> Dukes believes, though he has no evidence, that the bacteria in his gut became drug-resistant because he ate meat from animals raised with routine antibiotic use. That would not be difficult: most meat in the United States is grown that way. To varying degrees depending on their size and age, cattle, pigs, and chickens — and, in other countries, fish and shrimp — receive regular doses to speed their growth, increase their weight, and protect them from disease. Out of all the antibiotics sold in the United States each year, 80 percent by weight are used in agriculture, primarily to fatten animals and protect them from the conditions in which they are raised.
I really don't like to generalise in this way, but this sort of stuff makes me, as a European, pretty angry at the general laissez-faire attitude of the United States towards such things.
You may say "The US is allowed to govern itself as it wishes, no one's forcing you to live there" - but with its heavy use of antibiotics in cattle-raising (banned in the EU - even though the US has tried to use its muscle to get the EU to un-ban it), the US is basically doing a fantastic job of fucking up antibiotics for everyone. So yes, I'm angry at the United States and its corrupt political system that means that there's almost zero chance that any of this will be fixed until it's far too late.
I really don't like to generalise in this way, but this sort of stuff makes me, as a European, pretty angry at the general laissez-faire attitude of the United States towards such things.
You may say "The US is allowed to govern itself as it wishes, no one's forcing you to live there" - but with its heavy use of antibiotics in cattle-raising (banned in the EU - even though the US has tried to use its muscle to get the EU to un-ban it), the US is basically doing a fantastic job of fucking up antibiotics for everyone. So yes, I'm angry at the United States and its corrupt political system that means that there's almost zero chance that any of this will be fixed until it's far too late.