Dangers of Factory Farming

Factory Farming Is Manufacturing Superbugs — and Endangering Us All

Posted: 06/17/11 09:06 AM ET
by Johann Hari, Columnist The London Independent
Here is a news story that could determine whether you live or die. Many of the world’s scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless — so a few people can get richer, for a while. If they aren’t stopped soon, the World Health Organization warns we are facing “a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics”. It will be a world wheretransplant surgery is impossible. It will be a world where a simple appendix operation will be as routinely lethal as it was in 1927, before the discovery of penicillin. It will be a world where pneumonia and TB and gonorrhea are far harder to deal with, and claim many more of us. But it’s a world that you and I don’t have to see – if we act on this warning now.