Boss Hog's attempted regulatory coup in North Carolina

A state commission spent two years crafting rules to monitor water pollution at factory farms -- but a state senator with close ties to the hog industry got his colleagues to unanimously pass a bill nixing those rules. Will the House follow suit?

That lawmakers are so sympathetic to a polluting industry is not altogether surprising considering the enormous clout the corporate agriculture lobby has in North Carolina -- influence that's apparent in bill sponsor Senator Charlie Albertson's record of campaign contributions.

Food Safety Bill Opposed by CAFO Zealots

The Wall Street Journal reported that lobby groups representing large-scale grain and livestock interests zealously opposed the bill, with the reliably pro-agribusiness House Ag committee chair Collin Peterson pushing their agenda.

The fear is that the bill would give the FDA authority to regulate livestock feed rations—which likely contribute significantly to food safety issues. Outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant staph (MRSA) and salmonella seem related to routine doses of antibiotics on livestock farms; and the practice of feeding animals an ethanol byproduct called distillers grains has been linked to both E. coli 0157 outbreaks and other antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains.

Cattle producers still routinely feed their cows “chicken litter" - chicken shit mixed up with excess feed and other wastes - even though it can contain cow blood meal (which large-scale poultry farmers often feed to chickens).

Though the origins of BSE remain unclear, scientists are convinced that it spreads among cattle through infected feed containing blood-meat-and-bone meal, protein supplements made from the blood and ground-up parts of cows. If the animal being processed is infected, then the meal can transmit the disease to many other animals. It takes only one gram of contaminated material to infect a cow.

“Live animals are not ‘food’ until the point of processing, which is why this bill needs to clarify that the FDA does not have regulatory authority on our farms, ranches and feedlots,” a functionary for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association told the Journal.

Read http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-30-house-food-safety-bill-questions-remain

Food Inc. The Movie Opens This Week

Go watch the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqQVll-MP3I

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.

Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Cattle On Drugs

Commentary: A growing health threat, ignored

By John Carlin

For two years my colleagues at the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production and I poured over volumes of data on what the Food and Drug Administration calls on its Web site "a growing threat," and what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has termed "among its top concerns" – the phenomenon of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

What we found in our research was that overuse of antibiotics, especially in the production of food animals, is one of the primary culprits. We released our findings in April of this year with the recommendation that the FDA phase out the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animal production, meaning quite simply, preserve these drugs to treat sick animals, not healthy ones, and don't use them simply to stimulate weight gain.

Our report and recommendations were met with an enthusiastic reception by the public health and medical communities. In July, the FDA announced that it planned to ban the use – other than for strict, medically limited purposes – of cephalosporin drugs in food animals, effective December 1 of this year. Cephalosporin drugs are a powerful class of antibiotics used to fight infections in people, one of our newest and most effective lines of defense against harmful bacteria. But strangely, just five days before the ban was set to take effect, the FDA, with none of the fanfare that accompanied the original announcement, reversed itself.

What changed in less than five months? Certainly the problem hasn't gone away. It has only gotten worse. Newspapers are full of stories of Americans falling victim to serious infections that are resistant to traditional antibiotic treatments. Just one of them, methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), kills more people in the United States each year than AIDS.

A decade ago, the Institute of Medicine estimated that antibiotic resistant bacteria generated an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion per year in extra costs to the U.S. health-care system, and costs have skyrocketed from there. Apparently, the drug companies and their allies in the animal agriculture industry were only too happy to lean on friends and quietly preserve a system that, for them, is incredibly profitable - never mind the growing threat to the health of the public.

As a former dairyman and Kansas governor, I was therefore disappointed to see my state's health department named as supporting reversal of the ban, lumping it with such special interests as the National Turkey Federation. On the other hand, groups supporting the ban included the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Disease Society of America and the American Public Health Association, among others.

It would be most interesting to know the basis for any organization's objection. Certainly the pressure on food animal producers is tremendous. A growing demand for meat and poultry led to a model of production that relies on what are commonly known as CAFO's – concentrated animal feed operations. Such industrial agriculture packs animals into such tight areas that often the conditions require a regimen of antibiotics to help avoid disease. Yet this practice, while once economically defensible, no longer is. The threat to public health from the antibiotic overuse alone is putting the human population at risk while adding billions to our health-care budget.

The rest of the world has leapt ahead of us on this issue. In Europe, antibiotics have long been eliminated from food production. South Korea followed suit this summer. Our refusal to turn away from this practice could cost us markets for our food products overseas and, by extension, precious jobs here at home.

