[ExI] The post-antibiotic era

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 3:27 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
> Antibiotic use in animal husbandry is actually a serious bad, and rightly
> banned in many countries (e.g. banned for non-medical purposes across EU
> since 2006). You can produce cheap meat without it. It is just that you can
> make cheaper meat with it, at the price of feeding resistance bigtime. (Not
> that the EU cares about cheap meat...)

### I disagree here. I am not familiar with any good evidence that
agricultural use of antibiotics in feed has any negative impact on
human health, directly or indirectly. From what I heard, the
antibiotics used to increase meat yields are usually different from
the ones used in humans, and, much more importantly, they are not used
in bacteriostatic or bactericidal concentrations. This bears
repeating: It is impossible to select for high levels of antibiotic
resistance using low concentrations of antibiotics. The mechanism
whereby antibiotics increase yields is not through killing of bacteria
but rather through some as yet poorly understood signaling processes.
This is completely different from medical use in humans, where the
purpose is to achieve bacteriostasis or even bacteriolysis. The source
of MRSA is not a farm, it's a hospital, and it's in the hospitals that
antibiotics should be limited.

Rafal