"Amerikassa eläimet syövät enemmän lääkkeitä kuin ihmiset." Jenkeissä ollaan vihdoin heräämässä siihen, että lääkeresistenssi eritoten antibioottien osalta on tulossa kansakunnalle äärimmäisen kalliksi. Ja koska asiaan ei esim. lainsäädännöllä päästy käsiksi, on keksitty esittää sitä mitä jokainen amerikkalainen ymmärtää: rahamääräistä käyttömaksua eläimille käytettäviin lääkkeisiin.
Make Those Cows Pay for Their Penicillin America’s animals take more drugs than its people do. About 80 percent of the 51 tons of antibiotics consumed each day in the U.S. are used in agriculture and aquaculture.
Such unrestrained use of the drugs may help farmers grow bigger cattle, but it has a drastic side effect: It prods bacteria to evolve defenses, so that the drugs don’t work so well when given to people (or fish or animals, for that matter) suffering from bacterial infections. The loss of these drugs as medical weapons is also astoundingly expensive. The current stock’s potential to prolong human life is worth upward of $60 trillion, according to a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
And so it is welcome news that the authors of that report also have a novel way to protect this pharmaceutical treasure: Impose a fee on all uses of antibiotics outside of human medicine. Their market-based strategy is worth a try.
Using government regulation alone to end the use of antibiotics to boost animal growth has always been a tricky proposition. The Food and Drug Administration this month asked drug makers to voluntarily relabel agricultural antibiotics so as not to allow it, and by 2017 the agency will require that veterinarians supervise the drugs’ application in livestock. Fully enforcing this new mandate will take careful monitoring. Even then, farmers and their animal doctors will still be able to use antibiotics for the purpose of preventing disease in cows, chickens, fish and so on, rather than to help them grow...
Koko juttu:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-02/make-those-cows-pay-for-their-penicillin.html
