Damn Euroweenies!
Scientists believe antibiotics also may have contributed to the explosive rise in asthma and allergies in children over the last 20 years.
Such health concerns led the European Union in 2006 to ban antibiotic use as feed additives for promoting livestock growth. But in the United States, nearly 25 million pounds of antibiotics per year, up from 16 million in the mid 1980s, are given to healthy animals for agriculture purposes, according to a 2000 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
www.scientificamerican.com
And vern-your calculator doesn't do science either, does it?
People have long been exposed to antibiotics in meat and milk. Now, the new research shows that they also may be
ingesting them from vegetables, perhaps even ones grown on organic farms.
The Minnesota researchers planted corn, green onion and cabbage in manure-treated soil in 2005 to evaluate the environmental impacts of feeding antibiotics to livestock. Six weeks later, the crops were analyzed and found to absorb chlortetracycline, a drug widely used to treat diseases in livestock. In another study two years later, corn, lettuce and potato were planted in soil treated with liquid hog manure. They, too, accumulated concentrations of an antibiotic, named Sulfamethazine, also commonly used in livestock.
As the amount of antibiotics in the soil increased, so too did the levels taken up by the corn, potatoes and other plants.
"Around 90 percent of these drugs that are administered to animals end up being excreted either as urine or manure," said Holly Dolliver, a member of the Minnesota research team and now a professor of crop and soil sciences at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. "A vast majority of that manure is then used as an important input for 9.2 million hectares of (U.S.) agricultural land."
