Factory farms implicated in marine mammal die-off

by | Feb 24, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification

By Tom Philpott / Mother Jones

The meat industry defends its reliance on routine antibiotic use by flatly denying the practice poses any public-health problem. The view is summed up by this 2010 National Pork Producers Council newsletter: “[T]here are no definitive studies linking the use of antibiotics in animal feed to changes in resistance in humans.” The claim, I guess, is that the drug-resistant bacteria that evolve on antibiotic-laden feedlots stay on those feedlots and don’t migrate out.

That contention is looking increasingly flimsy. My colleague Julia Whitty recently pointed to a new study showing that a particular antibiotic-resistant pathogen “likely originated as a harmless bacterium living in humans, which acquired antibiotic resistance only after it migrated into livestock.”  In its new, harmful form, Julia reports, the bacterial strain “now causes skin infections and sepsis, mostly in farm workers.”

And humans aren’t the only creatures paying the price of routine antibiotic use. A research team from the Pacific Northwest has found that terrestrial pathogens, including strains if E. coli resistant to multiple antibiotics, are now infecting sea mammals. The researchers collected and performed autopsies on more than 1600 stranded seals and otters over 10 years. They found that infectious diseases accounted for 30 percent of 40 percent of the deaths. “Comparing the diseases found in marine mammals with terrestrial mammals has identified similar, and in many cases genetically identical disease agents,” the researchers report.

They recently presesnted their findings at a science conference in Vancouver, and the title they chose says it all: “Swimming in Sick Seas.”

Not all of the pathogens are related to factory farms—some are associated with cats and possums. But livestock play a role. “We’re finding similar pathology or abnormalities in marine mammals to what we’re seeing in our livestock cases,” one of the researchers told The Vancouver Sun. Some of the seals carried strains of E. coli and Enterococcus that are “resistant to eight different antibiotics used in livestock,” the Sun reports. The pathway from factory farm to sea is likely manure that runs off into streams and ends up in the ocean.

The gross part is that the E. coli-infected seals were found in coastal areas where people sometimes take the water. “These harbour seals are in similar areas to where humans would be,” one of the study’s resarchers told the Sun. “If clinical disease were to develop, it may be more difficult to treat with conventional antibiotics.”

He added: “Marine mammals recognize no borders, and neither do pathogens and parasites.” That’s not a message to comfort the meat industry, which wants us to believe that its antibiotic-resistant pathogens stay penned up on factory farms.

From Mother Jones: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/02/how-factory-farms-are-killing-seals

Study: Factory farm antibiotic use responsible for “superbug” transmittable to humans

by | Feb 23, 2012 | Toxification

By David Ferguson / The Raw Story

Speculation has long abounded that overuse of antibiotics by factory farmers has been a major contributing factor in the development of so-called “superbugs” like MRSA or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Now, according to a report from Mother Jones, there is scientific proof.

According to a paper in the American Society of Microbiology’s newsletter mBio, researchers have sequenced the genomes of 88 closely-related strains of Staphylococcus aureus. They have concluded that one “particularly nasty” strain, CC398, began as a fairly harmless human bacterium known as MSSA, but evolved after colonizing the systems of pigs, chickens and other livestock.

Inside the animals, the bacterial strain was bombarded by an array of broad-spectrum antibiotics, drugs commonly used by factory farmers to reduce infections and disease in animals kept in close quarters. According to mBio, this allowed the germs to become resistant to antibiotics like tetracycline and methicillin, as well as allowing the microorganisms to become “bidirectional,” meaning that they can freely be transmitted between humans and livestock.

The resistant CC398 strain first appeared in livestock in 2003, but is now widespread among U.S. farm animals and has been causing sepsis and skin infections, mostly in farm workers. So far, the infection has not been able to transmit from human to human.

The Food and Drug Administration announced in January that it is placing new restrictions on the wholesale use of some antibiotics in farm animals. Mother Jones reports, however, that according to the journal New Science, these regulations cover a paltry .02 percent of the drugs commonly used on animals.

From The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/23/factory-farms-breeding-superbugs-says-study/

Marine mammals sickening from land-based animal diseases

by | Feb 20, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Toxification

By AFP

When dead sea mammals started washing ashore on Canada’s west coast in greater numbers, marine biologist Andrew Trites was distressed to find that domestic animal diseases were killing them.

