(Global Research)

* * *

According to Biosurveillance, itself part of Veratect, a US Pentagon and Government-linked epidemic reporting center, on April 6, 2009 local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico. . . . “Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak.”

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Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) [is] a Factory Farm concentration facility for hogs. In 2008 they produced almost one million factory hogs, 950,000 according to their own statistics. GCM is a joint venture operation owned 50% by the world’s largest pig producing industrial company, Smithfield Foods of Virginia.

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The Times of London [reports] that 4-year-old Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria . .”was the first known sufferer of swine flu, a revelation that has put La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons’ at the centre of a global race to find how this new and deadly strain of swine flu emerged.” That’s quite interesting. They speak of “La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and “manure lagoons.”

Presumably the manure lagoons around the LaGloria factory pig farm of Smithfield Foods are the waste dumping place for the feces and urine waste from at least 950,000 pigs a year that pass through the facility. The Smithfield’s Mexico joint venture, Norson, states that alone they slaughter 2,300 pigs daily. That’s a lot. It gives an idea of the volumes of pig waste involved in the concentration facility at La Gloria. Significantly, according to the Times reporters, “residents of La Gloria have been complaining since March that the odour from Granjas Carroll’s pig waste was causing severe respiratory infections. They held a demonstration this month at which they carried signs of pigs crossed with an X and marked with the word peligro (danger).

There have been calls to exhume the bodies of the children who died of pneumonia so that they could be tested. The state legislature of Veracruz has demanded that Smithfield’s Granjas Carroll release documents about its waste-handling practices. Smithfield Foods reportedly declined to comment on the request, saying that it would ‘not respond to rumours.” A research compilation by Ed Harris reported, ‘According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’

However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. That would imply that the entire Swine Flu scare might have originated from the PR spin doctors of the world’s largest industrial pig factory farm operation, Smithfield Foods.

The Vera Cruz-based newspaper La Marcha blames Smithfield’s Granjos Carroll for the outbreak, highlighting inadequate treatment of massive quantities of animal waste from hog production. Understandably the company is perhaps more than a bit uncomfortable with the sudden attention. The company, which supplies the McDonald’s and Subway fast-food chains, was fined $12.3 million in the United States 1997 for violating the Clean Water Act. Perhaps they are in a remote tiny Mexican rural area enjoying a relatively lax regulatory climate where they need not worry about being cited for violations of any Clean Water Act.

Tamiflu and Rummy

In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the drug Oseltamivir, sold under the name Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.

What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug it had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stockholder in Gilead, which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold. When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide. That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.

Tamiflu is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy side effects. It contains matter that could have potentially deadly consequences for a person’s breathing and often reportedly leads to nausea, dizziness and other flu-like symptoms. Since the outbreak of Swine Flu Panic (not Swine Flu but Swine Flu Panic), sales of Tamiflu, as well as any and every possible drug marketed as flu-related, have exploded.

Wall Street firms have rushed to issue “buy” recommendations for the company. “Gimme a shot Doc, I don’t care what it is…I don’t wanna die…” Panic and fear of death was used by the Bush Administration skillfully to promote the Avian Flu fraud.

With ominous echoes of the current Swine Flu scare, Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed “free-roaming chickens” on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions.

Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank. ( By William Engdahl)

Source: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13408 See Also:

Flying Pigs, Tamiflu and Factory Farms Part II: By F. William Engdahl Global Research, May 4, 2009 WHO takes a page from a Michael Crichton Novel

As the great American poet Yogi Berra might have put it, “this just gets absurder and absurder.” The international agencies supposedly responsible for monitoring worldwide dangers of new pandemic threats, the WHO and CDC are acting like the directors of a Hollywood “B” grade sci-fi movie or the author of a copycat version of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain novel. The global panic over outbreak of a new human-to-human Swine Flu pandemic is increasingly revealed as a likely operation in mass psychological terror whose only beneficiaries are the few global pharmaceutical giants that are in the business of peddling so-called “antiviral” drugs—Roche, SmithKlineGlaxo and Novavax most prominently. The losers are the rest of us normal folks.

The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount. Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year.

So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do — even if it came marginally close to that standard — it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems.

Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield’s business model. * * * Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around.

Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs — anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits.

The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond. The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day.

The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying. From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems.

They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them.

Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

* * *

Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink. Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous.

