New Law -> Regulates Antibiotic Use On Farm Animals

The FDA should have taken action a long time ago with regulating the use of antibiotics for farm animals, especially the healthy animals that don't need them.  Of course, everytime we eat non-organic meat (sometimes I even wonder about the quality of "organic" meat in the US) we are pretty much swallowing antibiotics and most people don't even recognize this or think about it... OR they just don't care.  As the article says:  

"The over-use of these antibiotics contributes to the development of so-called ’superbugs,’ or infections that cannot be treated with existing medicines." 

I recently read that C-Diff has now developed a strain being a superbug.  When I read that 300 people a day die from C-diff... A DAY, my jaw dropped.  I thought the words after 300 would be something more like "people per month".  That sounds about right in my opinion, but things have gotten out of control in this country.  The use of drugs for everything and the medical field's lack of knowledge of NATURAL, more healthy ways of eradicating a pathogen/illness is now biting us in the ass.    

"A recent study published in the medical journal, Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that nearly 50 per cent of grocery store meat was contaminated with antibiotic resistant pathogens, according to the Senator. Approximately 25 per cent of this meat was contaminated with pathogens that were resistant to three or more type of antibiotics." 

Mmmmm yummy!  Makes you want to have a nice steak huh?! Yeah right... ORGANIC ONLY.  The standards that certified organic follow should be the normal standards for all farms and all the food that is allowed into the grocery store for human consumption.  That 50% of meat that is full of pathogens is not even fit for an animal to consume and people are eating it everyday.      Y  U  C  K!    

New Law Introduced to Safeguard Use of Antibiotics in Agriculture - The Pig Site:

New Law Introduced to Safeguard Use of Antibiotics in Agriculture

28 June 2013

US - Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) has introduced legislation to combat antibiotic resistant superbugs that develop when antibiotics are misused in animal agriculture.

The Preventing Antibiotic Resistance Act of 2013 directs the Food and Drug Administration to prohibit the use of human antibiotics in the feed and water of healthy farm animals if they jeopardize human health.

The bill requires drug companies and agriculture producers to demonstrate that antibiotics are used to treat clinically diagnosable diseases - not just to fatten livestock. The over-use of these antibiotics contributes to the development of so-called ’superbugs,’ or infections that cannot be treated with existing medicines.

“Antibiotics are the closest thing to a ‘silver bullet’ in human medicine given their ability to wipe out a wide variety of bacterial infections, but we are in danger of losing this weapon in the fight against infectious diseases,” said Senator Feinstein. “When antibiotics are fed in low doses to animals, only the strongest, most resistant bacteria are left behind to reproduce. By the time these resistant pathogens make their way from the animals into our communities, the infections can be costly to treat or untreatable all together.”

A recent study published in the medical journal, Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that nearly 50 per cent of grocery store meat was contaminated with antibiotic resistant pathogens, according to the Senator. Approximately 25 per cent of this meat was contaminated with pathogens that were resistant to three or more type of antibiotics.

“The irresponsible use of antibiotics is dangerous, and tens of thousands of people in the US die each year from antibiotic resistant infections,” Senator Feinstein added. “We must preserve the efficacy of these life-saving drugs by carefully restricting their overuse in our agriculture products.”

The Preventing Antibiotic Resistance Act of 2013:

• directs the Food and Drug Administration to prohibit the use of antibiotics in ways that accelerate antibiotic resistance
• requires drug companies and producers to demonstrate they are using antibiotics to treat clinically diagnosable diseases—not just to fatten their livestock
• applies restrictions to only the limited number of antibiotics that are critical to human health. Any drug not used in human medicine is left untouched by this legislation, and
• preserves the ability of farmers to use all available antibiotics to treat sick animals. If a veterinarian identifies a sick animal, or a herd of animals that are likely to become sick, there are no restrictions on what drugs can be used.

More than 375 public, consumer and environmental health groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, support the legislation.

Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) and Barbara Boxer (D-California) are co-sponsors of the legislation.

ThePigSite News Desk

Don't Eat The Sausage - Sick Pigs = Your Food. #PEDV Is Effecting The US #Pork Industry

So basically all the pork in our grocery stores is from pigs that have this swine PEDV.  Yeah OKAYYYY!! Like we should really put diseased pork into our bodies.... sounds real healthy (sarcasm)! There is just something about this sentence below that sounds a loud effing horn that says .... THEY ARE IDIOTS...... DON'T LISTEN TO THEM... I REPEAT... DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM.    I like how they begin the article with this too..

"The swine-only virus, the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus (PEDV), poses no danger to humans or other animals, and the meat from infected pigs is safe for people to eat."    - F YOU!!!   

I would like to make a BLT for the person who said this and watch them eat it...Yummy BACON!!! Not just any old bacon... DISEASED BACONNNN!!

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS

• "Like everything else, we screw up from time to time," said Ronald L. Plain, professor of agricultural economics at University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. "We know so little about the transmittal of this virus. We can't be sure if it's happening because of something we're supposed to do right and didn't - or by some mechanism we don't know that we're supposed to do differently."  This statement says a lot... they know so little about the virus.  I don't think it's just a lack of knowledge on how it's spread, but a lack of knowledge about the in's & out's of the virus.  It's never been a problem, so there's been no real research done on PEDV.  So, with that said, how can they be certain that this virus poses no risk to humans?  Just because someone  eats some diseased meat and doesn't initially show signs of sickness, doesn't mean that the person will never be effected (years from now). It just can't be a good idea to eat diseased meat; any kind of meat.

• "But the food shield is not impermeable. "If it becomes clear that this is not a novel way for to be transmitted, and that there had to be physical contact, that's going to be a major concern," said William Marler, a leading food-safety attorney. "It means that there was a failure in the system."  the system fails us all the time... that's not new news.  They know nothing about this virus. 

•  "Initial reporting about the virus may have been delayed, say sources, because its symptoms can be confused with a more common malady, transmissible gastroenteritis (TGE)"  It's actually sad that there are all these animals that are sick and suffering and just loaded up with antibiotics to stay alive until they are slaughtered.  It's just not right.

• "Also, states are not required to report cases of PEDV to the federal government, and farmers are not required to report to state veterinarians."  Why the hell not?? That's just not wise.  Any sick animal(s) that will be going into the food supply should have to report these conditions.  But wait... now that I think about it, the majority of farm animals are sick. There would be an overload of cases and not enough man power to investigate.  I just answered my question

HUGE #IBD STUDY - New Light on Genetic Basis of #UC & #CD

I have no idea how I forgot to publish this post. I just found this and a few other posts that I saved as drafts and never published to my blog... Ooops*  

Fars News Agency :: New Light on Genetic Basis of Inflammatory Diseases:

News number: 9107116502

15:12 | 2012-11-02

New Light on Genetic Basis of Inflammatory Diseases TEHRAN (FNA)- In one of the largest studies of its kind ever conducted, an international team of scientists has thrown new light on the genetic basis of the inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD).

Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, the two most common forms of IBD, are chronic inflammatory digestive disorders. Dr. John Rioux, researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Universite de Montreal, is one of the researchers who have identified 71 genetic regions newly associated with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), increasing the total number discovered to date to 163, in one of the largest studies of its kind. Also, the study points out that these regions showed a striking overlap with those implicated in autoimmune diseases and in immune deficiencies. Even more surprising was the observation of a significant overlap with genetic regions controlling our response to microbial infections such as in the case of tuberculosis. Moreover, these findings suggest that IBD results from overactive immune defence systems that evolved to fight off serious bacterial infections. In IBD, the body's immune system produces an ongoing inflammatory reaction in the intestinal tract that injures the intestinal wall, leading to diarrhea and abdominal pain. IBD patients typically require lifelong treatment with drug therapy, and often need surgery to repair tissue damage caused by the disease. Up until this point, researchers have been studying Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis separately. This study was based on the fact that there seems to be a vast amount of genetic overlap between the two disorders. In the first step of the study, the researchers conducted a "meta-analysis" of 15 previous genomic studies of either Crohn's disease (CD) or ulcerative colitis (UC), the two most common forms of IBD, creating a large dataset that combined genetic information from some 34,000 individuals who took part in those studies. The results then formed part of a second meta-analysis that included data from new genome-wide scans of more than 41,000 DNA samples from CD/UC patients and healthy comparison subjects collected at 11 centers around the world by the International IBD Genetics Consortium. "We have greatly expanded the map of genetic regions that are associated with IBD," agreed Dr. John Rioux, co-lead author of this study and chair of the Consortium, with Jeffrey Barrett of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England, lead author of the study. "Each of these regions only increases a person's chance of developing IBD by a fraction of a per cent and even taken together they cannot tell us who will or will not develop the disease. But they each tell a small story about the biology of this disorder, and by combining them we find biological pathways that, if disrupted, can lead to IBD." Dr. Rioux and the international team of researchers also studied the activity of genes in their IBD regions in hundreds of different types of cells involved in the immune system. They found that certain cells tended to produce more of these IBD genes, including many that are involved in the body's first line defense against invasion. This illustrates that an immune response seems to be a major factor in IBD: when a bacterium is detected, these cells are not just activated, but become overactive. "We see a genetic balancing act between defending against bacterial infection and attacking the body's own cells," said Dr. Barrett. "Many of the regions we found are involved in sending out signals and responses to defend against bad bacteria. If these responses are over-activated, we found it can contribute to the inflammation that leads to IBD." Nearly 100 scientists in 15 countries contributed to the new work, which "highlights the incredible power that working together in a large team can have," said Barrett. "This would not have been possible without the thousands of DNA samples from patients with these conditions assembled by the International IBD Genetics Consortium. Collectively, our findings have begun to uncover the biological mechanisms behind this disease." IBD results from inflammation in the digestive system and affects 2.5 million people worldwide. With over 230,000 cases, Canada has among the highest frequency of people with IBD in the world. Although it can affect any age group IBD is more likely to develop in teens and adults between 15 and 30 years of age. IBD is a lifelong debilitating condition. It can have a devastating impact on the physical and social lives of those affected.

'via Blog this'

Higher Risk of Melanoma in IBD Patients

Gee great!! I'm just gonna die.. my God.  Melanoma was the cancer that killed my mother, making the % higher for me.  I didn't even read the article.  The title says enough.  Maybe one day i'll decide to scan my eyes over the words, but for now I don't feel like going there.  Click the link to go to the original article if you'd like to read it. 

IBD patients are at higher risk of melanoma, report researchers:

'via Blog this'

Researchers in #Edinburgh Seek to Identify #Biomarkers in #IBD Patients Using Advanced Techniques

I had no idea the rates of IBD in Scotland were that high.  It seems like researchers and scientists everywhere are looking for the cause and a cure for this horrible chronic illness, but no one has found either.  There are many suggested theories as to the cause of Crohn's and ulcerative colitis that involve the combination of environmental, immune system and bacterial factors effect the person/people that have genetic susceptibility.  We are in desperate need to determine the cause of IBD.  At least if the main cause is identified, scientific studies can be lead in the appropriate direction, with hopes that an effective cure would soon be developed.  
It's frustrating to read all this literature on the studies being done (I'm sort of obsessed with researching this disease). I believe that scientists all over the world are not just twiddling their thumbs in the lab.  I think there are some hard working, determined scientists all over the world, especially in countries that are seeing a growing population of people with this life changing disease, that are committed to finding the true & actual cause.  The frustration, that I'm sure a lot of  these people experience when they think they are on to something and feel confident in the results that were found, to just have those findings tossed in the trash because followup studies confirm something different.  Oh, and not to mention the millions of dollars in research costs that is spent to conduct these studies. 
I'd imagine this has happened thousands of times.  It wasn't just yesterday that they started researching IBD. 
I have hope though..Even although the cause has not been determined as of yet.  I know that someone, sometime soon, will find those golden results that everyone has been anxiously waiting for.  I pray that  God would take any discouragement that may fester in the minds of these people, who have dedicated their lives to helping people get well.  Let that passion to help people only increase and drive these brilliant people to find the answer.  I pray that God would lead these researchers to that answer that will result in millions and millions of people getting better and having the life that was intended for them =  HEALTH & COMPLETE WHOLENESS OF THE BODY!