Around the world, seals, otters and other species are increasingly infected by parasites and other diseases long common in goats, cows, cats and dogs, marine mammal experts told a major science conference.

The diseases also increasingly threaten people who use the oceans for recreation, work or a source of seafood, scientists told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held this year in this western Canadian city.

The symposium “Swimming in Sick Seas” was one of many sessions at the meeting that drew a bleak picture of the state of the world’s oceans, which are increasingly acidic, warming in some areas and being inundated with melting ice or other climate change effects.

“There are dramatic shifts in the ocean ecosystem,” said Jason Hall-Spencer of Britain’s University of Plymouth, citing his research in Italy, Baha California and Papua New Guinea that is “all showing the same thing” — with an increase in carbon dioxide, “you get a 30 percent drop in microbes, plants and animals” in the oceans.

Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California at Santa Barbara said increasing ocean acidity, caused by CO2 from fossil-fuel burning, is killing shellfish young — called spat — worldwide.

In the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the United States, the failure of spat hatcheries threaten a commercial industry worth more than $200 million, said Hofmann.

Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, said warming of the water reduces how much oxygen it can hold, newly threatening deep-sea creatures that have survived for millennium under stable conditions.

“We’ve seen less than five percent of (animals) on the deep sea floor, and if we’re wiping them out we’ll never see them,” Levin told the conference.

“There are undoubtedly organisms down there that can be very beneficial to us, that we have yet to find.”

According to Trite, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the Fisheries Centre at University of British Columbia, the bodies washing ashore are a grim signal.

“I see the dead mammals coming ashore as canaries in a coal mine,” said Trite.”

Parasites, funguses, viruses and bacteria are increasingly passed from land to sea animals because human settlements on coastlines changes water patterns through paving, filling of wetlands that are natural filters, and intensive agriculture run-off, said scientists.

Toxoplasma gondii (sometimes called kitty litter disease), round-worm, single-celled parasites that cause brain swelling and disease that cause cows to abort their fetuses add to the challenges marine animals face from human pollution, Trite said.

Diseases from large agriculture operations “can cause abortion storms” in sea animals, said Michael Grigg, a US expert in parasites with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Grigg said a virulent new Type X strain in California “is now spreading across the US” and samples have found it in South America and Asia. Grigg noted common strains of Toxoplasma gondii are already common in people, infecting as many as 25 per cent of North Americans and 50 to 70 per cent of adult Europeans.

Changes in disease and frequency in sea animals “could have unrecognized impacts on humans as well,” said Melissa Miller, a veterinarian in California. “We live in the same areas, and harvest and eat many of the same foods.”

The panel said increased surveillance was required to monitor the health implications for humans of parasites and pathogens spreading from land to the marine mammals.

From Yahoo! News:

Scientist develops “burger” from stem cells in laboratory; considers producing “panda meat”

by | Feb 19, 2012 | Agriculture

By Ian Sample, The Guardian

Lurking in a petri dish in a laboratory in the Netherlands is an unlikely contender for the future of food. The yellow-pink sliver the size of a corn plaster is the state-of-the-art in lab-grown meat, and a milestone on the path to the world’s first burger made from stem cells.

Dr Mark Post, head of physiology at Maastricht University, plans to unveil a complete burger – produced at a cost of more than £200,000 – this October.

He hopes Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of the three Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, will cook the offering for a celebrity taster as yet unnamed.

The project, funded by a wealthy, anonymous, individual aims to slash the number of cattle farmed for food, and in doing so reduce one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

“Meat demand is going to double in the next 40 years and right now we are using 70% of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock,” Post said.

“You can easily calculate that we need alternatives. If you don’t do anything meat will become a luxury food and be very, very expensive.”

Livestock contribute to global warming through unchecked releases of methane, a gas 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, Post said the burger would be a “proof of concept” to demonstrate that “with in-vitro methods, out of stem cells we can make a product that looks like and feels and hopefully tastes like meat”.

Post is focusing on making beef burgers from stem cells because cows are among the least efficient animals at converting the food they eat into food for humans.

“Cows and pigs have an efficiency rate of about 15%, which is pretty inefficient. Chickens are more efficient and fish even more,” Post said. “If we can raise the efficiency from 15% to 50% it would be a tremendous leap forward.”

Post and his team of six have so far grown thin sheets of cow muscle measuring 3cm long, 1.5cm wide, and half a millimetre thick. To make a burger will take 3,000 pieces of muscle and a few hundred pieces of fatty tissue, that will be minced together and pressed into a patty.