To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit. Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

* * *

According to the EPA, Smithfield’s largest farm-slaughterhouse operation — in Tar Heel, North Carolina — dumps more toxic waste into the nation’s water each year than all but three other industrial facilities in America.

* * *

Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In North Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million gallons into the Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act — the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA.

It amounted to .035 % of Smithfield’s annual sales. A river that receives a lot of waste from an industrial hog farm begins to die quickly. Toxins and microbes can kill plants and animals outright; the waste itself consumes available oxygen and suffocates fish and aquatic animals; and the nutrients in the pig shit produce algal blooms that also deoxygenate the water.

The Pagan River runs by Smithfield’s original plant and headquarters in Virginia, which served as Joseph Luter’s staging ground for his assault on the pork-raising and processing industries. For several decades, before a spate of regulations, the Pagan had no living marsh grass, a tiny and toxic population of fish and shellfish and a half foot of noxious black mud coating its bed.

The hulls of boats winched up out of the river bore inch-thick coats of greasy muck. In North Carolina, much of the pig waste from Smithfield’s operations makes its way into the Neuse River; in a five-day span in 2003 alone, more than 4 million fish died. Pig-waste runoff has damaged the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound, which is almost as big as the Chesapeake Bay and which provides half the nursery grounds used by fish in the eastern Atlantic.

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea, every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the millions. It’s hard to conceive of a fish kill that size.

The kill began with turbulence in one small part of the water: fish writhing and dying. Then it spread in patches along the entire length and breadth of the river. In two hours, dead and dying fish were mounded wherever the river’s contours slowed the current, and the riverbanks were mostly dead fish. Within a day dead fish completely covered the riverbanks, and between the floating and beached and piled fish the water scintillated out of sight up and down the river with billions of buoyant dead eyes and scales and white bellies — more fish than the river seemed capable of holding. T

he smell of rotting fish covered much of the county; the air above the river was chaotic with scavenging birds. There were far more dead fish than the birds could ever eat. Spills aren’t the worst thing that can happen to toxic pig waste lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers.

Many of the pig-shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several feet underwater. Satellite photographs show a dark brown tide closing over the region’s waterways, converging on the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to sea in a long, well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life remained behind

Tens of thousands of drowned pigs were strewn across the land. Beaches located miles from Smithfield lagoons were slathered in feces. A picture taken at the time shows a shark eating a dead pig three miles off the North Carolina coast. From a waste-disposal perspective, Hurricane Floyd was the best thing that had ever happened to corporate hog farming in North Carolina.

Smithfield currently has tens of thousands of gallons of open-air waste awaiting more Floyds. In addition to such impressive disasters, corporate hog farming contributes to another form of environmental havoc: Pfiesteria piscicida, a microbe that, in its toxic form, has killed a billion fish and injured dozens of people. Nutrient-rich waste like pig shit creates the ideal environment for Pfiesteria to bloom: The microbe eats fish attracted to algae nourished by the waste. Pfiesteria is invisible and odorless — you know it by the trail of dead. The microbe degrades a fish’s skin, laying bare tissue and blood cells; it then eats its way into the fish’s body. After the 1995 spill, millions of fish developed large bleeding sores on their sides and quickly died. Fishermen found that at least one of Pfiesteria’s toxins could take flight: Breathing the air above the bloom caused severe respiratory difficulty, headaches, blurry vision and logical impairment. Some fishermen forgot how to get home; laboratory workers exposed to Pfiesteria lost the ability to solve simple math problems and dial phones; they forgot their own names. It could take weeks or months for the brain and lungs to recover. (By Jeff Tietz) See http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/1284porks_dirty_secretsecret_ the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters.

See Also: PIGS AND POLITICS

A group of prominent American scientists recently wrote a report accusing the Bush administration of “misrepresenting and suppressing scientific knowledge for political purposes.” Jeffrey Kaye explores the intersection of politics and science on one North Carolina pig farm. Source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june04/pigs_6-3.html

• Our award winning undercover investigations have exposed the reality of modern intensive farming systems and brought the plight of farm animals to the attention of the world’s media.
• Our political lobbying and campaigning has resulted in the EU recognising animals as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and suffering. We have also secured landmark agreements to outlaw the barren battery cage for egg-laying hens, narrow veal crates and sow stalls across Europe.
• Our Good Egg Awards will benefit over 15 million laying hens every year. Winners so far include Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, McDonald’s, Unilever (including Hellmann’s mayonnaise in the UK) and the National Trust – all of whom won a Good Egg Award for sourcing only barn or free-range eggs, instead of eggs from caged hens.

