Today there are over 1 billion overweight people in the world by World Health Organization estimates. Ironically, there are an estimated 850 million more who are starving. Everyone in the industrialized world has more access to farmed animal products than ever before in history. The animals we eat have been bred, or genetically modified in some cases, to grow so big so fast until both eater and eaten can no longer function properly and suffer health problems as a result.
No one is really sure why, but antibiotics have been found to make farmed animals grow faster. The result is the use of 25 million pound of antibiotics used each year in agribusiness. That’s eight times the amount used to treat human illnesses! The overuse of antibiotics favors the strongest organisms who survive each treatment. The growth of resistant and disease causing bacteria weakens antibiotic use in humans and sets the stage for a worldwide pandemic like the recent swine flu scare.
We are increasingly making ourselves vulnerable to bacterial infections that develop immunity to normal lines of antibiotic treatment.
Factory farms are virtual breeding grounds for bacteria to develop and thrive. At industrialized pig farms, each football field-long shed backs into a lagoon where organic waste including manure and dead animals are left to rot and evaporate. Each shed contains thousands of animals packed closely together, making it easy for diseases to spread.
Given these facts it’s not a stretch to infer that our current health care crisis is closely tied to the health crisis in the animal agricultural industry.
Additional reading:
Sierra Club - Abuse of Antibiotics Factsheet
Natural Resources Defense Council - Facts About Pollution from Livestock Farms
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