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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Factory farming is accelerating the rise of superbugs

Not sure why the downvotes, this is a known fact. Cows are meant to eat grass for instance but because we feed them corn and soy instead (slightly cheaper), they get diseases they otherwise wouldn’t get. So their foodstuff is also laced with antibiotics, which people eating the meat and milk in turn absorb.

Even if you feed livestock a totally optimal diet (e.g. grass for cows) they'll convert it more efficiently (read: they'll grow bigger from the same amount of feed) if you supplement it with low dose antibiotics.

It's shockingly dangerous and should be illegal.

According to Wikipedia, it is illegal in the EU since 2006, and in Sweden since 1986 (and partly so in the US since 2017).

I thought the main issue was that antibiotics make the livestock put on weight faster, and the dose to do that isn’t quite enough to kill of the bacteria? So the bacteria get a chance to evolve immunity?

its even worse with pig farming in populated developing countries (china), amount of antibiotics fed to pigs is staggering

Interesting that this has been downvoted. Isnt antibiotics abuse as livestock fattening helper absolutely breeding resistance and there's also a concept of horizontal gene transfer between germs after they have been passed to farm workers

Anyone ever suspect that someone is following them and downvoting everything they post? :-D

I didn't downvote it, but your comment was pretty useless as far as knowledge building goes. You merely made a claim about something that's controversial, non-obvious to most of the population and has more nuance than you let on.

In this case, explicitly mentioning the antibiotics abuse and how that leads to resistance would've made a big difference in quality. Going further and explaining feasible ways about how to deal with it and how to manage the economical and lifestyle impact of possible solutions in a feasible manner would've been even better.

It isn't really the burden of the statement maker to enunciate his arguments to the nth degree lest suffer the pangs of mob downvotes. At least it shouldn't be, on a decent realm of discourse. If anything, the downvotes just show a low level of informedness of the average HN user.

Yes, it is their burden, specially when you're treating a subject that has a lot of depth.

You cannot form a decent realm of discourse when every comment is low-effort. This is the kind of thing that (for now, and only up to a certain degree) separates Hacker News from things like popular subreddits that only chant trendy opinions or act as venting boxes without much actual factual discussion going on.

FWIW I'm just as guilty as the GP of doing the same at times, and I should be called out for it as well whenever it happens. Sometimes we don't know what we don't know, know too much and take things for granted, or can't tell when our biases are showing. It is up to the community as a whole to keep the standards high.

Exactly. The word “superbugs” implies antibiotic resistance, and anyone who is skeptical or curious about the connection between factory farms and antibiotic resistance due to HUMAN activity can look it up.

I could go to the nth degree and speak about how capitalism creates a lot of negative externalities, including factory farming, pollution, depression and the current state of the news. In fact take the latter — here is a website for what the problem is, what the solutions are, and how to fix it... as well as an hour long interview that goes into all the details:

https://rational.app

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M8HbvC6vqIY

I often go into amazing detail and write blog posts about each topic... but if I link to them on HN, I would usually get accused of throwing out “20 claims at once” and “shilling my blog” and my videos and solutions (that I give away for free). You just can’t win with some people...

Throwing links as an answer (instead of using them as an addendum or because it's a valid source) is considered bad practice in discussion since usually they're not a direct rebuttal to specific points made.

If you were making a detailed argument about the issues with unregulated capitalism, and I would just respond with "Go read some Mises", it's just a lazy cop-out that doesn't address the problems you're presenting and lowers whatever value the comments may have to a reader, even if I had a point or not.

I am not telling you to read “some” Mises. I am giving you a link to the exact arguments, all you have to do is click it and view it

> Factory farming is accelerating the rise of superbugs

Downvotes don't change facts. The browbeating over people misusing antibiotics at the individual level is a lot like plastic producers guilting consumers over recycling when the root cause is from industry.

Factory farming uses antibiotics purely for profit, the health of the animals is only an ancillary benefit. Animals fed antibiotics grow larger, driving higher profits. It's a tragedy of the commons situation, since the abuse of antibiotics has major negative externalities for us all, but the profits are reserved for the owners of the factory farms.

This. I have been saying this all along... including the entire non biodegradeable plastic analogy.

We need a UBI funded by Pigovian taxes on pollution and other negative externalities. It’s the only way I can see ending these situations sustainably!

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26806506.

Maybe we’ll eventually deploy nano-tech antibiotics.

But what if the nano-bots get a virus!

Antibiotics, and bacteriophage viruses, kinda are nanotechnology (albeit in the same limited sense that steel dates back a thousand years).

You might like bacteriophages — viruses which eat bacteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage

Kurzgesagt has a cool video on phages. But I meant the grey goo kind of nanobot

We are the goo ;) (I want to finish that “goo gatchoo”, musical puns aside, we are what grey goo is capable of and what it ends up looking like).

Interesting idea, never considered that angle. Perhaps I should clarify that like my goo to obey commands written in ACGT, and not some future kind using C

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