There are, however, still many challenges we have to face if we are to realise our vision of a world where all farm animals are treated with compassion and respect and where cruel factory farming practices end. We believe that farm animals should not and need not suffer. If you agree, please consider supporting us today. You will literally help us improve the lives of billions. For more information, visit http://www.ciwf.org.uk. For more information on organic farming, see:

Infectious disease ranks among the greatest risks facing you and your family.

New threats like Mersa, Ebola and Ecoli are emerging.

For centuries, plagues, flues and poxes swept across Asia, Europe and the Americas killing millions of people.

Then, in the mid 1900’s people learned enough about sanitation and medicine to keep these pandemics in check.

But fighting disease, after we are already ill, is a battle we are doomed to lose.

Our best hope for survival is to correct these mistakes by supporting organic farming techniques.

First Mistake: The livestock industry crams thousands of chickens, hogs and cattle into feeding factories.

Infectious diseases flourish in these insanely unsanitary and over-crowed buildings.

Most of us have been callous to the tortuous treatment of these animals.

Few of us will be immune to the microbes that breed in these chambers.

Many scientists believe that these feeding factories have already produced deadly strains of Avian flu, Swine flu, Ebola and Cholera.

By choosing to buy organic, “free range” meat, you can support farmers who raise their livestock in far more sanitary conditions.

Second Mistake: Livestock feeding factories over-use antibiotics rendering them useless against human diseases

Feeding factories cram animals into rows and stacks of cages where they are confined day and night hoof-deep in their own waste – and highly susceptible to illness.

Those factories regularly give those animals heavy doses of antibiotics to prevent disease from sweeping across the confined population.

Every year, the livestock industry uses an incredible 70% of all antibiotics.

They use the same kind of medicine that your doctor gives you when you are sick.

At first antibiotics were very good at killing bacteria.

Antibiotics administered to livestock kill most – not all – of the bacteria

The strongest survive, interbreed and spawn the next generation of microbes that cannot be killed by the original dose of antibiotics.

So the factories buy bigger and stronger doses, which kill most – but not all – of the bacteria, leaving the strongest to survive and become even more powerful.

Now, bacteria have evolved super strains that are immune to incredibly powerful doses of antibiotics.

The statistics are staggering and terrifying.

In 1960 90% of all S. Aureus infections could be cured by Penicillin. In 2001, 90% of all S. Aureus bacteria are now immune to penicillin.

In 1970 99% of all S. Pneumoniae infections could be cured by penicillin. Today 50% of S. Pneumoniae are immune to Penicillin.

By choosing to buy organic, antibiotic-free meat, you can support farmers who raise their animals in healthier, more humane conditions.

Third Mistake: In raising crops, huge agribusinesses misuse pesticides so that they have become less effective against insects and overuse pesticides to the point that they kill the birds, bats, frogs, turtles and fish that keep the insect population in check.

Insects infect people with deadly diseases.

Via ingestion when they contaminate our food.

At first, pesticides were very good at killing insects.

But many farms have been using insecticides as the only tool to combat crop-eating insects and many suburbs have been using insecticides as the sole tool to combat mosquitoes.

Pesticides killed most – not all – of the pest population, leaving the strongest to survive, interbreed and spawn generations of insects that resist highly toxic doses.

Moreover, the highly toxic insecticides are poisoning birds, bats fish, frogs and turtles that feed on insects and their eggs. (With their vast numbers and fast reproductive cycles, insects evolve far more rapidly than do higher species).

Now, pesticides do not work very well against dangerous insects but do kill the animals that naturally keep the insect population in check.

In other words, misuse of pesticides has caused the insect population to explode.

By buying organic produce, you can support farmers who control insects without killing birds, bats, turtles, frogs and fish.

Specific breeds of insects feed on specific kinds of crops. Each year, insects breed and nest in the soil and then return each spring in greater numbers. By rotating crops, organic farmers deprive those insect populations of the foods they are adapted to eat.

Fourth Mistake: Industrial agriculture and livestock pollute our waters, inflicting immediate injury on their neighbors and increasing long-term health hazards for everyone.

Livestock factories concentrate hundreds of thousands of animals into building where they generate gargantuan quantities of feces and urine.

Large factories generate more waste than do major US cities.

But your city maintains a sewage treatment facility while feeding factories dump raw sewage into our water supply.

The cesspools seep into the water table and overflow into rivers and streams with disastrous results for the surrounding areas.

