Wagist

Factory Farming Is Killing More Americans Than AIDS

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Dan Linehan

Natalie Portman has been a vegetarian for twenty years. She wrote today that she was inspired to go vegan by Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals.

As we can tell from her work Mrs. Portman is a very intelligent young woman. In her article she makes some excellent points about the direct effects that the animal farming industry has on human health.

I read the chapter on animal shit aloud to two friends — one is from Iowa and has asthma and the other is a North Carolinian who couldn’t eat fish from her local river because animal waste had been dumped in it as described in the book. They had never truly thought about the connection between their environmental conditions and their food. The story of the mass farming of animals had more impact on them when they realized it had ruined their own backyards.

People rarely connect the dots between their own health problems and animal farming. The truth is, millions of Americans are affected by meat production in ways they may never realize. One example is the creation of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria due to the overuse of antibiotics fed to farmed animals.

Scientists estimate that 50 percent to 80 percent of all antimicrobials in the United States are are added to farm animal feed instead of being used to treat sick people. The widespread use of antibiotics on factory farms has directly enabled antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) to develop.

These drug-resistant staph bacteria have gone on to cause 95,000 serious infections and 20,000 deaths each year in the United States. This makes MRSA more of a public health threat than many more well-known diseases. In 2005 (and probably every year since) MRSA killed more Americans than AIDS.

Factory farming is directly to blame for this public health nightmare.