By Joe Ray
I’ve always had an aversion to taking antibiotics unless someone could really convince me they were worth it.
A few ex-girlfriends might say otherwise, but it’s a good thing I’m not a pig in the United States.
Nicholas Kristof wrote a recent zinger about big agriculture’s use of antibiotics in animal feed that can lead to an antibiotic-resistant staph infection called MRSA, which, as he notes, “kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.”
In an article full of jaw-droppers, he also cites a 2008 article in Medical Clinics of North America that said “more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.”
Go get ‘em Tar Heels!
On March 17, New York State congresswoman and microbiologist Louise Slaughter reintroduced legislation to curb the use of antibiotics in agriculture. First read the article, then give your congressperson a call.
Food and travel writer and photographer Joe Ray is the author of the blog Eating The Motherland and contributes to The Boston Globe's travel blog, Globe-trotting
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