Article Highlights

• "(IBD) – are common causes of chronic ill-health, especially in Scottish children, where the incidence of Crohn’s has increased by 500 per cent in the past 50 years."
• ".... Edin­burgh University will work with two international teams of clinicians and scientists in the £15 million programme, to help identify tell-tale signs in the blood or bowels of patients that point towards the two diseases and could help early diagnosis."
• "...... mole­cules or proteins – known as bio­markers – that are specifically associated with the development of bowel diseases, .... to track how the illnesses progress in patients over time. In this way, the team hopes to spot the most markers for predicting progression of the disease."
• "The scientists will use ­cutting-edge scientific techniques – including DNA, protein and microbiological analysis."
• ".... biomarkers could also make it easier to predict how serious a patient’s illness could become, .. predict their response to treatment,... clues about the possible causes of IBD, .....  pinpoint new targets for better treatments."
• "Scotland has among the ­highest rates of IBD in the world"

Scientists develop warning system for bowel disease

Picture: Getty

By LYNDSAY BUCKLAND
Published on 18/05/2013 00:00

Scottish researchers are ­moving closer to finding new ways of diagnosing and treating patients with debilitating bowel conditions.

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis – together known as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) – are common causes of chronic ill-health, especially in Scottish children, where the incidence of Crohn’s has increased by 500 per cent in the past 50 years.

Researchers in Edinburgh are now taking part in studies to identify early changes in the bowels and blood of patients which would lead to earlier dia­gnosis, better treatment and more information on the potential causes of the conditions.

Symptoms of IBD include stomach pain, weight loss, ­diarrhoea and extreme ­tiredness. Drugs can be used to treat the symptoms, but often patients require major surgery to relieve their suffering.

Now researchers from Edin­burgh University will work with two international teams of clinicians and scientists in the £15 million programme, to help identify tell-tale signs in the blood or bowels of patients that point towards the two diseases and could help early diagnosis.

They hope to identify mole­cules or proteins – known as bio­markers – that are specifically associated with the development of bowel diseases, and to track how the illnesses progress in patients over time. In this way, the team hopes to spot the most markers for predicting progression of the disease.

The scientists will use ­cutting-edge scientific techniques – including DNA, protein and microbiological analysis.

These biomarkers could also make it easier to predict how serious a patient’s illness could become, and to predict their response to treatment. As well as providing clues about the possible causes of IBD, the researchers hope to pinpoint new targets for better treatments.

Scotland has among the ­highest rates of IBD in the world, though the reasons behind this remain unclear.

It is thought environmental factors, such as diet or levels of vitamin D, may play a part in causing conditions which affect one in every 100 to 200 people.

Professor Jack Satsangi, professor of gastroenterology at Edinburgh University, said: “Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are now common causes of chronic ill-health throughout the world, and in Scotland incidences are increasing rapidly.

“The fact the EC has chosen to support two studies involving Scottish patients highlights the fact that the impact of diseases in this country is recognised to be high, and that current therapies are often not successful.”

Thousands of newly-diagnosed patients across Europe and North America are to be recruited for two research trials, which will be run by scientists and clinicians from the UK, Sweden, Belgium, Spain and Norway.