Friday, April 15, 2011

Bad Creationism: 50% of US Meat Contaminated by Drug-Resistent Bacteria

There was yet another article on CNN this morning about the meat industry's use of low-dose antibiotics in farm animals. Scientists have been horrified by this practice, but until now the meat industry has ridiculed the scientists' predictions that it would cause the rise of "super bugs," bacteria that were highly drug resistant.

But this time there was some "meat" behind the grim message. A scientific study found that fully half of all meat sold in the United States is contaminated with drug-resistent bacteria. And not just one drug – in one quarter of the meat samples, the bacteria were resistant to three drugs.

This is a direct result of this country's religion-fueled anti-evolution, anti-science attitudes.

Evolutionists and biologists warned the FDA decades ago that feeding low-dose antibiotics to farm animals was a terrible idea, and have continued to sound the alarm ever since. In Europe (where science is respected) most countries banned the use of low-dose penicillin and tetracycline over thirty years ago.

But here in the USA, the FDA has consistently ignored the warnings of scientists and kowtowed to the meat industry. In 1989, the Institute of Medicine Committee concluded that existing data were not adequate to demonstrate that using subtherapeutic doses of drugs in farm animals was dangerous. Based on that, the FDA ignored the warnings of evolution scientists and biologists and let the meat industry carry on with its dangerous practices.

This was a phenomenally stupid policy. It's like believing the law of gravity might not apply because you've fallen from a 100-story building, and when you're 90 stories down, the data you've gathered so far during your fall "are not adequate to demonstrate" that you're about to go splat on the ground.

Everyone believes the law of gravity, and nobody would dispute that a fall from a 100-story building will kill you. So why is it that the FDA ignored an equally valid scientific prediction about the use of subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics? Could it be because the science used to make that prediction was the Theory of Evolution?

Thanks to religion's relentless attacks on the Theory of Evolution, a large fraction of America's politicians and bureaucrats don't believe in evolution, even today when it's been clearly demonstrated in the lab and in the world. The meat industry took advantage of this ignorance. They disregarded public safety and circumvented the FDA's concerns. They fed low-dose antibiotics to millions of animals, virtually guaranteeing the rise of these "superbugs."

Now we're faced with grocery stores full of meat that's infected with antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus germs, and the creationist movement helped it happen.


3 comments:

  1. I like that you managed to use the word "kowtowing" in this article. I was moooved.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wait, there's such a thing as good creationism?

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  3. Drakk, when an engineer designs & builds something, taking into account physics & materials science, she can be said to have "Created" something by way of "Intelligent Design." Does that work?

    ReplyDelete

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