Anyone Feeling Sick???

[csgray]

Routinely feeding healthy livestock the same antibiotics used to treat human diseases, solely for the purpose of increasing the speed of weight gain in the animals, is a big reason for the proliferation of antibiotic resistant bacteria. MRSA first emerged outside of hospitals in people who worked with swine in large scale industrial style hog fattening facilities. Using antibiotics for weight gain is also a common practice in similar chicken and beef fattening operations. These are bacteria rich environments and constant exposure to the antibiotics used to fight diseases in humans has sped up the rates at which these bugs develop resistance to the drugs. They then spread to the general populations through workers and through run off into waterways. There was a huge explosion of MRSA outside of hospitals after many factory farms had their pig manure lagoons flooded and released into waterways during a series of big storms and hurricanes in the South East several years ago.

Carol