Assessing the public health impacts of industrial farm animal production (IFAP)

Although most public health research addresses relationships between specific exposures (e.g., microbes, chemicals, behaviors, or treatments) and diseases or other individual outcomes, the health of populations is fundamentally determined by the architecture of systems that create mass exposures, both harmful and healthy, as well the resilience of individuals and organized communities.  Agriculture, energy, transportation, commerce, and defense/war, are examples of such systems.  Public health advocates correctly promote their goals not only based on specific exposure-outcome relationships, but on the way that systems affect human rights, social justice, violence, and ecological sustainability.  The system of IFAP results in depletion of water, soil, and fossil fuels, massive air and water pollution, dangerous working conditions, poor mass nutrition, and concentration of production that makes the food supply vulnerable to disruption by pestilence, storms, loss of power or transportation, and economic failure.  The practice of routine sub-therapeutic administration of antibiotics for growth promotion (as opposed to disease treatment), which promotes antibiotic resistance, is an IFAP practice that has garnered special attention because it threatens the effectiveness of antibiotics in medicine.  Some public health advocates mistakenly believe that ending the practice would stop IFAP.  Focus on this issue could promote undue public fear, discrimination against IFAP workers, and play into the hands of IFAP promoters who argue that because bacteria adapted to livestock are less effective human pathogens, the practice is fine.  Researchers who fail to put antibiotic use in context may contribute to the problem.