Eideard

Home on the Range

Federal drug regulators announced Wednesday that farmers and ranchers must restrict their use of a critical class of antibiotics in cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys because such practices may have contributed to the growing threat of bacterial infections in people that are resistant to treatment.

The medicines belong to a class of antibiotics known as cephalosporins and include such brands as Cefzil and Keflex. They are among the most common antibiotics prescribed to treat strep throat, bronchitis, skin infections and urinary tract infections. Surgeons also often use them before surgery to prevent bacterial infections.

The drugs’ use in agriculture has, according to many microbiologists, led to the development of bacteria that are resistant to the drugs’ effects, a development that many doctors say has endangered the lives of patients.

Antibiotics are often added to animal feed and are used routinely to encourage rapid growth of livestock, but officials at the Food and Drug Administration have been increasingly vocal in their concerns that overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is endangering human health. The agency proposed rules in 2010 to slow the use of penicillin, tetracycline and other antibiotics simply to promote growth or prevent disease in feed animals, but those rules have yet to be made final…

Perish the thought we offend a drug company or the owners of cattle feed lots.

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This will seem incongruous to many Americans. That is a description of your own parochialism. The extension of cellular networks throughout the 3rd World – leapfrogging the construction of landlines – has become commonplace.

The South American giant is preparing to use its first locally-designed microchip in cattle earrings, a device that could eventually help authorities crack down on destruction of the Amazon rain forest caused by roaming herds.

Produced by state-funded firm Ceitec, the “Chip do Boi” or “Cow Chip” is part of home-grown innovation efforts that Brazil hopes will help it overcome challenges in its sprawling economy and over time make it an exporter of niche technology…

“Brazil has competitive advantages in areas like agriculture and clean energy, and it makes sense for the country to maintain those advantages through technological innovation,” said Ceitec chief executive Cylon Silva, a theoretical physicist with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

“There’s no way that a country of Brazil’s size and influence can go without an electronics industry…”

The cattle trackers can help ranchers demonstrate their cows have not been exposed to illnesses and may be crucial for creating a database of cattle showing which animals grazed on recently deforested land.

Brazil’s state development bank said last year it will begin requiring the ranchers it finances to show where their cattle have grazed, possibly using such devices…

Brazil’s high-tech sector still faces challenges including weak and unequal education systems, notorious government bureaucracy, and chronic delays in project execution…

The country is working to make sure that doesn’t happen…

Silva says it will take decades for the country to be competitive in global chip markets but that the success of firms with high-technology products such as Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer shows Brazil can produce much more than just commodities.

“I think there is a real opportunity for a country with the resources that Brazil has to become a player in this market,” said Silva. “If we can manufacture planes, why not think that we can manufacture integrated circuits?”

Bravo!

BTW – this is being implemented around the world among significant cattle producing countries. Only a few, like here in the GOUSA, have managed to encounter lawsuits from Christian groups upset over “the number of the beast” being a satanic plot.

Which are clones – which aren’t?

Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning company. Farmers say it is being done because it is only possible to tell that the animal’s meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass.

US scientists are using a variety of techniques to assess which animals have exceptional qualities. These attributes include meat quality, productivity or longevity.

These exceptional animals are cloned to be used as breeding stock, with the aim of raising the quality of herds on beef, dairy and pig farms in the US…

The head of the leading US animal cloning company has said that European farmers will fall behind the rest of the world unless they are allowed to use such techniques to improve the productivity of their livestock…

Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully…

“We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it’s too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal…”

Cloning is not used by livestock farmers in Europe, and there are moves by some members of the European Parliament to ban it altogether. Mark Walton believes that would be a mistake.

“If I were a European farmer and my competitors in the US, China and South America were using the technology, I’d be concerned about losing all access to it,” he said.

It is early days for cloning in US agriculture. There are only a thousand clones in the one hundred million-strong American cattle herd…

Disingenuous. That hundred-million-strong herd includes hundreds of thousands of offspring of cloned animals. Do you think farmers are buying cloned bulls for 5-figures just to gaze at them? They go to work siring offspring.

Two years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that meat and milk from cloned animals were safe to eat. Ever since then, products from the offspring of cloned animals have entered the food chain

I always ask the same question and get the “Uh, no” answer. Can anyone who’s panicking over cloned food animals tell the difference in a blind test between meat that is – or isn’t – cloned?

Federal food regulators took a tentative step this week toward banning a common use of penicillin and tetracycline in the water and feed given cattle, chickens and pigs in hopes of slowing the growing scourge of killer bacteria.

But the Food and Drug Administration has tried without success for more than three decades to ban such uses. In the past, Congress has stepped in at the urging of agricultural interests and stopped the agency from acting.

In the battle between public health and agriculture, the guys with the cowboy hats generally win.

