Have you ever heard of antibiotic-free meat? Assuming your
answer is no, I haven’t either! Antibiotic-free meat, at first, sounds kind of
dangerous because “antibiotic-free,” possibly means that there weren’t any
precautions to kill harmful microorganisms. Can this be true? Well, after
reading an article by Eryn Brown from the La Times about UCLA hospitals now
serving “antibiotic-free meat,” I kind of have a different perspective.
 |
| https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/images/f/f7/Antibiotics-for-agriculture.gif |
Enhancing the growth of cows has many ways, but feeding
antibiotics to cows, chickens, and pigs not only enhances there growth; but it
can also be a problem of microbes becoming resistant to antibiotics. “Bacteria
that are susceptible to treatment die off in the presence of antimicrobial
medication, allowing other bacteria that are resistant to drugs to thrive and
endanger patients.” It’s only logical that the more the drugs are used the more
opportunities arise for resistant bacteria to show up. This can take place both
in the human’s life of improper use of antibiotic drugs and in the U.S
agricultures’ for overuse of antibiotics in farm animals. According to a report
by the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention more than 2 million
people in the U.S suffer antibiotic-resistant infections every year and 23,000
of those people die from their illnesses.
UCLA is now starting to put antibiotic-free ground beef,
chicken breasts, and ground beef patties on the menus at the university’s
hospitals, which include UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica and Ronald Reagan
UCLA Medical Center; hospital officials hoping to get rid of “so-called
superbugs.” Uslan, director of the UCLA Antimicrobial Stewardship Program, says
it’s just a small step toward solving the problem of antibiotic resistance but
a very important one.
This article is probably one on the most well written
articles I blogged about this semester. The research and knowledge seem to be
all backed up by scientific claims and well analyzed. Most of this information
was already known but it seemed to be talked about in a different perspective;
which I feel is always nice because of the different insight you get. The main
point, antibiotic-free meat, was also well addressed in this article and I feel
like I now know a reasonable amount about this topic. Only one question arises
from my perspective, and that is, is this antibiotic-free meat really going to
help in the long run? I guess we will just have to wait and see!
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ucla-antibiotic-free-meat-20140401,0,129974.story#axzz2z6mSFKeB
This is incredibly interesting. I never thought that antibiotics could have such an effect on agriculture and meat! It makes me wonder as well if making the meat antibiotic free will really make a difference in our health. I also wonder how that impacts the animals. Can this benefit both humans and animals? I find it a little odd that this "new" meat is being served at hospitals though. It's almost as if the patients are the test subjects. Though I'm sure the meat can't do any damage. I wonder if it tastes differently. I also wonder how far until this meat becomes public in our supermarkets. It doesn't hurt to try, especially if normal meat that does contain antibiotic resistant microbes can harm us and make us ill. However, since pumping antibiotics into cows/pigs make them bigger, and thus they produce more, I don't see it stopping.
ReplyDelete