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"It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda." ~ Harry BrowneThe war against so-called 'vaccine preventable' diseases has a new frontier: the internet, and most recently The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) has entered the fray with the publication of an interactive map that it claims "visually plots global outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, rubella, and other diseases that are easily preventable by inexpensive and effective vaccines." This widely referenced map generated news headlines such as:
The use of antibacterial drugs on healthy livestock is a common practice in the United States. The meat industry's overuse of antibiotics has become so widespread that about 29 million pounds of these drugs (or 80% of all antibiotics sold in the US) are used in industrial feedlots, with only 14% of these drugs being used for therapeutic purposes.The Secret Source of Antibiotics in Your Food
As a result, dangerous germs, dubbed "super bugs", capable of fighting off antibiotics, are spreading throughout our communities, not only jeopardizing our health, but also the future of healthcare.
For the last several decades, doctors have been warning about the dangerous practice of routinely feeding antibiotics to healthy animals. Many farmers do this in an attempt to ward off disease in crowded conditions and to speed growth, but public-health researchers have linked the overuse of antibiotics in farming to the sharp rise in hard-to-kill - and sometimes fatal - superbugs in people.Why Factory Farms Threaten Your Health
Actually, the scientific consensus regarding antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been conclusive for many years. In 1989, the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, stated that the use of antibiotics in factory farms was responsible for antibiotic resistance in bacteria and was seriously undermining the ability of these agents to protect human health. Three years later, the Institute of Medicine stated that multi-drug-resistant bacteria had now become a serious medical concern. The Institute of Medicine laid the problem squarely on the doorstep of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), also known as factory farms.Got Antibiotics in Your Food? Thank the FDA
In 1997, the World Health Organization called for a ban on the routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock. A year later, the journal Science called the meat industry "the driving force behind the development of antibiotic resistance in species of bacteria that cause human disease." In 1998, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) blamed the serious emergence of Salmonella bacteria that had become resistant to no less than five different antibiotics on the routine and non-medically necessary use of antibiotics in livestock.
Comment: Read more about UNICEF's attack on independent health journalism: UNICEF Surveils, Defames health sites over vaccines