Obviously they’re just your usual statists looking for even more regulations, nothing new, but that’s not what I’m on to here. They claim that farmers are using antibiotics when they aren’t needed (seemingly to increase production by cutting costs), thus raising the risk of creating resistant diseases.
Okay, I don’t think we can argue with the science of antibiotic use, assuming this is really happening.
But what I’m interested in is–what is the free market solution to this problem?
My first thought is that, farmers could be held legally responsible if (is this a big if?) it can be shown that their unneccesary use of antibiotics created a resistant strain of disease that originated from their farm. I would imagine that this would have the effect (and assuming now it’s not the case) of reducing usage of the drugs. Is this a realistic, fair, and reasonable answer? Is there another?
Part of my hesitiation here is that there’s already a pretty big penalty if a disease comes from their farm- their business could be destroyed, worst case, or at the very least they’ll have huge losses. Seemingly that’s not enough incentive to stop this risky behavior, however. Am I off base here? Perhaps the government is enabling this somehow as well? (wouldn’t doubt it)
An interesting topic, aside from the politics. The other view I have heard is the problem is not farmers using antibiotics prophylactically, it’s human Petri dishes in ICU. Families can’t bring themselves to turn the respirator off, so these living corpses slowly rot away from sepsis, while incubating billions of bacteria that the doctors are trying to keep at bay. Hospitals are basically giant, pass-thru bureaucratic institutions as well, so they’re basically hotels instead of what they should be: antiseptic institutions gleaming with steel and tile flooring that you don’t stay in for one minute longer than you have to. Our worst-of-all-worlds government/medical insurance warps a lot of these things.
I think medicine could use AB’s a lot more intelligently–they are definitely WAY overused. But I think farmers are thinking back to the days when one coughing cow meant a whole herd dying in a week, so they dose the animals regardless.
Antibiotics producers should be able to control how their product is used, and to do so in order to maintain its effectiveness. If farmers are overusing antibiotics, it is because the people selling them the antibiotics do not care about the long-term effectiveness of their product. It could also be that there is no credible threat.
Antibiotic resistant strains typically only survive in controlled environments, and cannot compete against naturally occuring strains. There’s very little chance that humans will be contaminated with them if they originate in an industrial farm. The real threat is, as always, places where animals and humans live in close quarters, and where no safety precautions are taken. This is the origin of all the really nasty new microbes.
Very few people outside that line of work know that all the present day aviary flu strains originated in the intensive chicken farms in Romagna and then spread all over the world mutating all the way. These were the first modern chicken farms, with chicken cramped in small cages and being given large doses of antibiotics (then just available in large quantities and on the cheap) to fight infections arising from such cramped quarters and, as a side effect, speed up growth. It worked for a time until antibiotic resistant strains developed. When I was a child (here comes the trip down memory lane…) I clearly remember the disasters this method wrought: millions of chicken, turkeys, ducks and other farm-raised birds died or were slaughtered to prevent the contagion, their carcasses being incinerated or buried in huge pits and covered with lime. Even if I live two hundreds miles from Romagna and the events happened decades ago the ruins of many aviary farms still dot the countryside, a sad reminder of this catastrophe. Did chicken farmers learn their lesson? Yes. They switched to extensive farming, they drastically cut antibiotics use, they concentrated on selective breeding, they switched to better feed, they invested more in veterinarian care. Outbreaks still happen occasionally but the problem has been solved. Not only that but industrial chicken now tastes much better, almost like the ones my grandparents raised.
Allow me a final word on antibiotics: drug-resistant strains tend to develop over time, it’s in the nature of things and research can deal with that no problem as long as the mutation rate is predictable. When external factors, like improper drug use, kick in the situation worsens a lot. Viral and bacterial strain (and also fungine infections) not only become drug resistant, but they also become more virulent, a classic case of evolution rewarding the fittest. Hospitals, despite being spotlessly clean and subjected to many controls, are the most demanding breeding ground for infections. To counter this more aggressive (and expensive) drugs are developed and often used without proper testing. How do I know that? Two years ago I underwent a simple surgical operation (it lasted 17 minutes) and I was given lots of aggressive antibiotics during the three days I spent in the hospital to counter aggressive virus and bacteria (they told me precisely that). A little after leaving the hospital I had a very strong internal bleeding caused by an allergic reaction which almost costed me my life and it took me almost two years to recover from it. So be careful each time somebody wants to inject you with something even for your own good, m’kay? [;)]
Disease should, IMHO, be treated as pollution, the farmer cah use as much antibiotic as he wants, though if he finds a resistant strain and it escapes his property, he is responsible…
Here’s another thing they don’t really tell you about AB’s: they kill those very useful bacteria in your intestinal tract as well. I had a bout of bacterial pneumonia a while back and was on AB’s for a month. It took the next year for my GI tract to feel ‘right’ again. I was eating yogurt too.
I was talking about this with a co-worker and she mentioned her hypochondriac mom. Always getting AB’s prescribed every time she got the flu. When she was in her late 60’s, a part of her intestinal tract just shut down and had to be resected.
I thought the “good bacteria” thing was common knowledge too, at least nowadays.
Anyway, yes I am approaching this problem with the same approach that you would use for pollution. I think it may actually work even better, because according to the news at least, they seem to be able to track these things down to their source already. Pollution, I’m afraid may be more difficult, but..different topic.
I think that brings up another question, which also would apply to pollution. If farmers cause a problem like this due to excessive antibiotic use, and they “should” be held liable, which would act as a deterrent-- why aren’t they now?
Because the real crux of the matter is that there is no real proof that it causes this phenomenon and that these bacteria do not already exist, just not as prevelant when they are outcompeted by non resistent bacteria…
If that’s the case, that should also be the argument to stop these regulation loving clowns at the url I posted above. But something tells me that the government won’t mind such “unimportant details”.
Not calling this wrong, but you lost me here. I’m not putting together how property rights ties into holding producers liable for environmental or safety related damages. Who’s property are we talking about?
Missed this-- isn’t this similar to saying gun producers should be liable for how their guns are used? I realize the difference of “preserving effectiveness”(antib) vs “preventing misuse”(guns), but the real problem isn’t the effectiveness of the drugs, it’s the potential risk that arises from mis-over-using (there’s a fun new Bushism for yas [;)]) the product.
Surely we don’t want pharmaceutical companies regulating the use of their products “for the good of the public”, any more than we want gun makers doing so.
When you breed a disease on your property and it moves to another person’s property, it is a violation of property rights, just as if your cow trespasses on your neighbors property…
If gun makers were to regulate their product for the good of the community, they would put one in everyone’s hands…
We don’t want them regulating use “for the good of the public.” We want them regulating use for the maximization of profit. This means insuring the efficacy of their product by contractually obligating vendors not to over-prescribe.