Regular waste run off pollutes the waterways with nitrogen and phosphorous, killing all higher forms of life.

Toxic pig waste from a larger spill in North Carolina killed one billion fish.

A particularly nasty microbe – called Erysipelas – that thrives in pig waste kills millions of fish and infects people who live and work around rivers with a particularly nasty disease – causing skin lesions and brain damage.

In the long-term run, pollution from livestock factories and industrial farms combine to create even more widespread and significant problems.

Industrial farms are heavy users of petrochemical fertilizers containing large amounts of phosphorous.

Agribusiness fertilization is a leading cause of water pollution. These fertilizers contain large amounts of phosphorous. Rain run-off caries this phosphorous into neighboring waters and wetlands where it causes huge and unnatural algae blooms – when the algae dies, it kills the fish, frogs and turtles leaving the insect population to explode.

Feeding farm waste is another leading cause of water pollution – the untreated sewage contains large amounts of toxic nitrates and spreads poisonous microbes.

By buying organic food, you can support farmers who raise livestock and crops in balance – feeding grains and stalks to the animals and recycling manure as fertilizer and using crop rotation to replenish the soil.

Individually, each of these mistakes creates serious short term problems and significant long-term risks. Together they interact to put the existence of the human race at risk.

Livestock factories are breeding grounds for ever-more deadly disease.

They over-use antibiotics so that these ever-more deadly diseases are ever more resistant to antibiotics.

Industrial farms are breeding grounds for insects.

These insects do not just threaten our food supply, they also carry diseases.

Due to misuse these insects are increasingly immune to pesticides.

Livestock factories and industrial farms spew prodigious amounts of pesticides and pollution into the environment. This inflicts short-term injury on their human neighbors. it also kills the predators that kill the insects that carry the diseases that feed on us.

In the long-term, one can help bring about reform by supporting private organizations and by voting for public servants who fight against the abusive practices of livestock factories and industrial farms.

In Europe, democratic governments are outlawing the abuse of antibiotics by the livestock industry without loss of productivity.

In Europe, democratic governments are limiting the abuse of fertilizers and pesticides, thus decreasing water pollution.

In America, the Obama Administration is re-staffing the Environmental Protection Agency with people who are committed to protecting the environment.

In the past, feeding factories and industrial agriculture failed to clean up their waste products and pay for the damages they cause to public resources.

This has allowed them to keep their costs and prices artificially low and to force hundreds of thousands of family/organic farms out of business.

In the future, requiring food producers to pay their own way will allow free market to work and for family/organic farmers to prosper.

Right now, you can vote with your fork by choosing foods grown on organic farms.

-Bill Jemas, Peacepaint

Diseases Resistant to Antibiotics: Major Threats To Food Safety and Public Health As is well known to the medical community, we face an urgent crisis of antibiotic resistance. Once considered miracle drugs, antibiotics are becoming less and less effective at treating infections and disease. Many Americans, including, I would guess, some in this room, have experienced this problem first hand. Sometimes when drugs don’t work, it means several days of unnecessary pain and suffering while doctors figure out that another drug is needed. But increasingly, resistance leads to more dire consequences.

Treating a patient with an ineffective drug can give an infection a chance to progress to a more serious illness. For cases where none of the available antibiotics work, resistance becomes a matter of life and death. In addition to rendering drugs ineffective, resistant strains are often more virulent than their susceptible counterparts.

Antibiotic resistance is of particular concern in terms of food safety. The CDC has found that half of all human Campylobacter infections are drug resistant as are one in five Salmonella infections. Nearly 100,000 of the Salmonella infections would resist treatment with at least five antibiotics. Salmonella and Campylobacter, the most common sources of food borne illnesses in the United States, account for well over a million resistant infections in this country each year.

Longer hospital stays to treat food borne illnesses and other diseases dramatically increase the nation’s health costs—by one estimate adding over $4 billion per year to the health care tab. Unfortunately, the resistance crisis will not be alleviated by the arrival of new drugs. The discovery of new classes of antibiotics, once almost a predictable occurrence, has become frustratingly difficult in recent decades.

The unhappy truth is that there are virtually no new classes of antibiotic drugs in the pipeline.  Unless we act to preserve the antibiotics we have, the age of the miracle antibiotics may be coming to an end.

