Think tainted Chinese pork is scary? Check out the nearest supermarket meat case

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Over in China, the nation's burgeoning pork industry has been been busted for churning out meat tainted with an illegal and quite dodgy growth-enhancing chemical, The Washington Post reports. The banned chemical, clenbuterol, is said to "reduce a pig's body fat to a very thin layer and makes butchered skin pinker, giving the appearance of fresher meat for a longer time." When people ingest it from eating the resulting pork, they suffer "symptoms such as a quickened heartbeat and headaches ... and, in rare cases, die."

Something similar could never happen here, right? Well, the poultry industry quite legally laces its feed with arsenic -- for similar reasons. Traces of arsenic do end up in chicken meat, in the poisonous "inorganic" form. And the pork industry regularly doses pigs with ractopamine, a growth enhancer that the USDA allows even though its own research shows that it stresses pigs out. The European Union and, yes, China ban ractopamine, worrying that it harms people when ingested.

Then there's "non-therapeutic" use of antibiotics so popular among the four or five companies that dominate our meat industry. Eighty percent of antibiotics consumed in the United States go to factory animal farms, the FDA recently revealed. One of the main functions of this pharmaceutical barrage is to promote growth. The problem with routine antibiotic use on farms, of course, is that it gives rise to all manner of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, which then can break out of farms and infect the human population (i.e., us).

There's a growing consensus among U.S. food-regulatory and public-health agencies that industrial meat's addiction to antibiotics endangers the public. The latest: the USDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have collected data showing that antibiotic overuse in meat factories "could be exposing Americans to bacteria like Escherichia coli and Campylobacter that have become resistant to antibiotics," The Wall Street Journal reports.

Thus the USDA and the CDC now join the FDA in coming out with damning data on the practice and publicly criticizing it. So will the regulatory authorities now regulate and crack down on this practice, now that they've shown it to be reckless? That's not how it works. "The USDA is asking for $10.65 million in its fiscal 2012 budget to increase food-safety research and the department wants some of that money to go towards developing ‘alternatives to antibiotics used in animals,'" the Journal reports. In other words, in place of action, the USDA is placing the burden on itself (and U.S. taxpayers), not the industry, to come up with alternative practices -- next year.

Meanwhile, people in the United States are dying from MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph that has been shown to be present on hog farms. Moreover, a growing body of evidence links resistant bacterial strains on farms with those actively sickening people. Now that the U.S. regulatory establishment has demonstrated that a) it knows routine antibiotic use is a public-health menace; and b) it has no intention of reining it in anytime soon, I wonder if it's opening the federal government to lawsuits from people who get sick or lose loved ones to antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Know what I think? I think our regulatory establishment is incapable of acting on its own findings with regard to routine antibiotic use because factory scale animal farms simply can't exist without it. Forget growth promotion -- you probably can't cram animals together indoors without light and feed them low-quality feed full of additives and expect them to survive to slaughter weight without shoring up their immune systems with antibiotics. Doing the right thing to protect public health would mean destroying the meat industry. One hidden price of cheap, ubiquitous meat -- and a national diet hinged on consuming more than a half pound of it per day per capita -- may well be novel, unpredictable, and increasingly hard-to-treat bacterial strains infecting the public. The FDA and the USDA officials have -- at long last -- begin to acknowledge the problem, but can't bring themselves to fundamentally challenge a powerful industry and actually address it.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D.-N.Y.) has yet again stepped up where regulators fear to tread, introducing the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (HR 965), or PAMTA, which would allow the meat industry to use antibiotics only when animals become sick. It would ban the prevailing practice of small daily doses. She has introduced PAMTA before -- and her colleagues have let it die, placing meat industry interests above those of the public. Since PAMTA has already failed in a Democratic-controlled House, it's hard to imagine it prevailing in the current teabag-infused, industry-worshipping one. Perhaps an outpouring of public outrage on the issue will prove me wrong?

As for China, the current scare over the dodgy feed additive may soon seem like child's play. U.S. pork giant Smithfield is working with Chinese grain-trading giant Cofco (which owns 5 percent of Smithfield), to industrialize China's hog production after the U.S. style.

http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-18-think-chinese-pork-is-scary-check-out-the-nearest-supermarket-me

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

Was it actually pork or ...could it have been dog and/or cat ?