Each piece of muscle is made by extracting stem cells from cow muscle tissue and growing them in containers in the laboratory. The cells are grown in a culture medium containing foetal calf serum, which contains scores of nutrients the cells need to grow.

The slivers of muscle grow between pieces of Velcro and flex and contract as they develop. To make more protein in the cells – and so improve the texture of the tissue – the scientists shock them with an electric current.

Post said he could theoretically increase the number of burgers made from a single cow from 100 to 100m. “That means we could reduce the number of livestock we use by 1m,” he said.

If lab-grown meat mimics farmed meat perfectly – and Post admits it may not – the meat could become a premium product just as free range and organic items have.

He said that in conversations with the Dutch Society of Vegetarians, the chairman estimated half its members would start to eat meat if he could guarantee that it cost fewer animal lives.

Meat grown in the laboratory could have several advantages, because its manufacture is controlled at each step. The tissue could be grown to produce high levels of healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids, or to have a particular texture.

Because the burgers are made from animal stem cells, researchers could make products from more exotic animals. “We could make panda meat, I’m sure we could,” Post said.

He believes it will be a relatively simple matter to scale up the operation, since most of the technical obstacles have already been overcome. “I’d estimate that we could see mass production in another 10 to 20 years,” he said.

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/19/test-tube-burger-meat-eating

Under Utah bill, videotaping a factory farm equal to assaulting a police officer on second offense

by | Feb 18, 2012 | Repression at Home

By Will Potter / Green is the New Red

Utah is the latest state to consider new laws targeting undercover investigators who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms. A new bill would make photographing animal abuse on par with assaulting a police officer.

Rep. John Mathis calls undercover investigators “animal rights terrorists,” and says video recordings that have brought national attention to systemic animal welfare abuses are “propaganda” and fundraising efforts.

The bill, HB187, targets anyone who videotapes or takes photograph on a farmer’s property without permission. It creates the crime of “agricultural operation interference,” a class A misdemeanor which is elevated to a third-degree felony on the second offense.

It comes at at time when the FBI has considered “terrorism” charges against undercover investigators.

Rep. Mathis’ opening remarks at a hearing by the Utah House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee on February 14th are indicative of the good ol’ boy network that is attempting to pass this legislation:

“It’s fun to see my good ag friends in this committee,” Mathis said. “… all my good friends are here.”

Mathis, the sponsor of the bill, said animal protection groups are solely using their investigations as “propaganda” efforts for fundraising drives. He went on to claim that animal welfare reforms, such as allowing chickens to spread their wings, are actually “detrimental to the welfare of animals.”

Exposing animal abuse is hurting animal welfare? Photography is terrorism? What Mathis leaves out is that these investigations have led to criminal charges against farm workers. Just this week, undercover video shot by Mercy for Animals at a Butterball farm resulted in six workers being charged with misdemeanors and felonies.

And a recent investigation by Compassion Over Killing (in Iowa, another state considering “Ag Gag” legislation) showed workers pushing herniated intestines back inside injured piglets, then covering the wound with tape.

Only token gestures of opposition were made during the hearing, such as one representative voicing concerns that the bill could target people who take “pretty barn pictures.”

But this bill isn’t about pretty pictures.

This bill, and similar attempts in Florida, Iowa, Minnesota and New York, is to criminalize anyone who exposes abuses on factory farms.

These disproportionate penalties are solely motivated by the corporate interests affected by animal welfare reforms. As Rep. Craig Frank, a Republican, noted: this bill makes taking a photograph of a factory farm in Utah a third-degree felony on the second offense, the same as assaulting a police officer.

He called it a “Blank Angus Ops” bill and questioned the need for new laws when trespassing is already a crime, but outside of making jokes he and the others on the committee offered no opposition.

In light of the recent criminal charges and systemic animal welfare violations, it’s startling to hear Mathis and supporters say the bill is the same as punishing someone who leaves a video recorder “under you and your wife’s bed.”

This isn’t about personal privacy.

It’s about corporations attempting to hide their criminal activity, deceive consumers, and deflect public scrutiny onto those who are dragging these abuses into the sunlight.

The committee voted 10-3 to move the measure as originally written to the full House. You can contact Utah representatives about HB 187 here.

From Green is the New Red