Quote:
Originally Posted by bughunter99
Actually plenty of humans are carrying around antibiotic resistant ecoli these days. Five-ten years ago it was pretty rare. These days it is in pretty much every hospital of any size in the country. The resistant strains do not cause more virulent, or more deadly disease. Just disease that needs more antibiotics to treat. The really bad strain is not resistant, it just secretes a whole lot of toxin. Ecoli 0157-H7. That one can kill people. Its less likely to be in human sludge than farm waste.
All the clarification aside. I agree the original post is contains a whole lot of inflammatory misinformation.
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You forget one of the key factors in the change of E-coli. The E-coli has always been found in cattle. It is part of the natural flora of their digestive tracts. But you are correct, it never used to be common in human flora. But there are actually TWO main changes in E-coli. The first is many strains gradually evolved to survive in a more acidic environment, and it also has evolved to be resistant to a wide range of antibiotics.
BOTH these changes are a result of CAFO's. You couldn't devise a better breeding ground for dangerous pathogens if you tried. Cattle eat more grains, which makes their digestive systems more acidic, and they are given antibiotics in constant low doses in their feed. So the previously harmless e-coli in animal waste has become potentially dangerous to us humans.
In years past, our more acidic digestive system handled killing the E-coli from cattle, and if for some reason it didn't, antibiotics worked to get rid of it easily.
Now because of the inhumane and dangerous way we raise animals, we are breeding dangerous strains of E-coli and other pathogens.
In fact in fact, E. coli O104:H4 is resistant to at least 14 different types of antibiotics and highly toxic because it picked up the genes for producing shiva toxins, presumably by horizontal gene transfer!
E. coli on the March
You would have thought us humans would have learned the dangers of CAFOs with the outbreak of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad cow), and learned some humility, but no,
We didn't learn a gosh darnoodley thing.
Makes me even more mad because it is getting worse.
But it doesn't have to be that way. There are environmentally friendly alternatives that respect animals key role in BOTH animal AND plant agriculture.
Chaffin Orchards