IATP Hog Report - Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Section 2
II. Putting Lives in
Peril
Sub-sections:
The Threat to Farmer and
Farm Worker Health and
Safety
Safety Hazards of
Industrialized, Intensive
Livestock Confinement
Acute and Chronic Health
Hazards, Intensive
Livestock Confinement
The Threat of Antibiotic
Resistance
What Is Subtherapeutic
Use?
Growth of Resistance and
the Social Impact
Intensive Confinement
and Antibiotic Use
A Long, Contested History
Progress in Europe
Assessing the Impacts of a
Ban on Subtherapeutic
Antibiotic Use
Potential Solutions
Food Irradiation: The
Wrong Answer for Food
Putting Lives in Peril
Overview
The nature of the technology used, rather than size alone, distinguishes
industrial from non-industrial animal farming methods. Whether practiced
by many small farmers or by a few large operations, industrialized animal
farming techniques can be harmful to life in ways that more natural and
less intensive farming techniques are not.
Dusts inside intensive confinement facilities and gaseous emissions from
liquid manure pits and lagoons have led to worker illnesses and injuries as
well as human and animal fatalities.
The continuous stress of intensive confinement lowers farm animals'
immunity to disease. But, reducing the intensity of confinement to
alleviate stress would raise animal factories' costs of production. To avoid
these costs, animal factories rely on continuous, subtherapeutic
administration of antibiotics in the feed or drinking water to help promote
growth and control bacterial illnesses.
The subtherapeutic use of antibiotics creates selective pressure on bacteria
that favors resistance, placing in jeopardy the effectiveness of precious
antibiotics for treating animal and human bacterial diseases.
The Threat to Farmer and Farm Worker Health and Safety
Anaerobic decomposition of liquefied hog manure in under-barn storage
pits or open, outdoor "lagoons" produces nearly 400 volatile organic
compounds. 1 The four most abundant of these are methane, hydrogen
sulfide, ammonia, and carbon dioxide. 2 These compounds may or may not
be odorous. One of the mercaptans, for example, which smells like rotten
eggs, is added to normally odorless natural gas to call attention to gas
leaks. Methane is both colorless and odorless, but is potentially deadly. It
is a potent greenhouse gas, can be explosive at certain concentrations in
the air, and can displace oxygen in confined spaces, resulting in
asphyxiation. The potentially deadly hydrogen sulfide is detectable at low
levels as a "sour gas" or rotten egg odor. As concentrations increase and
become more dangerous, hydrogen sulfide paralyzes the olfactory senses
and becomes undetectable. Scientists now believe that, even at low levels
of exposure, hydrogen sulfide can have lasting effects on human health.
In 1982, more than 85,000 people in Iowa and 500,000 in the United
States worked in livestock confinement systems that used liquid
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