How Some Fast Rood Restaurant Chains Are Confronting the Threat of Antibiotic Resistance (kmov.com) 69
"Many of our favorite fast food and restaurant chains continue to contribute to the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, according to a report released Thursday by advocacy groups," reports CNN:
Fifteen of America's favorites received an "F" for their lack of action in reducing the use of beef raised with antibiotics, including Burger King, DQ, Jack In the Box, Pizza Hut, Olive Garden, Chili's, Sonic, Applebee's and the pizza chains of Domino's, Little Caesars and Pizza Hut. Only Chipotle and Panera Bread, who were early leaders in using only antibiotic-free beef and chicken, received an "A"...
Despite the severity of the problem, the U.S. lacks appropriate laws to regulate overuse of antibiotics in our food chain. Thus advocacy groups have turned to some of the largest buyers of raw beef and chicken -- restaurants -- and asked them to use their purchasing power to force change. And it works. A huge success story over the past five years is the reduction of chicken raised with antibiotics in many of our favorite restaurants, said Lena Brook, director of food campaigns for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups who sponsor the study. Others include Consumer Reports, the Milken Institute School for Public Health and the Center for Food Safety... The early push by Chipotle Mexican Grill and Panera Bread, followed by Chick-fil-A, McDonald's and Subway, began a domino effect that encouraged major chicken supply companies to get on board, the report said.
Yet the article notes that almost two-thirds of the antibodies sold in the U.S. are still going to food animals...
Despite the severity of the problem, the U.S. lacks appropriate laws to regulate overuse of antibiotics in our food chain. Thus advocacy groups have turned to some of the largest buyers of raw beef and chicken -- restaurants -- and asked them to use their purchasing power to force change. And it works. A huge success story over the past five years is the reduction of chicken raised with antibiotics in many of our favorite restaurants, said Lena Brook, director of food campaigns for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups who sponsor the study. Others include Consumer Reports, the Milken Institute School for Public Health and the Center for Food Safety... The early push by Chipotle Mexican Grill and Panera Bread, followed by Chick-fil-A, McDonald's and Subway, began a domino effect that encouraged major chicken supply companies to get on board, the report said.
Yet the article notes that almost two-thirds of the antibodies sold in the U.S. are still going to food animals...
One of Slashdot's Editors (Score:1)
Fast Rood
One of Slashdot's editors received an "F" for their lack of attention in reducing typos in headlines.
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"Whatever the problem, solve it with fire!" -- Magical Kyoko
Chipotle? (Score:5, Interesting)
Didn't 500 people around the country get sick from Chipotle food back in 2015? Wasn't Chipotle still having 'food safety issues' in 2017? And weren't they still having 'health issues' in 2018?
Well, their antibiotic-free beef makes it all OK, I guess.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-chipotle-food-safety-crisis/ [bloomberg.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/20/chipotle-shares-sink-on-yet-another-report-of-possible-food-safety-issues.html [cnbc.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/31/chipotles-new-management-still-has-the-old-problem-food-safety.html [cnbc.com]
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And yet many people still eat there. I'm with you in that I don't understand why they would do that, when it's not that great to begin with. Almost every town has a superior local taqueria, except a few places where they run brown people out of town by sundown. But even lots of places where the n-bombs fall fast and thick have got one, because even racists love tacos.
Out here in California, everyone working in every restaurant has to have food handler certification. I don't know if that's actually made any
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Out here in California, everyone working in every restaurant has to have food handler certification.
No they don't. They let anyone with a pulse into the back of the house. Minimum wage + the ever-broken promise of split tips with the servers, 3 smoke breaks, you start now. Move those boxes, mop that shit up, and then start dicing onions. Oh wash your hands at some point.
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Out here in California, everyone working in every restaurant has to have food handler certification.
No they don't. They let anyone with a pulse into the back of the house.
It's just an online test you can take for eight bucks, but it's the law, and there are inspections. Further, you can just push the cost off onto the employees.
Re: Chipotle? (Score:2)
First, awesome that your handle is drinkypoo and we're talking about food poisoning :)
I like chipotle, and if I had a local taqueria near me they might be better, but I can almost guarantee that if the local taqueria served as many customers, and had as many locations as chipotle, they would have the same problems.
Whenever I hear in the news about "X many people had food poisoning at Y restaurant", I want to see a statistic about what fraction of customers got sick. One outbreak from the local taqueria is p
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I live half in Thailand and half in France and another half in Germany ...
