Self - interest and short-term orientation. Improving your own animals' health increases your profits and cash flow now. The downsides are long-term and shared by many others.
For regulators, the incentives might be skewed by lobbying and perhaps corruption.
Unfortunately, this is the way in which "market forces" fail us. When all motivations ultimately spring forth from ever-higher profits and market dominance, how can "doing the right thing" for society as a whole win out on a consistent basis?
On the other hand, relying on regulators seems to be fundamentally flawed. Some of the domains that these people are regulating are highly specific, niche, and complex. Where is the government going to get people who are well-versed and experienced in these domains if not the industries being regulated? And, once you are a regulator, from where do you source alternative job opportunities if not the companies you are regulating?
| Unfortunately, this is the way in which
| "market forces" fail us. When all motivations
| ultimately spring forth from ever-higher profits
| and market dominance, how can "doing the right
| thing" for society as a whole win out on a
| consistent basis?
Theory (aka fantasy):
- The people running the company will be selfish and want to minimize the future risks to their offspring/descendents.
- If the company uses a practice that is bad, all of their customers will just boycott / switch to a competitor.
Reality:
- The people running the company may not have any offspring and therefore not much riding on the future.
- Most of these companies all use the same practices, so it makes boycotting hard. Switching to competitors that don't use these practices are more expensive (i.e. organic), and food is something that people need.
- The detriments of certain practices may not be known right away, and stopping them later could lead to lower short-term profits (and maybe not even increased long-term profits, just betterment of society), and Wall Street doesn't like this because all Wall Street is concerned about is numbers going up or down (all other considerations are not considered).
- Most people have issues with long-term thinking. Things that happen slowly over long time-spans don't seem to register.
> Switching to competitors that don't use these practices are more expensive (i.e. organic), and food is something that people need.
I do agree that people see this as an impediment. However, people use this excuse way too often - as a crutch, in my opinion. We (Americans, in my case) spend a pitifully small percentage of our incomes on food:
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/01/america-food-...
I'd focus more on what the breakdown is for people below the median income. Obviously at a certain level, people can afford the more expensive, but the people in the lower echelons of society are the ones that are funnelled towards "what's cheap" when it comes to food choices.
That's not even getting into whom the largest consumers are. I'll bet that there is a lot of interfacing between companies like McDonald's/KFC/etc where other corporate interests are attempting to push down prices. Then you end up with multiple layers of corporate interests that end up insulating the consumer.
All of this can also be side-stepped (at least in this case) by moving to a vegetarian or vegan diet, but that's a large leap for some people and there are stigmas attached to it by some in society (i.e. 'dirty hippies,' etc).
Small daily doses of antibiotics act as a growth stimulant for animals. Bigger animals = more money, and there aren't any incentives in place to prevent farmers from killing the effectiveness of antibiotics.
While true, it is also irrelevant. All known antibiotics belong to a very small number of classes by their mode of action. Resistance genes often confers resistance to not just one antibiotic, but an entire class, for example mecA in MRSA. Therefore it is possible for a bacterium to develop resistance to all therapeutic antibiotics without ever having encountered the exact types.
What's more alarming is that bacteria frequently exchange genetic material between species. Just because the resistance genes have not been discovered in a pathogen does not mean that the gene cannot be easily and instantly transferred from another species, and the chance of that happening is greatly increased if the environment is flooded with resistance genes due to selection by human use of antibiotics.
Just because it hasn't happened yet is not a reason not to do something. A tornado hasn't wiped out my house yet, should I move because it might happen some day? Of course there is a risk associated with their use, but the estimated risk is miniscule. It's not even measurable yet. Let's worry about problems we can identify and solve rather than wasting time fretting about what may be.
If by "risk" you meant the horizontal transfer of resistance, then I point you at genomic studies of horizontal gene transfer across bacteria. It happens with such regularity that the concept of a species cannot be naively applied to bacteria.
You're correct, feed grade antibiotics aren't used for humans. The use of antibiotics that are used in human therapy for feed grade antibiotics is already outlawed by the FDA.
