[tadd]

As somebody who works with chemicals, biology really is the scary bit. Mostly cause it can self replicate.

Yet we continue to force nature to 'test statistics' on many fronts...such as feeding low level antibiotics to livestock to fatten them up.

What's the phrase: a very large amount of monkeys banging on a typewriter will come up with hamlet?

I get that there is no direct evidence as to this contributing to any resistant bug, but knowing how biology works, why are we even 'testing nature' on this? Yes it is statistically very rare for the correct mutation to cause resistance and not affect some other important process but come on... we aren't helping keep that at bay by the total scale of what we are doing. Livestock are reported to receive over 13 million kilograms of pharma, or approximately 80% of all antibiotics, in the USA annually (1). I haven't found numbers on the total number of animals that receive antibiotics yet.

Antibiotic use in humans has been shown to select antibiotic-resistant strains, and we have several that kill many every year. Biology is no different in humans than chickens, pigs, or cows.

So why do we keep at it? Are we just that beholden to money to throw away our health?

The only thing that somewhat shines in this mess is that we stopped doing research on sulfa drugs back in the 30s and 40s. Lots of side effects, but lots of unexplored promise.

1. Hollis A. Ahmed Z. Preserving antibiotics, rationally. The New England Journal of Medicine. 2013;369:2474–2476