For a pretty penny

This the Thursday after the midterm, so I had two students come to my section and (so far) none to my office hour. Instead I've some time to marvel about the things people do for money and what they're willing to risk for it.

People should be more than familiar with my rant about inappropriate use of antibiotics by now. This morning I just got another fun talk from a practitioner (formerly ER & OR)who gave us a case study in which a girl decided to go off and take antibiotics for her cold. She did get better after a few days, mostly due to the fact that mild cold/flu only lasts a few days. What's important was that later when she got appendicitis and had to get her appendix removed, she had a fairly normal mild infection that, when treated with the fairly standard antibiotics that they give you for this sort of infection, got worse. By taking antibiotics when she didn't have to, she had effectively selected for the resistant bacteria growing on her so that, when she does develop a wound, it'd be those bacteria that's infecting her. She nearly died from the subsequent treatment to get rid of those resistant bacteria, but thankfully she didn't.

This I know. What I didn't know was how much antibiotics they're routinely loading into animal feeds. For the large companies that tend to house animals in far too crowded conditions, this is the only way they can prevent half of the animals from dying from infections born of unsanitary over-crowded conditions. Right now some analogues of the antibiotics that doctors reserve as a last line of defense for bacteria that are resistant to all your regular antibiotics is going into cattle feed on a regular basis. People who work in these company's meat packing factories have been found with higher percentage of antibiotic resistant bacteria on them than normal people. You draw the conclusions.

Meat is not a significant portion of my diet, but for this reason alone I think it's worth it to shell out a few extra bucks for the company that produce meat not loaded on antibiotics. Net income is somewhat less important than death, I'd think. If you're dead, your money's not going to be of much use to you, is it?

(Oh and I found the link for the treatise on the problem with sticking antibacterial agents/antibiotics on every thing, from Center for Disease Control. Seriously, normal soap is good enough. Normal soap (well a cleaner, more expensive kind) is what we use in lab to lyse (burst open) bacteria cells. Well technically it's possible that some day there may be a bacterium that'll be resistant to normal soap, but compared to antibiotic resistance that's like...looking for someone who's resistant to an atomic bomb vs looking for someone who's resistant to bubonic plague: 1/3 rate of survival for the later, currently known rate of survival for the former is zero. ...unless you count the Indiana Jones miracle, which I don't. Lead-lined fridge so would not be helpful to you in an atomic explosion, no matter what the movie says.)

On a not so seriously note, the TruGreen ad banner makes me think of the book GREENER THAN YOU THINK.