Awesome Road Advice For Cyclists

"No road user is 'solely responsible for their own safety'. That's not the right way of understanding traffic, which is a social environment with plenty of interaction that follows pretty much universally understood norms of human behaviour. It's not a free for all in which everybody is on their own. It is only by increasing the degree of collaboration between different road users that actual safety and perceived safety can be improved.

It is all about interacting, communicating well, making eye contact, projecting confidence in traffic, etc. So, no-one's an island."

The Price of Cheap Food

Got this from Riverford Farm this week, well worth the read.

I am told this is a bit of a rant, but it is something I really feel strongly about …

50% of Dutch farmers now carry MRSA and are liable to be denied access to hospital as a result. The push for cheap meat, whatever the cost, has created pig and poultry factory farms that are inherently unhealthy and require the routine and excessive use of antibiotics to stave off disease. This is not just a question of animal welfare; the resulting antibiotic resistance now threatens the single most important advance in medical science.

Antibiotics are still used as growth promoters in the USA. Tetracycline and penicillin were banned as growth promoters in Europe in the 1970s, yet the last 30 years still saw a 1500% rise in tetracycline use and a 600% rise in penicillin use as they continued to be routinely included (albeit with a vet’s prescription) on a massive scale in pig and poultry rations. Regulation is not working and the continued irresponsible use of antibiotics has led to widespread antibiotic resistance in bacteria; experts agree that resistance amongst salmonella and campylobacter is primarily the result of antibiotic use in agriculture.

Until now one of the few effective antibiotics in the treatment of MRSA has been the tetracycline group which is also widely included in animal rations. Worryingly, the new MRSA carried by Dutch farmers is resistant to the tetracyclines and at least some of this resistance can be traced to animal infections where resistance evolved in response to excessive, and many would say reckless, inclusion in feed.

Organic farmers are usually happy to treat sick animals with antibiotics to prevent unnecessary suffering provided the production system does not require their routine use. The idea is to provide a diet and environment that promotes health rather than routinely fighting the disease that is an inevitable result of intensive production. The modern pig, poultry and pharmaceutical industries lobby hard for continued prophylactic antibiotic use in feeds, on the basis that the large scale, cheap, pig and poultry production would be impossible without it. Should these proponents find themselves among those suffering in hospital with an antibiotic-resistant infection I wonder if they will feel that cheap food has come at too high a price.

http://www.riverford.co.uk/