Court Ruling On Feed Grade Penicillins and Tetracyclines.

I am adding a link to the District Court ruling on Penicillins and Tetracyclines used in feed grade applications for livestock.  I will add it to my Newsletter section in the left hand margin.

Societal Engineering

This is from a very reliable source and mentor of mine:

“We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security”  Dwight D.Eisenhower

When President Eisenhower said this, I don’t imagine he was thinking about food safety, but the concept sure fits.

On a very related note, I recently attended an Institute of Medicine meeting which was sponsored by the CDC and held at the headquarters of the Pew Charitable Trusts (yes, I spent a day and a half in the PEW headquarters).

The workshop was entitled “Exploring the True Costs of Food”.     The goal by these groups is to apply all of the “externality” costs to animal-derived foods and then come up with what animal food products really “cost” the consumer.  For those not familiar with the externality term, it is any cost associated with production of a good or service which is not reflected in the market price.  For example, the 4 breakout groups were on …

1.       Energy and green house gas emissions

2.       Soil, water, and other environmental consequences

3.       Consequences of antimicrobial use in agriculture

4.       Other public health consequences (which included psychological stress of living next to an intensive animal production unit)

I heard discussion of “food deserts”, although I am not sure how we are responsible for that.  I think the true agenda of the meeting came out when a senior representative of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health stood up and said (written down as quickly as I could)  “We don’t want to reduce the size of production units and still produce the same amount of meat, we want to reduce the amount of meat in the American diet”.   It appears that ways to accomplish that are to increase cost through increased regulations or taxation.  One economist even talked about removing the profit motive as a determinant of the structure of food animal production.  Hmmmmm, I’ll let you apply a term to that concept. 

The template presented to the meeting was the hidden cost of energy report.    One question for the breakout groups had “benefits” in there, but only food animal representatives proposed any benefits of animal-derived foods.  One of my more interesting lunch conversations was with a CDC representative who had the view that we produced so much food that she scoffs at the idea of ever making America food insecure (about 10% of our population is already there), essentially proposing that however we crank down on the industry won’t harm the U.S. population.   The $87 billion in food imports are just because “people like to try different things”. 

This was a real awakening for me to actually sit in a room with the people who would like to see us gone, and get insight into how they intend to move policy towards doing that.  I was basically branded a luddite by the Danish representative for not understanding that the scientists do the risk analysis, then hand it off to the politicians to do the risk management.  I won’t bore you with details of that conversation, but the ugly American was slow in catching the wisdom of that one. 

After listening to discussions of life cycle analysis, health impact analysis, and the value of a statistical life, it was pretty clear in what arenas the policy battles will take place. Unfortunately, in my opinion the results of these policy battles will be more decided by election results than by scientific input.  It was interesting to note that the anti-food animal groups are starting to downplay risk assessment as a means to evaluate risks (note that many come out with incredibly small risks).  The precautionary principle was a standard refrain at this meeting (in the antibiotic breakout), said with reverence rather than disdain. 

Just FYI on a meeting.  In addition, the Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) is having a meeting next week where they will hope to guide us backward types into other ways of controlling disease in food animals.    Then, in a couple of weeks, the USDA is also having a stakeholder meeting on how they are going to become involved.  The CDC has also started a taskforce on antibiotic resistance, one for which quite a few of us food animal types applied, but I am not sure any got on the taskforce.

The times they are a changin”

Mike