Antibiotic Resistance Results From Antibiotic Use

Exposure to antibiotics selects for those bacteria that can withstand the drug. Resistant organisms are encouraged in settings where antibiotics are heavily used—primarily human medicine, veterinary medicine and food animal production. Microorganisms exist in an interconnected ecosystem and travel back and forth among humans, animals and other elements in the environment.

Thus, antibiotic-resistant microorganisms generated in the guts of pigs in the Iowa countryside don’t stay on the farm. They can be transmitted to humans in at least three ways: carried on meat or poultry; colonizing farm workers who transmit them into the community; or moving through water and soil, which can lead to the contamination of fresh produce. Recently, lettuce, tomatoes and spinach have all been found to be sources of food borne illness. When the antibiotics used in raising food animals such as pigs are the same (or more precisely, in the same classes) as those used in doctors’ offices, bacteria from the pigs will be impervious to therapies based on the drugs.

The fundamental approach to prolonging the effectiveness of drugs is to curb unnecessary uses—whether in human medicine, veterinary medicine, or food animal production. Every sector needs to accept responsibility and curb its own unnecessary antibiotic use. The medical profession has stepped up to the plate and identified and attempted to address the issue by establishing guidelines against unnecessary uses, like treatment of viral diseases and aggressively seeking to reduce prescriptions for those uses. Periodically, it evaluates the effectiveness of its initiatives. To date, the veterinary and industrial agriculture communities lag far behind the human medical community in taking similar steps to reduce unnecessary use. Instead it has spent its energies in minimizing or denying the problem.

* * *

Production Agriculture’s Contribution To The Problem

As it turns out, food animal production uses the lion’s share of the antibiotics in the United States—some 13 million pounds of antibiotics every year, about 70% of the total. The estimates include drugs used in only three livestock sectors—poultry, swine and beef cattle—and only for purposes other than treating sick animals—nontherapeutic purposes like growth promotion and routine disease prevention. All of these antibiotics, among them Penicillins, Tetracyclines and Erythromycin—are in classes of drugs used in human medicine. Most of these drugs are delivered to animals mixed in their feed.

* * *

The Link Between Animal Production and Reduced Efficacy of Human Drugs

In light of the enormous use in production agriculture of exactly the same drugs used in human medicine, it is difficult to imagine a credible scenario under which resistant bacteria generated in the billions of animals we grow for food would not find their way to human populations and erode the effectiveness of our antibiotic arsenal. And indeed a mountain of scientific studies now demonstrates that that is the case.

* * *

The Solution is Reducing Antibiotic Use

As long as the massive use of antibiotics continues, animals, particularly animal guts, will remain a fountain of resistant pathogens, dangerous to both animals and humans. The straightforward solution to the problem is to reduce the use of antibiotics in animal production and thereby diminish the pool of resistant organisms and traits. Fortunately, the largest amounts of antibiotics in food animal production are used for growth promotion, feed efficiency, and routine disease control, uses that can be eliminated without damage to animal health or unacceptable increases in animal production costs or consumer meat prices

* *

A recent report from the USDA Economic Research Service looking at changes in U.S. agriculture supported the notion that antibiotic use in agriculture could be reduced without significant costs to producers. The USDA confirmed that large farms are more likely than small farms to use antibiotics in feed but noted that the benefits of this use is limited to certain stages of production, particularly pig nurseries. For other stages of production like finisher pigs, there were few benefits.

The USDA also found that practices such as increased sanitation and vaccination could be substituted for antibiotics. Data from Europe also support the feasibility of reducing antibiotic use even in intensely industrial poultry and swine systems.

In 1999, Denmark, the world’s leading pork exporter, ended all use of antimicrobial growth promoters. A World Health Organization (WHO) analysis of the Danish experience has shown that ban has had little or no impact on agricultural productivity and animal welfare. The comprehensive analysis, published in 2003, showed that there were no appreciable impacts from the antibiotic ban in broiler chickens or older, so-called “finisher” pigs. In young nursery pigs, also called “weaners,” there was a modest increase in the number of pigs requiring antibiotics for the treatment of diarrhea, but the increase was completely offset by the overall decrease in antibiotic use. According to the WHO report, the overall drop in antibiotic use was 54%. In the years following the ban, the Danish pig herd continued to grow and the production losses associated with the ban in weaner pigs have been overcome. (By Margaret Mellon, Ph.D.)

For Full Testimony, see: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/food_and_agriculture/july-2009-pamta-testimony.pdf.