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Let's go with numbers....

Less than 100,000 people get sick from MRSA.

Less than 19,000 actually die from MRSA infections.

Now how many people eat meat?

Next.

[Amby 490]

You're still funny

[Obama 2012 1,714]

You're still funny

you can call it all you want, but at the end of the day you have to look at the bigger picture.

[Zero Sum 305]

Its been shown before that statistical interpretation of 'hard' numbers when it comes to epidemiology isn't your forte. Just a reminder.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Its been shown before that statistical interpretation of 'hard' numbers when it comes to epidemiology isn't your forte. Just a reminder.

trolling again?

the stats were correct.

the opinions well, they are opinions.

next.

[Zero Sum 305]

trolling again?

the stats were correct.

the opinions well, they are opinions.

next.

The stats or the absolute math you used to drive an opinion? This reminds me of someone that cooks the books to get the numbers they want to get. Significance is what it is, so your statistical opinions are predictably off.

But if you want to accuse of trolling, substantiate it.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

The stats or the absolute math you used to drive an opinion? This reminds me of someone that cooks the books to get the numbers they want to get. Significance is what it is, so your statistical opinions are predictably off.

But if you want to accuse of trolling, substantiate it.

cooking the books?

Using numbers of the CDC website are not 'cooking the books.'

If you think so, then that's your problem. Not mine.

[Zero Sum 305]

cooking the books?

Using numbers of the CDC website are not 'cooking the books.'

If you think so, then that's your problem. Not mine.

As in, thinking significance is only what you think it should be- something you seem to excel at in your interpretations here. At least you owned your perspective on that and conceded that it was your opinion. An important consideration to the topic at hand.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

As in, thinking significance is only what you think it should be- something you seem to excel at in your interpretations here. At least you owned your perspective on that and conceded that it was your opinion. An important consideration to the topic at hand.

Until there's a cure for heart disease, various forms of cancer, Chronic lower respiratory diseases, diabetes, influenza, etc. which are all many times more deadly than MRSA, then I think we can leave well enough alone and devote our research to places that matter.

Yeah, might be my opinion, but it's an opinion weighed by the numbers and statistics, whether you like it or not.

Of course there again, all of this is placed on the idea/belief that living longer is a 'good' thing. I won't get into it, but while self preservation is fine and dandy, living longer may not be the 'best' thing for society overall.

[mawilson 2,133]

The banned chemical, clenbuterol, is said to "reduce a pig's body fat to a very thin layer

Who would want to buy a skinny pig?

[Zero Sum 305]

Until there's a cure for heart disease, various forms of cancer, Chronic lower respiratory diseases, diabetes, influenza, etc. which are all many times more deadly than MRSA, then I think we can leave well enough alone and devote our research to places that matter.

Yeah, might be my opinion, but it's an opinion weighed by the numbers and statistics, whether you like it or not.

Of course there again, all of this is placed on the idea/belief that living longer is a 'good' thing. I won't get into it, but while self preservation is fine and dandy, living longer may not be the 'best' thing for society overall.

I still don't think you understand the idea of statistical significance.

I suspect you'd be singing a different tune if you weren't immune to lead.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

I still don't think you understand the idea of statistical significance.

I suspect you'd be singing a different tune if you weren't immune to lead.

Actually I do, and it's why I can get by with my 'opinion' on things.

You see, while statisical significance might be found in the idea that a small percentage of people who consume pork in these instances end up sick with MRSA, less than a small fraction of a percent of people actually get MRSA of those who consume pork and an even smaller fraction of a percent end up dying.

You see, by using critical thinking and using the numbers appropriately, you'd come to the realization that while a pattern can be drawn, it's significantly unimportant.

Cute on the made of lead part btw. You see your problem is you're not talking about statistics at all. What you are talking about is pure emotion on the matter and how it might effect those and the ones surrounding those who get sick. Which is fair enough, but has nothing to do with the statistics here, just as the statistics for those who die from heart disease every year have nothing to do with the emotional effect on those surrounding either.

[Zero Sum 305]

Which is all again, your opinion about what constitutes significance.