is the title of this column by Nick Kristof. I put up a comment in the Pundit Roundup, but thought I would put up a diary to make more people aware of the column, which I urge people to read and pass on.
For example:
Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours.
That is almost twice as many people a year killed by food as were killed on 9-11, and yet agribusiness continues to successfully fight laws and regulations that would make our food safer.
As for antibiotics, consider this:
The single state of North Carolina uses more antibiotics for livestock than the entire United States uses for humans.
That is because NC is factory farming hog central.
Please keep reading. . .
Our overuse of antibiotics leads to rapid spread of resistant strains -
An article this year in a journal called Applied and Environmental Microbiology reported that MRSA was found in 70 percent of hogs on one farm.Another scholarly journal reported that MRSA was found in 45 percent of employees working at hog farms. And the Centers for Disease Control reported this April that this strain of bacteria has now been found in a worker at a day care center in Iowa
As I said, an important column. Read it, pass it on. And think about the implications of how you eat and how you shop for food.
Peace.
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