A Healthy Pig (photo by vnyberg, courtesy of morgueFile.com)

Giant agribusinesses like to claim that industrial farming produces an abundance of food at affordable prices, but once the costs of government subsidies, environmental devastation, and the impact on human health are factored in, industrial food is expensive indeed! And those costs are born by ordinary people through taxes and medical bills, while top executives from the world of big agribusiness live splendid lives of luxury.

The Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming is working to protect human health by eliminating the misuse of antibiotics and related drugs in food animals, joining the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, and countless others in an effort to improve public health.

At the Pew Charitable Trusts’ web site, the nonprofit organization explains:

To reform health care we need to reduce health care costs, and that includes reducing the drug-resistant diseases that cost our country billions. This means stopping the misuse of the antibiotics our families rely on. Many industrial farms routinely feed these drugs to chickens and livestock that aren't sick, which promotes the development of deadly antibiotic-resistant infections.

This past July, the New York Times published an article saying, “The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.”

The Times article reported that Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, told the House Rules Committee that feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle should cease, because the practice leads to the development of bacteria that are immune to many treatments.

To visit the Pew organization's web site, get more information, and/or get active, go to: The Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming

To read the New York Times article cited above go to: Administration Seeks to Restrict Antibiotics in Livestock

To view previous posts on the topic go to:

1. We Want to Know What's in Our Children's Milk!
2. Highest Quality, Healthiest Meat is Sustainably Produced
3. What is Sustainable Food?

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