The Pew Commission was composed of farmers, doctors, veterinarians, economists and other talented professionals who took on the challenge of finding a model that would allow U.S. farmers and ranchers the freedom to pursue their livelihoods in a way that does not adversely impact public health, the environment and the economies of their communities. We believe we found such a model, and it included phasing out the indiscriminate overuse of antibiotics.

Changing the way agriculture works in this country will likely prove challenging, and involve many difficult decisions. It's a tragedy that on this occasion the FDA took the easy – and more dangerous – way out.

ABOUT THE WRITER

John Carlin is a former governor of Kansas and was chairman of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

Meat Wagon: Bush Administration Midnight Riders

From http://www.gristmill.grist.org/ See the rest of the Meat Wagon Reports here, search for meat wagon.

Living near confined-animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) is no bowl of cherries. CAFO operators pack thousands of animals into tight spaces, concentrating their waste. The smells they release are intense and foul -- and probably dangerous.

According to one recent peer-reviewed study, by Wellesley researcher Stacy Sneeringer, living near CAFOs "significantly" raises infant-mortality rates.

But you don't need to live near a CAFO to feel their effects. According to the U.N., CAFOs generate tremendous amounts of greenhouse gas -- more even than cars. If this weren't Friday afternoon, I'd add a pungent sentence or two about CAFOs' dreadful effects on groundwater.
In this context, you want to see federal agencies cracking down on CAFOs, forcing them to take responsibility for the messes they generate.

But that's not how it works. Rather than forcing CAFOs to reduce their putrid emissions, the EPA just brazenly exempted them from even reporting emissions.

Cut another notch in Stephen Johnson's belt.

It turns out that when we cram thousands of animals together and force them to wallow in their waste, they become susceptible to all manner of sickness. Thus the temptation to douse them with antibiotics as a preventive measure. It also happens that antibiotics tend to make animals fatten faster -- another reason why CAFO operators use them liberally.

That such steady use of antibiotics is ruining their effectiveness and breeding resistance has become widely accepted. Researchers in Canada have found that supermarket pork is routinely infected with antibiotic-resistant staph.

Even the FDA got concerned. Back in July, the agency banned "extralabel use" of a family of antibiotics called Cephalosporin at factory farms -- meaning that it could no longer be applied for preventive purposes, but only to treat sick animals.

"This rule will help further protect consumers against antimicrobial-resistant strains of zoonotic foodborne bacterial pathogens," the agency declared. But then, on the day before Thanksgiving ... experienced FDA watchers will be able to predict what comes next.

On the day before Thanksgiving -- with millions of Americans preparing to cook up factory-farmed turkey -- the FDA unceremoniously issued this statement:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is revoking the order prohibiting the extralabel use of cephalosporin antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals.

Wha'?? What about that business about protecting consumers against antibiotic-resistant pathogens?

Turns out the agency had opened a comment period on the rule, and meat-industry flacks had bombarded it. Here's the FDA:

The agency received many substantive comments on the order of prohibition, and therefore, in order for FDA to fully consider the comments, the agency has decided to revoke the order. As a result, the order of prohibition will not take effect on November 30, 2008.

Nice one! Laura Rogers, project director for the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, was, for one, not impressed by this logic. She recently issued the following statement:
"The misuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture helps fuel the increase in antibiotic-resistant infections -- a fact long acknowledged by the American Medical Association, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even the FDA. Yet in another set-back for public health, the FDA reversed itself on the off-label use of cephalosporin -- a family of antibiotics vitally important in human medicine -- allowing this unrestricted use in industrial farm animal production to continue.

"Earlier this year, the agency had announced plans to ban all off-label uses in agriculture of these critical human drugs. Regrettably, the FDA changed its course.

"These important drugs are the only effective therapies for serious gastrointestinal diseases in children and also the best treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections in cancer patients. Easing restrictions on the use of cephalosporin on factory farms jeopardizes the effectiveness of these drugs and needlessly imperils our public health.

"In addition, the overuse of human antibiotics in farm animals is driving up the cost of healthcare. For example, in 1998 the Institute of Medicine estimated that antibiotic-resistant bacteria generated an estimated $4 billion to $5 billion per year in extra costs to the U.S. healthcare system.

"The incoming Administration and the new head of the FDA need to examine the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms. They must take the advice of the doctors and other public health professionals who have raised the alarm about antibiotic misuse and put the health of people -- particularly susceptible groups like the elderly and children -- ahead of industry profits. Change cannot come soon enough."