If you had a majour food poisoning in Thailand it would make newspapers.
If it was in Germany your shop is closed, worst case for ever.
In France I'm not sure if they still try to lynch you or if they are now more civilized.
The amount of people you server, or more precisely meals, is no excuse for bad food.
No, there is no inherent problem in serving large amounts of food that make it difficult.
Every freaking cantina in a majour company
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The problem Chipotle has is that the fresh food is supplied by the franchise, not prepared onsite by the franchisee. Great for franchise getting their cut, less so for food hygiene. It's not it it can't work, but there are so many ways for it to go wrong and the food to spoil a little.
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It seems like Chipotle has both types of problems, because they have had food poisoning outbreaks limited to single restaurants. And the pathogens involved have pointed specifically to problems with handwashing when using the bathroom.
But you're correct that large-scale food processing is the problem. It's actually terrible for society in every way. Contaminated equipment spreads pathogens to large batches of food instead of small batches. Defective equipment puts plastic bits or metal shavings into large q
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Out here in California, everyone working in every restaurant has to have food handler certification. I don't know if that's actually made any substantive difference ...
In Germany it used to be a class room education with a test at the end, about a day, perhaps even two.
Now it is a 45 minutes video you are asked to watch (while no one checks if you are watching or fumbling with your phone) and there is no test, but a $40 fee
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Just did a search on G for california approved food handler certification and one of the ad hits is:
Doesn't fill me with boundless optimism.
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Actual Problem? (Score:2)
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The threat here is that antibiotics-resistant germs will be created and eventually will start to infect humans. It is yet another of these long-term threats that the average person is so spectacularly unable to grasp.
Re:Actual Problem? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not yet a critical problem because typical antibiotic resistance has significant metabolic cost for bacteria, but it requires ONE bacteria to develop a novel enzyme that works at low concentration and pretty soon this gene will be widespread.
This is now happening with metallo-beta-lactamase enzyme that slowly migrates from India to the US. It confers near 100% resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics (penicillin) for essentially near-zero metabolic cost.
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then quarrantine them in a sterile environment once they caught an infection that not even vancomycin could completely clear,
You're referring to fire.
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Has there been an actual problem or is this just prognistatic politicking? I can see the inherent danger, but there's some amount of that in anything. I don't eat at most of these places with any regularity, but I understand that they're massively popular. The only one I recall have any issues as of recently was Chipotle, but I don't think it had anything to do with their meat. Are there some real and realistic estimates of risk, because I have a feeling that while they're worse than we'd like, they're a lot less than a lot of other more common problems that we're perfectly okay with.
Statistically - accidentally tripping, then falling off the side of a cliff and getting struck by lightning before hitting the ground is more probable. +/- .0000846%
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Has there been an actual problem or is this just prognistatic politicking?
Well they made up their own system then graded companies on it in order to shame them into buying certain things from certain suppliers and spouting off about certain values, so...
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Everyone knows that feeding unreasonable antibiotics to animals makes the bacteria resistent.
It does not mean you get sick from the food, it means if you get sick from tose bacteria, no antibiotics will help you.
Do you live under a rock?
This is a case of mistaken identity (Score:4, Funny)
>Fifteen of America's favorites received an "F" for their lack of action in reducing the use of beef raised with antibiotics, including Burger King, DQ,
Whoa, wait. This is a case of mistaken identity. I'm not a favorite American restaurant and I had nothing to do with this.
DeQueue
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But did you get that "F" or not?
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No. I didn't get an "F" grade. TFA says that the restaurant chain that carries my monogrammed clothing line got an "F".
DeQueue
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Guess you are lucky then that people do not eat clothes!
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That what you get for allowing both input and output at both ends.
You could have been Stack or Queue, but you had to go and be general purpose. Lines get crossed. The ignorant get confused, and mistakes are made. You've got nobody but yourself to blame.
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Because these are completely different plants from the ones that keep getting pulled off store shelves due to E-Coli contamination.
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Where do those plants get the E. coli from? Manure. And do a comparison of veggie burger recall vs animal burger recall, and you'll see there's quite a gap as well. If E. coli is a legit concern for you, then eliminating animal use is just about the best thing you can do to reduce risk.
Yes, they are different plants... (Score:3)
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... when plant-based fake meat is used.
Plants get infected with shit all the time, and it's often shit that humans are vulnerable to.
Tragedy of the commons all over (Score:4, Informative)
The commons here is antibiotics and the tragedy is that they become increasingly ineffective for humans, all because of greed and stupidity inf the form of a complete lack of foresight.
