Superbugs. An alarming story in this week's The New Yorker focuses on man-made new diseases that cannot be eradicated with almost anything except bleach, even inside hospitals. The writer quotes Michael Pollan to explain the connection to your local meat factory:
“Seventy per cent of the antibiotics administered in America end up in agriculture,” Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at Berkeley and the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” told [the writer]. “The drugs are not used to cure sick animals but to prevent them from getting sick, because we crowd them together under filthy circumstances. We have created the perfect environment in which to breed superbugs that are antibiotic-resistant. We’ve created a petri dish in our factory farms for the evolution of dangerous pathogens.”
Pigs in factory farm image courtesy of Farm Sanctuary.
