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The Danish Experiment

  • Spence Cooper
  • February 12, 2010
Pigs not in muck
Get less antibiotics

In Denmark they call it the “Danish Experiment”, and it was launched 12 years ago, when European studies showed a link between animals fed antibiotic feed and people developing antibiotic resistant infections. The country’s 17,000 farmers use antibiotics only when animals are sick.

“We don’t want to use more medicine than needed, and a lot of the medicine that is given is not needed,” said Soren Helmer, a second-generation pig farmer whose sows produce more than 30,000 pigs a year.

According to CBS news, since the ban, the Danish pork industry has grown by 43 percent – making it one of the top exporters of pork in the world. All of Europe followed suit in 2006. But the American Pork Industry wants nothing to do with it because of the increase in costs.

“What we’ve seen in Denmark and other countries is that they actually have had some increases in cost of what it takes to produce a pig,” said Liz Wagstrom, a veterinarian with the National Pork Board.

The cost increase Wagstrom refers to amounts to a paltry $5 more for every 100 pounds of pork brought to market. That’s a small price for public health, says Dr. Ellen Silbergeld, who has been studying the antibiotic resistance link between livestock and people for the past decade.

As we here at FriendsEat have pointed out, it is standard procedure for many large corporate U.S farms to feed antibiotics to perfectly healthy animals” pigs, chickens, cows” to make them grow faster and to save on feed costs despite the known link between the abusive use of antibiotics that are needlessly given to animals, and the explosion of human drug-resistant infections that kill tens of thousands.

In March, 2009, Rep. Louise Slaughter introduced the “Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act”(PAMTA) in the House of Representatives. This bill would ensure that we preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics for the treatment of human diseases by restricting the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock. But Rep. Slaughter is waging war with the pharmaceutical industry who spend $135 million a year in lobbying dollars and another $70 million from agribusiness. Follow Rep. Louise Slaughter on Twitter, and please tell Congress and your Representatives you support this bill.

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