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Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society, Inc.
38 East Market Street, Rhinebeck, New York 12572 USA -
845-876-2626
Vegetarian - Vegan - Animal Rights - Health - Nutrition - Environment
The mission of the Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society, Inc. is to promote the vegetarian ethic in the Mid-Hudson (New York) region, educate the community and aid anyone in the pursuit of a totally vegetarian (vegan) cruelty-free and healthful lifestyle.
Newsletters
Articles From the Fall 1998 Newsletter
STILL ANOTHER REASON TO GO
VEGETARIAN
By Terry Sullivan
Farm animals are being pumped full of antibiotics, and that's posing a very real threat to human health.
Factory farms feed antibiotics to their stressed-out animals to keep them from developing devastating infections and to fatten them for slaughter. But just as bacteria in people can become resistant to antibiotics, so can infectious bugs in farm animals. As a result, human diseases that were treatable with antibiotics in the past are becoming more and more dangerous.
Several strains of disease-causing bacteria with resistance to nearly all known antibiotics have emerged in just the past couple of years. And a government panel says cases of antibiotic-resistant human disease have "clearly occurred" due to bacteria from farm animals given antibiotic-laced feed.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest calls the panel's report a "landmark...the first authoritative U.S. report to explicitly acknowledge that use of antibiotics in farm animals poses a risk to human health."
But the C.S.P.I. also criticizes the government panel for calling for still more study, instead of recommending an outright ban on the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals.
Eleven years ago, John Robbins put it this way, in his book "Diet for A New America:"
"Unless we restrict the habitual use of antibiotics in livestock feed, these lifesavers are well on their way to becoming utterly ineffective, and physicians will find themselves as helpless in the treatment of many infectious diseases as they were in the pre-antibiotic Middle Ages."
Return to Fall 1998 Newsletter
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