What the USDA Doesn't Want You to Know About...

What the USDA Doesn't Want You to Know About Antibiotics and Factory Farms

Â Big Ag puts short term profit first.

TOM PHILPOTT - Mother Jones

Here is a document the USDA doesn't want you to see. It's what the agency calls a "technical review"-nothing more than a USDA-contracted researcher's simple, blunt summary of recent academic findings on the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant infections and their link with factory animal farms. The topic is a serious one. A single antibiotic-resistant pathogen, MRSA-just one of many now circulating among Americans-now claims more lives each year than AIDS.

Back in June, the USDA put the review up on its National Agricultural Library website. Soon after, a Dow Jones story quoted a USDA official who declared it to be based on "reputed, scientific, peer-reviewed, and scholarly journals." She added that the report should not be seen as a "representation of the official position of USDA." That's fair enough-the review was designed to sum up the state of science on antibiotic resistance and factory farms, not the USDA's position ...

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