Word: feeding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Antibiotics are feed for thought
Antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin and tetracycline have revolutionized medicine, and they have been wonder drugs for agriculture as well. Today about two-thirds of our cattle and nearly all poultry, hogs and veal calves are raised on feed laced with the drugs. Animals consume almost 8 million Ibs. a year, nearly 40% of U.S. production. The antibiotics not only keep them healthy in their crowded pens but, for reasons not yet clear, also speed up growth on less feed. Now, after a quarter-century of largely uncritical acceptance, the practice is being sharply questioned. Reason: the drugs the animals consume...
Many scientists are afraid that the acquisition of such bacterial immunity is greatly hastened by adding antibiotics to animal feed. Most livestock already harbor large populations of drug-resistant bacteria, since the less hardy microbes are wiped out by the drugs. Opponents of the feed practice argue that even with relatively clean handling and packaging conditions, these bacteria could be transferred to meat and poultry products and eventually wind up in the human gastrointestinal tract. There they could pass on their defensive plasmids to resident bacteria in the gut. One strong piece of evidence: people who are often in contact...
Another consideration, they add, is economic: limiting antibiotics in animal feed could substantially raise the cost of producing poultry and meat, in some instances by as much...
...plant stands on a company-owned property of about 5,800 sq. mi., which is larger than Connecticut. The pulp factory and its ancillaries cost $400 million to construct. A companion plant is expected to be towed up the river and put in operation by the mid-1980s. To feed the plants with young trees, a vast reforestation is under way that will clear the land of old growth and establish huge new timber farms. The principal planting is the Gmelina arborea (pronounced malina ar-bor-ea), a hardwood native to Burma and India that grows...