North Carolina has the densest pig population in North America, with around twice as many swine mega-factories as any other state. In 1998, North Carolina’s pig population had hit ten million, up from two million just six years before. Yet the number of hog farms was decreasing, with more and more animals being crammed into fewer and fewer farms. Since the primary route of swine flu transmission is thought to be the same as human flu, the increased potential for the spread of disease in such conditions is clear. Since news of the epidemic broke, reports in Mexico City daily La Jornada and Veracruz-based paper La Marcha have detailed how a number of community residents in the affected areas have expressed concerns over the operations of Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer. According to these reports, in Veracruz – where the outbreak originated, a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carrol raises 950,000 hogs per year in intensive conditions.

Smithfield has released a statement denying any link between the outbreak and Granjas Carrol’s operations in Mexico. It said the company routinely administers influenza virus vaccinations to its herds and conducts monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza. It said it had found no clinical signs or symptoms of swine influenza on its farms. This is not the first time intensive, industrialized agriculture has been accused of spreading disease. Recent avian flu outbreaks, for example, have shown the extent to which the export-oriented corporate model of poultry production may have spread strains such as H5N1. In my report Avian flu: time to shut the intensive poultry flu factories? I

n 2006, I outlined how bird flu has been endemic in wild birds in much of the world without leaping the species barrier and causing people any harm. But in damp and cramped conditions, a series of mutations can occur resulting in a highly pathogenic form. Within crowded chicken factory farms, the mild virus can evolve rapidly towards more dangerous and highly transmissible forms, capable of jumping species and spreading back into wild birds, which are defenseless against the new strain. (By Caroline Lucas)

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/28/swine-flu-intensive-farming-caroline-lucas/print

Pollution from Giant Livestock Farms Threatens Public Health Waste lagoons and manure sprayfields — two widespread and environmentally hazardous technologies — are poorly regulated.

Factory farms — giant livestock farms also known as feedlots that house thousands of cows, chickens or pigs — produce staggering amounts of animal wastes. The way these wastes are stored and used has profound effects on human health and the environment. On most factory farms, animals are crowded into relatively small areas; their manure and urine are funneled into massive waste lagoons.

These cesspools often break, leak or overflow, sending dangerous microbes, nitrate pollution and drug-resistant bacteria into water supplies. Factory-farm lagoons also emit toxic gases such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and methane. What’s more, the farms often spray the manure onto land, ostensibly as fertilizer — these “sprayfields” bring still more of these harmful substances into our air and water. Yet in spite of the huge amounts of animal wastes that factory farms produce, they have largely escaped pollution regulations; loopholes in the law and weak enforcement share the blame.

NRDC has fought, and won, a number of courtroom battles over the years to force the federal government to deal with the problem of factory farms, and the U.S. EPA is now under court order to set tighter controls on release of pathogens into the environment by factory farms, exercise greater oversight on factory farms’ pollution-reduction plans, and ensure that these plans are made available to the public.

Threats to Human Health

People who live near or work at factory farms breathe in hundreds of gases, which are formed as manure decomposes. The stench can be unbearable, but worse still, the gases contain many harmful chemicals. For instance, one gas released by the lagoons, hydrogen sulfide, is dangerous even at low levels. Its effects — which are irreversible — range from sore throat to seizures, comas and even death. Other health effects associated with the gases from factory farms include headaches, shortness of breath, wheezing, excessive coughing and diarrhea. Animal waste also contaminates drinking water supplies. For example, nitrates often seep from lagoons and sprayfields into groundwater. Drinking water contaminated with nitrates can increase the risk of blue baby syndrome, which can cause deaths in infants.

High levels of nitrates in drinking water near hog factories have also been linked to spontaneous abortions. Several disease outbreaks related to drinking water have been traced to bacteria and viruses from waste. On top of this, the widespread use of antibiotics also poses dangers. Large-scale animal factories often give animals antibiotics to promote growth, or to compensate for illness resulting from crowded conditions. These antibiotics are entering the environment and the food chain, contributing to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and making it harder to treat human diseases.

Source: http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/nspills.asp

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/world/europe/14briefs-EUROPEANUNIO_BRF.html?_r=1 A version of this article appeared in print on January 14, 2009, on page A14 of the New York edition.

For More Information on Organic Pest Management, see: http://www.nrdc.org/health/pesticides/ipm/contents.asp http://www.beyondpesticides.org/ http://members.aol.com/rccouncil/ourpage/index.htm http://www.pesticideinfo.org/ http://www.panna.org/

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