You Had to Know This Wasn't Good

The industrial meat industry is rife with problems and they often start with how the animals are gathered, transported, held in feed lots for fattening before being slaughtered.

Feed lots can resemble rock concerts, creatures crammed into a smallish space, only in feed lots the critters eat and poop in the same place right next to other critters doing the same thing. The proximity of the animals and the limits on their hygiene creates problems of disease, contagious and non. Here is the gauntlet of "issues" bossy may encounter long before she winds up on your plate: tick fever, footrot, Enterotoxaemia (pulpy kidney), Bovine respiratory disease (BRD), Blight (Pink eye), feedlot bloat, acidoses, liver abscesses, botulism. The most common cause of feedlot death is BRD. The most common feedlot disease is bovine viral diarrhea types 1 and 2.

Of course there's an answer. There has to be an answer. And it involves keeping those creatures medicated. Pharma-giant Merck offers an array of products including vaccines for infectious bovine rhinotracheitis, pneumonic pasteurellosis, parainfluenza 3 virus infection, bovine respiratory syncytial virus infection, Histophilus somni disease complex, bovine viral diarrhea types 1 and 2, and clostridial disease.

Critics argue that these medications aren't used to keep livestock healthy and well but to keep them sufficiently alive to make it to the abattoir door.

It's a system that has worked well enough so far that we still swing by the meat counter at our grocery stores to buy pieces of these creatures in shrink wrapped foam trays.

Now the World Health Organization has thrown a wrench into those well oiled gears with a warning that the antibiotics that defend your dinner's life may not be so good for your own.

New guidelines from the global body suggest farmers should stop using any antibiotics routinely to promote growth and prevent disease in animals that are otherwise healthy, a common practice in some parts of the world, including Asia and the US. Such routine use is banned in Europe, though campaigners fear the rules are sometimes flouted.

Using antimicrobial medicines on farm animals is one of the leading causes of the rise of superbugs, resistant to all but the strongest antibiotics. Medical authorities warn that the antibiotics available to treat even relatively minor human diseases are running out because of the rapid rise of such resistance.

Dame Sally Davies, chief medical officer for England, has warned repeatedly that, a decade from now, even routine, previously low-risk operations, such as hip replacements, may become dangerous because of the risk of infections resistant to medicines.

The WHO reported on Tuesday that in some countries, as much as 80% of antibiotic use is on farm animals. Even in some countries where routine use for enhancing growth is banned, more antibiotics are used on animals than on humans.

The use of the strongest antibiotics, a last resort for the most deadly infections affecting humans, should be banned altogether in animals, the guidelines advise. This should apply, according to the WHO, even in cases where an illness has been diagnosed in a food-producing animal. Implementing this could require animals to be quarantined, allowed to die, or for herds to be culled in order to halt the spread of a serious disease rather than attempting to cure it.

Well that would certainly put a ding in the wallets of those who can't live without a nice, thick, juicy steak. Don't expect the industrial cattle industry, especially the feedlot operators, to take that without a fight.