> How anybody could believe taking that component out from the rest of the defense system, and breed pathogen resistance against it in isolation, could be anything but begging for calamity is beyond me. It boggles the mind that this has been permitted to go on, but particularly unexpected it is not at all, sadly.
Every irreplaceable natural resource (in this case, human immunity) is somebody's profit waiting to be taken, unless stopped.
Yeah, that seems to be the issue doesn't it.
And this in a pharma sub-field infamous for not getting enough investment in corporate research because the effect of novel substances is almost instantly destroyed by precisely the sort of misuse the article points to.
One's tempted to dismiss any attempts to adequately explain the exploitation with either greed or stupidity as impossible, and just chalk it up to pure malice...
Maybe ok if used just as medicine for rare cases where it's the last hope.. but for what do we use it? To have more of mass-produced meat every day, meat with meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, yay!
It’s not even like meats getting cheaper. They produce it for cheaper and keep the extra margins. Yay monopoly?
One of the drivers of antibiotic use in farming is the fact that price points for food need to remain low because of stagnant wages. In order to eke out a profit, industrial amounts of food are needed at lower costs and those costs need to go down even in the face of inflation.
It's yet another perverse incentive and market failure that'll lead to ruin.
Physiologically it's well known that that the antibacterial peptides are part of the immune system. They were discovered as a part of the pathogen defense mechanisms of insects, found to be present also in vertebrates as well and only then, of course, exploited for chemical mimicry as pharmaca.
How anybody could believe taking that component out from the rest of the defense system, and breed pathogen resistance against it in isolation, could be anything but begging for calamity is beyond me. It boggles the mind that this has been permitted to go on, but particularly unexpected it is not at all, sadly.