Scholar Calls Enviro-Radicals' Antibiotic Warnings "Junk Science"
by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
June 8, 2004
(AgapePress) - A major campaign is underway to get schools to stop buying meat from suppliers who use antibiotics on their livestock. The Keep Antibiotics Working Campaign is being pushed by radical environmental and anti-meat groups, as well as by politicians like Senator Hillary Clinton of New York and Ohio's congressman Sherrod Brown. These groups and individuals claim they are concerned about a rise in bacterial resistance to antibiotics used to treat humans.
The activists say they are concerned because antibiotics -- which may include low doses of human drugs such as penicillin, erythromycin, and tetracycline -- are sometimes given to chickens or other livestock to prevent or reduce sickness and to speed growth. These drugs kill the bacteria that cause the animals to become sick, but some critics of the practice fear that routine use of the drugs in large numbers of animals may help set the stage for the evolution of drug-resistant microbes.
However, adjunct scholar Steve Milloy of the Cato Institute, the publisher of JunkScience.com, says consumers need not avoid such animal food products. He notes that there has not been a single case reported anywhere in the U.S. of a school-lunch-associated epidemic caused by the bacteria on which this whole anti-meat campaign is focused -- no cases of salmonella or campylobacter contamination that can be associated with food poisoning and illness.
Milloy says the groups' warnings against livestock treated with antibiotics are "simply without merit," and he points out, "There is no need for this. There has been no outbreak of campylobacter in school lunches, where this is targeted, and the antibiotics at issue aren't even used to treat children under 18 years of age."
Rather than a genuine attempt to safeguard the health and well-being of schoolchildren, Milloy contends this campaign is nothing more than a junk-science-fueled scare tactic being employed by activists in an effort to promote their own anti-business agenda.
The columnist and Cato Institute scholar says the groups behind this campaign "don't like people eating meat, they don't like the farmers that produce meat, and they don't like the businesses -- in this case, the pharmaceutical companies who help the farmers produce the meat. That's what it's all about."
According to Milloy, the anti-meat groups and environmental radicals that are targeting school cafeterias are simply trying to "scare the public into getting meat out of the school lunch program" in order to advance their own cause.
