Summary: The Overuse Of Antibiotics On Factory Farms

he Overuse of Antibiotics on Factory Farms In 2015, a fellow student from my high school, whose name has been left out, contracted a type of E. coli. The doctors realized that this strain of E. coli was resistant to antibiotics meaning there were no antibiotics that could be given to her as a treatment. The sickness forced her to miss major portions of her senior year. Hospitalized for over six months, doctors waited to see if her body’s immune system could fight the bacteria off. She eventually healed and came back to school after being hospitalized for a majority of the year but the illness changed her. She wore a face mask every day in the school, terrified of catching another illness that had become resistant to the antibiotics that the …show more content…
In the article “Why Factory Farms Threaten Your Health by John Robbins, he explains factory farms routinely give their meat production animals antibiotics with each meal to help boost their growth to get the most money from them after their death. Jenni Cathcart, author of “Antibiotic Contaminated Meat Not Safe for Human Consumption”, also brought up the idea that the antibiotics are given as a precaution due to the living conditions forced on cattle to prevent the widespread of illness and death. The usage of antibiotics for prevention and growth, which are not the original reasons for antibiotics, have led to the extreme overuse of antibiotics. This overuse of antibiotics for reasons not typically associated with antibiotics can happened because most companies with farms don’t get their antibiotics for their animals prescribed for them from veterinaries, but rather from some over-the-counter place as explained by Maryn McKenna in her article posted on National Geographic. The idea that these companies are getting their antibiotics from over the counter places and not veterinaries, where most animal antibiotics come from, can help explain why the resistant bacteria affects humans so much; they are the same antibiotics used in humans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) became focused on the issue of antibiotics and resistant bacteria. In the Cathcart article, she includes that CDC found that there have been 2,049,442 illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the United States that could have been treated with antibiotics had the bacteria that infected and killed these people not become resistant to it on the farms. These alarming numbers show how fast and problematic this issue is becoming as it turns into a health epidemic. In addition, Cathcart