Sunday, May 28, 2006

Meat Farming: Antibiotics and the Meat we Eat


Meat Farming: A Look into what we Eat...


We know that ranchers and farmers have been feeding small doses of antibiotics to farm animals daily so that they might gain as much as 3 percent more body weight, a huge deal when profits are involved. Such antibiotics like tetracycline are thoughts to kill the flora living in the animals’ intestines and this helps the animals utilize their food more efficiently adding to their weight gain.

The main concern is that antibiotics used to treat human illnesses are put into the animals’ food and drink and over time creates a type of super bacteria that is resistant to the drug. This resistance can be passed on to humans can pose a great human health risk when you think of what might happen on a global scale when our antibiotics are no longer effective in fighting our illnesses.

It is estimated that there are 15-17 million pounds of antibiotics used sub-therapeutically in the United States each year. Antibiotics are given to animals for therapeutic reasons, but this use isn't as controversial even though there are ethical as well as heath concerns involved when sick animals are used for meat farming. The conditions the animals are raised under in meat farms could be a reason for the number of sick animals needing medication.
Concern about the growing level of drug-resistant bacteria has led to the banning of sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in meat animals in many countries in the European Union and Canada. In the United States, however, such use is still legal. The World Health Organization is concerned enough about antibiotic resistance to suggest significantly lowering the use of antibiotics in the animals we eat. In a recent report, the WHO declared its intention to "reduce the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials in food animals for the protection of human health." Specifically, the WHO recommended that prescriptions be required for all antibiotics used to treat sick food animals, and urged efforts to "terminate or rapidly phase out antimicrobials for growth promotion if they are used for human treatment."

A study from the New England Journal of Medicine done in 2001 found that: 20 percent of ground meat obtained in supermarkets contained salmonella. Of that 20 percent that was contaminated with salmonella, 84 percent was resistant to at least one form of antibiotic.
Lowering or halting sub-therapeutic antibiotic use in animal production could have serious economic effects on the meat and poultry industry. According to the same report, U.S. hog producers saved about $63 million in feed costs in 1999 due to their use of low levels of sub-therapeutic drugs; they would have suffered an estimated loss of $45.5 million in 1999 if the drug use was banned.

Despite these statistics, even within the industry, there is a growing movement to reduce at least the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in animals raised for food. Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms and Foster Farms, which collectively produce a third of the chicken Americans eat, recently declared their intention to greatly reduce the amount of antibiotics fed to healthy chicken. There is still no way for consumers to know whether one of these companies' chickens has been treated with antibiotics, although some corporate consumers, McDonald's, Wendy's and Popeye's among them, are refusing to buy chicken that has been treated with fluoroquinolones. Increased public pressure may cause the companies who grow animals for food to collectively decide that putting extra weight on feed animals isn't worth the possibility that they are putting consumers' health at risk.

Along with the consumer's health risk I think as consumers we have an ethical responsibility to look at the process by which we recieve our meat products and evaluate the standards by which the animals were raised and slughtered. Is the production process ethical? Is it humane? If it is not, does this go about adding to the health risks we face when we eat altered, sick and unhealthy animals?


Here is a book by author Madeline Drexler, former medical columist for the Boston Globe. In her book, Secret Agents, she argues that farm animals in this country live in unmatched squalor. "The site of modern meat production," she writes in her book, is akin to a walled medieval city, where waste is tossed out the window, sewage runs down the street, and feed and drinking water are routinely contaminated by fecal material."



Pigs are held here until they are 250 lbs,about 6 months old. Then they are taken to slaughter.
Turkeys going into the slaughter:

Below is a flash animation video about the meat you eat that is informative and hopefully entertaining. Take time to watch it for a quick overview of meat farming in America today.
http://www.themeatrix.com/

Here are some ideas for how you can take action to help protect our foods.
Take Action Now:
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/fwwatch/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=3181

More good ideas are buying ORGANICALLY CERTIFIED foods that do not have hormones or drugs fed to the animals, as well as buying FREE RANGE meats where the animals are spaced and raised humanely for a natural and healthier meat.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Aswan High Dam



The History:

The Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, controls the largest river in the world, the Nile. It is near the border of Egypt and Sudan and has created the world's third largest reservoir, Lake Nasser. The Nile has a long history of annual flooding which contributes to the fertile soils along its banks. The Aswan dam was built in part to control these flooding cycles as well as to create hydroelectric power from the dam itself. Earlier shorter dams had been built at Aswan in 1889, 1912 and 1933, but they were insufficient to hold back the flood waters and near breechings showed how dangerous these dams could be. The dam, whose estimated cost is thought to be at around $1 billion, was paid for by Egypt with funds obtained from nationalizing the Suez Canal. In 1959 the Soviet Union steeped in as well paid for possibly an entire 1/3 of the cost of the project. They also provided technicians and machinery and the entire dam was designed by the Russian Zuk Hydroproject Institute.






The Bright Side:

The Aswan High Dam contains 17 times the material used in the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Dam is 11,811 feet long, 3215 feet thick at the base and 364 feet tall. It provides irrigation and electricity for the whole of Egypt and provides about a half of Egypt's power supply and has improved navigation along the river by keeping the water flow consistent. The dam created a 30% increase in the cultivatable land in Egypt. The electricity producing capability of the Dam has doubled Egypt's available supply. When the dam first reached its peak production rates, it allowed most of the villages in Egypt to connect to electricity for the first time, a large step in community development. The dam also mitigated the negative effects of the large floods in 1964 and 1973, as well as the droughts in 1972 and 1983. An entire fishing industry was created around Lake Nasser, which increased yields and offered more jobs. Today however this industry is struggling because of the distance from large markets.


The Down Side:

In order to build the dam both people and artifacts had to be moved. Over 90,000 Nubians had to be relocated. Those who had been living in Egypt were moved about 28 miles away but the Sudanese Nubians were relocated 370 miles, a great distance a huge disturbance to their lives. The loss of silt in the flood planes and the nutrients reaching the ocean is a huge problem. Farmers have been forced to use about a million tons of artificial fertilizer as a substitute for the nutrients which no longer fill the flood plain. Fish and shrimp harvests are declining because of a lack of nutrients entering the ocean where the Nile ends. The Nile Delta itself has lost much of its fertility. This silt gets caught in the dam and is slowly lowering the water storage capacity of Lake Nasser. Irrigation practices have led to water-logging of the soils and increased salinity. Many are concerned about the long term effects the dam will have on the ecosystem of the area and its wider impacts. There has also been significant erosion of coastlines due to lack of sand which was once brought by the Nile, all along the eastern Mediterranean. The Swan Dam has actually increased the salinity of the Mediterranean Sea, which affects its outflow current into the Atlantic Ocean. It is being studied and questioned weather this change in outflow properties might have an impact on global weather patterns.

I feel that although dams can do a great deal of good, the environmental damage that they create in the long-run can outweight the benefits they offer. We have other energy alternatives to large scale damming, and I feel that just as in the case of mud-slide areas and areas with a high risk of fire, proper regulating, zoning and public managment needs to be enforced. Nature has its essenital cycles and people need to realize we cannot bottle these forces without significant risk and eventual loss. Dams are increadibly expensive in their construction and maintanence, and they pose a lingering danger to those who live beneath the reservoirs. A look at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina can show us what can happen when we loose respect and vigilance over our attempts to control natural systems. Today China has built as many dams as the entire rest of the world, and they are in the process of building the Three Gorges Dam. Serious concerns need to be raised about the proliferation of this means of human adaptation.