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Comment by btcindivist | Hacker News Reader

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btcindivist·

If only we didn't waste all of the antibiotics on non-human animals. Such a bad use of brilliant biotechnology.

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>If only we didn't waste all of the antibiotics on non-human animals.

This is the one thing that makes me want to turn vegetarian.

we waste antibiotics on cattle. regardless those same cattle become reservoirs where new diseases that could kill us are incubated, because they are mammals like is.

It would be very difficult for a plant disease to jump to us.

In the pedantic tradition around here:

To be fair, I remember an E Coli outbreak in spinach that laid a lot of people out. (I probably eat as much spinach as I do any meat :| and here I like to say I’m not much of a gambler)

——

Not to take away from your collective points at all. Rehashing the entire situation makes us look like a foolish species to have burned through such an advantageous technology so quickly. One can only hope we might come to yet more elegant solutions.

Well, spinach E Coli is there because we use cattle poop all over it. Nothing better than fertilising our vegetables with manure rich in antibiotics resistant E Coli.

I actually think it came from tainted water. Which is also potentially where Botulism can hit vegetables, too.(Or the bloody air)

Of course it’s all part of the same cycle

I can only imagine the aliens are judging us harshly

Or freely prescribe them for small ailments (looking at China here)

Antibiotics for human use are nothing. There's around 70 billion domesticated land animals being born and dying every year. That's 700 billion Petri dishes with varying antibiotic power in just 10 years, and that number is more than all of the humans that ever lived on Earth. More than enough for some massively superior bacteria to evolve.

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