin or cartilage cells to begin with, there was no such tissue in the meat. This development could have some interesting implications for world hunger– if meat can be mass-produced in places with climates that can’t support large numbers of animals, everyone can get their protein.

Widespread use of this discovery could also help environment in some major ways. Right now, it’s estimated that confined animals produce three times as much waste as humans in the US, and account for a huge percentage of carbon and methane emissions. Runoff from factory farms ends up in groundwater and ecosystems, causing diseases to develop in places that they shouldn’t be developing in.

So how much value do lab-grown burgers have? Are they the next “pink slime”? Or are they the solution to world hunger and the destructive consequences of factory farming?

Or do you think hunger can be fixed in a much less creepy and “scientific” way? After all, meat is being produced so fast, and there is so much of it, that it has already become less expensive than vegetables. Things like Epic Meal Time, a Youtube series that features recipes for 60-pound 6 piece chicken nuggets, among other food items, show that getting enough animal protein in your diet is clearly not an issue in some places. Should we focus first on the politics and socioeconomic barriers that contribute to world hunger, instead of trying to fix everything with science?

 

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/science/a-lab-grown-burger-gets-a-taste-test.html

http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-factory-farms-and-environment

[Th]e [S]hutdown: Why It Matters

Posted on by
2

Everyone knows about the really obvious effects of the government shutdown on science— the Smithsonian museums are closed, national parks are closed, NASA is pretty much closed, and this thing pops up whenever you try to do research for a science class:

Screen Shot 2013-10-10 at 6.30.01 PM

However, there are two other slightly more serious consequences that haven’t been publicized as much: many patients with serious illness are being kept from possible treatments, and our food is no longer being inspected.

Even though people are still being enrolled in clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health, the process has become much slower. Only 12 patients have been enrolled since October 1st, when the shutdown began. Normally, about 200 patients, many with cancer, are enrolled each week and more than 1,400 trials run at any given time. But because of the lapse in funding, only people who are in immediate danger of dying are being added to the list.

It’s important to note that clinical trials are often a last hope for patients—they’ve gone through other known treatments but the disease hasn’t improved, so they decide to try new, experimental treatments that are still being studied. So while lawmakers and politicians are arguing about how health care should work, other people are trying to decide which 12 patients (out of 200) with long-term, life-threatening illnesses need treatment the most, since 75% of the NIH staff has been furloughed and the agency just doesn’t have enough funding to treat everyone.

I guess this won’t be happening anytime soon:

Screen Shot 2013-10-10 at 7.46.07 PM

The CDC and FDA have also suffered cuts, losing 68% and 45% of their staff, respectively. Among this staff are epidemiologists who had been tracing a salmonella outbreak that started in California and spread through 18 states, before they were furloughed. There have been no inspections of domestically produced food this week because inspectors, lab technicians, and many other staff members have also been sent home.

Food inspections have led to a lot of important information being made public in the past, most recently the fact that arsenic was used in chicken, turkey, and pig feed. If the government shutdown lasts for many more weeks, it would be almost impossible for anyone to know what new things are added to the food that our meal plans pay for.

These issues are frustrating because even though they are so severe, they are so easily fixed; if funding is resumed, the NIH could continue to perform clinical trials, and the CDC and FDA could go back to working on public health.

Hopefully our government will pause their health care debate long enough for that to happen.

 

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/us/politics/risk-to-food-safety-seen-in-furloughs.html?src=recg

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/health/in-shutdown-clinical-trial-enrollment-slows-but-doesnt-halt.html?ref=science

(Special Health Issue) A Dose of Arsenic

Posted on by
3

This Tuesday, the FDA announced a ban on three arsenic-containing compounds that have been used in over 100 drugs that are fed to pigs, chicken, and turkey. This was because of a recent discovery that chicken sold in grocery stores (and probably at Redifer and Pollock buffet) contained more than four times the arsenic it is allowed to. These chemicals are used to “prevent disease, increase feed efficiency, and promote growth.” I had no idea what “feed efficiency” meant, so I Googled it and found out that it’s “a ratio describing the amount of feed consumed per unit of production (e.g. milk, eggs, gain).”

Screen Shot 2013-10-04 at 2.02.26 AM

This is an important issue because arsenic can cause lung and skin cancer, hard black scab-like growths on skin, liver lesions, and a whole host of problems with almost every organ system.

So why didn’t the FDA ban these chemicals in the first place? Doesn’t every chemical that could possibly end up in our food have to go through FDA approval first?

It’s important to realize that in low amounts, dangerous chemicals often don’t have major health effects. Mercury levels in shrimp are so low that even the cholesterol is probably more harmful. We’ve been eating a little bit of arsenic in our meat for years before the FDA banned it several days ago. And on a molecular level, all proteins are just really fancy ammonia molecules, which sounds a lot more horrifying than it really is.

Screen Shot 2013-10-04 at 2.25.24 AM<– really fancy ammonia molecule

It’s often easy to demand that all unpalatable chemicals be banned, but there are few other practical options for raising animals on such a large scale. If we don’t want the cost of meat to skyrocket and entire forests to be shaved to clear land for pastures, lab-produced (and possibly dangerous) chemicals would need to be used. In fact, a fourth arsenic-containing compound that many people would like banned, is the only known treatment for histomoniasis, a liver parasite that can kill many young turkeys.

With these three drugs withdrawn, factory farms will have to replace them with others. Diseases still have to be prevented, and growth (both animal growth and economic growth) still has to be promoted, arsenic or no arsenic.

Should the FDA start specifying what companies should do, instead of what they shouldn’t do? Or will they just be playing Whack-a-Mole with dangerous chemicals in food, no matter what? Should we demand a list of the ingredients in animal feed as well as the ingredients in our food?

This issue is much more complex than it first seems, but could there be a solution?