The return of disease a-la 19th century and prior style plagues threatens to return to the world again as the abuse of antibiotics in everyday life has caused once easily curable illnesses to become resistant to cures and re-emerge with a deadly vengeance. There are three areas in which this has been most prominent.
The first and of least concern in the western world is the abuse of antibiotics for actual medicine. This is a major problem in the former Soviet-bloc countries and still is today. It is believed to be the reason behind the emergence of drug-resistant tuberculosis, which remains a serious threat and is spreading across East Asia.
The second issue is that of the sodomites. This is something that Shoebat.com has covered many times, and it is that because the sodomites masturbate with poop, they expose themselves to disease and eventually get sick. One cannot play with filth and expect to avoid disease, and so the evil behavior that they use to define themselves eventually turns on them.
But the largest cause of drug-resistant bacteria is the agricultural industry. Livestock of all kinds are frequently kept in filthy conditions because it is cheaper to let the animals live in their wn sewage than clean it up, and also to overcrowd animals into a space. Given how profit margins can be very slim, and how food is a critical part of US domestic and foreign policy, it is cheaper to give animals medicine to prevent them from getting disease instead of dealing with the conditions that cause disease. It is so widespread that one only needs to go to any farm or feed store (for those who are unfamiliar with how to visit one, just look for your local “Tractor Supply Store” in the US) and if one looks at chicken feed and it says “medicated”, this means that there are antibiotics in it.
Unfortunately, the spread of drug-resistant bacteria due to the agricultural industry has had larger consequences than were foreseen. Antibiotics have been measured in corn and soy crops, both which are used as feed for all kinds of animals, as a result of using animal feces as fertilizer. The antibiotics are taken up by the crops, more antibiotics are added to the crops, and then fed to the animals in question.
This blatant abuse of antibiotics has created a situation where it is inevitable that at some point, there is going to be a serious emergence of drug-resistant bacteria among the agricultural sector. The concern here is not if the animals die, but if said bacteria are able to be passed to humans and make them sick.
According to a new study published by an animal-welfare group, upon taking samples from pork purchased from Walmart, it was found that 80% of samples of said raw meat had at least one strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria within them, and 37% were resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics.
160 samples of pork were tested by researchers at Texas Tech University: 80 were from Walmart and 80 were from a competing national retail chain in the Mid-Atlantic region. The samples were tested in 32 batches for E. coli, salmonella, enterococcus and listeria. Researchers said they found enterococcus in 13 batches, E. coli in 10 batches, salmonella in 6 and listeria in 3 batches.
Alesia Soltanpanah, executive director of World Animal Protection U.S., said: “The presence of multidrug-resistant bacteria on pork products illustrates the role the pork supply chain plays in the global health crisis caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The fact that pork from one of the nation’s largest retailers contains bacteria resistant to antibiotics critically important to human health is particularly alarming and should raise concerns.”
In addition to Walmart, researchers also tested pork sample from another national retail chain and also found antibiotic-resistant bacteria. However, the second batch tested did not contain two strains of multidrug-resistant bacteria in a single batch (as the Walmart batch did) and none of the samples were resistant to antibiotics considered “critically important to human health”.
The report didn’t name the second retailer, but FoodDive speculates that it is Costco, Kroger or Target, based on the report noting that the second retailer has “has committed to strengthen its animal welfare policies for its pork suppliers, including working towards a commitment to complete elimination of gestation crates for breeding sows.”
Walmart has not yet made this commitment, while Target and Costco have committed to the initiative by 2022 and Kroger by 2025. In 2016, however, Walmart partnered with IBM and Tsinghua University to track the movement of pork in China using blockchain. (source)
This finding raises two questions. First, are those who consume such meats also consuming the antibiotics given to these animals, and in so doing this are making themselves more susceptable to these new bacteriae that are emerging? Second, what is the threat to public health at this point from raw meat or possibly consuming raw meat?
The study used pork, but it would be interesting to see if beef or chicken showed similar results because both meats consume the same feed that pigs do for the most part, and likewise are also heavily dosed with antibiotics.
The Centers for Disease Control has called antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest public health challenges of our time” because there is no way to cure it outside of making new antibiotics, but even those are only as good as the ability to keep them from being compromised by abuse. The problem is one of philosophy that places expediency and bottom-dollar profit over the long-term health of the consumers meant to consume the product and even the producer making said product, since disease resistance such as this is highly destructive and not easily stopped once it is able to establish itself.
The more one looks at the current issues of the 21st century, the more one cannot help but wonder if the world is gradually moving towards a massive state where biology, economics, politics, and finally, war will culminate in the mass death of a large part of the human race, and people will be left feeling powerless and wondering how things came to be. Yet the fact will be, as it always has been throughout history, that the events which lead up to the current situation were gradual, except it was that nobody paid attention when they were happening.
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