The F.D.A. released a policy document stating that agricultural uses of antibiotics should be limited to assuring animal health, and that veterinarians should be involved in the drugs’ uses.

While doing nothing to change the present oversight of antibiotics, the document is the first signal in years that the agency intends to rejoin the battle to crack down on agricultural uses of antibiotics that many infectious disease experts oppose…

Antibiotics are used in agriculture for three reasons: to promote animal growth, prevent illness and treat sickness. How antibiotics in feed and water help to fatten animals is not entirely clear.

The industrialization of animal husbandry has increased processors’ dependence on antibiotics because factory farm animals tend to be sicker and feed-lot diets can encourage bacterial infections.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated in 2001 that 84 percent of all antibiotics were used in agriculture and that 70 percent were used simply to promote animal growth, not to treat or prevent illness. The Animal Health Institute, a trade association, estimated that 13 percent of agricultural antibiotics were used to promote growth…

The distinction is important because F.D.A. officials said they were mostly concerned with the use of antibiotics to promote growth — not to prevent or treat illnesses. If the agency some day bans growth promotion as a use, there is a chance producers would simply relabel such uses as preventative.

There now is proposed legislation banning nontherapeutic uses of some classes of antibiotics on animals and poultry. I don’t think it’s even succeeded in getting out of committee.

Farmers who fear the removal of one of their more universal money-making schemes may become limited have the mid-term elections to look forward to. Nothing like moving Congress further to the Right to aid in ill health for our populace.

Researchers, based in Ireland and Britain, have found the complete mitochondrial DNA genome sequence of ancient wild cattle using a sample from a 6,700 year-old bone.

They assembled the mitochondrial DNA sequence from the well-preserved foreleg bone of an aurochs, originally discovered in a cave in Derbyshire. The team’s findings are published in this latest issue of the journal PLoS ONE…

Co-author Dr Ceiridwen Edwards, a researcher in Ancient DNA Studies at Oxford University, said: ‘This finding heralds what we hope will be the start of a very exciting project to explore the evolutionary history of aurochs and modern cattle. We used newly developed DNA technologies that allow us to extract genetic information much more quickly than we have previously been able to do. This area of research could have implications not only for archaeologists but also for farmers engaged in modern day cattle rearing. In time, we hope to work on sequencing the DNA genomes of thousands of ancient cattle breeds.’

Co-author Professor David MacHugh from University College Dublin said: ‘Our results demonstrate the incredible promise that next-generation DNA sequencing holds for archaeogenetics.’

Previous studies have suggested that ancient aurochs, which lived in the Near East (modern day Iran, Iraq and Syria) and across Europe and Asia, are the ancestor of modern cattle. However, comparisons of European aurochs mitochondrial DNA with modern European cattle suggests that the level of cross-breeding between domestic cattle and the wild, fierce European aurochs must have been very low.

Professor Mark Pollard, Director of Oxford University’s Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, said: ‘We need more research into ancient DNA if we are to complete the jigsaw of evolutionary development, not only of cattle but also other species. In the long term, we hope that an Oxford led team could conduct an ambitious DNA project into the migration of plants, livestock and humans across Britain, from the end of the Ice Age to the modern day.’

Cripes. There is so much interesting research going on worldwide.

Though my personal blog is occasionally noted for politics, this is why I won’t separate my interest in science from the rest of this conversation with the cyberworld.

The Food and Drug Administration believes antibiotics should be used on livestock only to cure or prevent disease and not to promote growth, a common use.

Principal deputy FDA commissioner Joshua Sharfstein said restrictions on livestock use would reduce the opportunity for bacteria to develop resistance to drugs used by humans.

Critics of the heavy antibiotic use in livestock, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, estimate 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are used on food animals, mostly in tiny doses that promote weight gain or more efficient feed consumption…

“Purposes other than for the advancement of animal or human health should not be considered judicious use” and not allowed, Sharfstein said in a statement for a House hearing. “Eliminating these uses will not compromise the safety of food.

“FDA also believes that the use of medications for prevention and control should be under the supervision of a veterinarian,” he said. This would mean no over-the-counter sales of antibiotics to farmers and ranchers.

Sharfstein told reporters afterward that his testimony was a statement of FDA principles. He said there was no administration or FDA position on a bill that would phase out nontherapeutic use in livestock of seven classes of antibiotics — penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, lincosamides, streptogramins, aminoglycosides, sulfonamides — and any other drug used to treat bacterial illness in people.

Identical phase-out bills were filed in the House and Senate on March 17 but have languished. The hearing on Monday by the House Rules Committee was the first in either chamber.

They’re still in the “my lobbyist said this” versus “your lobbyist said that” stage of considering legislation in Congress, of course.

Wouldn’t it be a pleasant switch if our Congress-critters considered our well-being to be as important as their after-Congress careers.