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''all because of greed and stupidity''
Let's not forget the consumer part of this equation. Consumers demand cheap prices. Antibiotics increase herd viability, lowering shrink which lowers prices. And yes it also promotes bacterial mutation significantly lessening the effectivity of antibiotics.
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Very true. The customer is very much included here. It is not like the problem with antibiotics in meat production are secret or difficult to understand.
Competition, not consumers (Score:2)
Competition is the price driver. Governments set rules to set the way competition plays out. Consumers don't have any direct control over prices. Governments can react to consumers and make new rules though.
american exports (Score:3)
frankly USA needs decent food standards in Federal Law
it taints the ability to export foodstuff's and deal with other countries.
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That would be a really good idea. Probably not going to happen though.
Antibiotics are not bad for consumers (Score:2)
There is nothing particularly wrong for the person eating the antibiotic beef.
The problem is that by over using the antibiotics the bugs become resistant super bugs. It is neither bad for the individual consumer nor the cow, but it is very bad for society as a whole.
So consumer laws are not the place to address this. What is required is laws that protect the antibiotics themselves.
And they need to be international. No point protecting US cows if Mexican ones produce the super bugs.
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The only reason it isn't bad for the cow is that it won't live long enough to notice any ill effects.
Re:Antibiotics are not bad for consumers (Score:5, Interesting)
Why, here in the EU we have all sorts of laws to protect standards in the food chain. Big debate here in the UK as we leave (or perhaps not who knows) the EU whether the USA is going to try and force your frankly shitty foods standards on the UK as part of any trade deal. Everything from chlorine washed chicken (perfectly safe only at least 10 times the rate of salmonella in the USA than the UK), hormone injected beef or any other random rubbish food standard.
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There is nothing particularly wrong for the person eating the antibiotic beef. ... the main infection goes down, but the others
Yes there is. As you so nicely pointed out in the rest of your post.
Eating such meat makes the bacteria inside of your body resistent, too. Those that are at the moment kept in control by your immune system.
As soon as you have an unrelated infection, like pneumonia, your immune system is busy and those resistent ones just spread like all of the others. Now you receive an antibiotics
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We have strict food standards for packaged products, like most of what would be exported.
But not really for raw ingredients, and restaurants are regulated at the County level. So there are problems only with exports of non-organic meats and grains. But everybody can have Twinkies. Or wait, Oreos.
Popeyes? (Score:1)
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Who's editing this content (Score:3)
''two-thirds of the antibodies sold i...''
WTF
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You got that far before asking that? The headline alone should have made you ask that.
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OK, wait, so is this where plasma "donations" go, or not?
Antibodies != Antibiotics (Score:2)
Important summary in other words:
That said, there is industrial scale production of antibodies in various facilities, but they are not used for food. Such antibodies are a key part of immunology studies and biochemical studies such as western blots [wikipedia.org].
No surprise here (Score:2)
Hormesis (Score:3)
You've got to build up your immune system by exposing it to ever increasing levels of toxins . Restrict your meals to those purchased from the taco trucks that keep moving ahead of the city health inspector.
Directly from the article. (Score:1)
When antibiotics are overused, some bacteria learn to survive, multiply, and share their resistance genes with other bacteria even if those have not been exposed. Those so-called "superbugs" enter our system when we eat undercooked meat or veggies that have been exposed to irrigation water contaminated with animal waste.
So don't eat undercooked meat or veggies, and wash your food before preparing it. Seems pretty straight forward to me.
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Also, roll up your windows if you see a cow.
And stay away from rural people.
Install ultra-violet lights (Score:2)
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Fry every living thing in the restaurant.
That would carry an added bonus of cutting down the amount of additional meat the restaurant would need to purchase.
No love for A&W? (Score:2)
Up in Canada, they are touting their use of antibiotic free beef and chicken.
Aren't they doing the same down there?
Is this really a thing?
Maybe the push for the "Impossible Burger" and similar meat substitutes are the predictable next wave and the most practical way around the antibiotic resistance.
I guess we'll all find out together.
Link for those who want useful information (Score:3)
Chain Reaction V Survey & Scorecard [uspirg.org]
As usual, all slashbot editors are worthless.
Fast Rood ?!? (Score:2)
PITA? (Score:2)
What, no outrage over all the poor animals that no longer have the right to antibiotics?
Denying healthcare to animals -- what ever happened to cruelty-to-animals rage?