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Cause and Effect Essay - Factory Farms Cause Sickness and Pollution

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Cause and Effect Essay - Factory Farms Cause Sickness and Pollution

There is little doubt that animals raised on small-scale diverse farms are apt to be healthier. When allowed to range freely, particularly in organically maintained yards and pastures, they receive more exercise, their diet is more varied and they are exposed to commensal bacteria that help exclude, and build resistance to, harmful pathogens. Some organic practitioners also argue that free-ranging animals actively seek out plants with medicinal properties that can build their resistance to illness,

When Livestock production is carried out on a scale that suits the global market, however, huge numbers of animals are kept in tightly confined conditions, and …show more content…

The newest class of antibiotics, fluoroquinolones- viewed as the last line of defence for some human infections- are already proving ineffective against some bacteria strains. An epidemiologist for the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention says that among public health officials
³there is no controversy about where antibiotic resistance in food-borne pathogens comes from²: the heavy use of antibiotics is to blame.

The huge amounts of manure that the industrial livestock farms produce also represent a human health risk. In the Cape Fear region of
North Carolina, for example, factory hog farms produce ten million metric tonnes of waste annually, equal to that produced by forty million people.
When heavy rains hit in 1999, numerous lagoons containing the manure burst.
In one case, two million gallons of hog waste spilled when a lagoon ruptured at a farm that raises hogs for a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the United States. Such manure spills were one reason the storm left 400,000 wells in North Carolina contaminated. Health officials expressed concern that an outbreak of gastrointestinal and other diseases, such as pathogenic E. coli, might be caused by contaminated drinking water.

Other agribusiness livestock practices are equally alarming.
Monsanto has been aggressively marketing rBGH, a recombinant form of a naturally occurring hormone, for use in dairy cows. The use of the genetically engineered

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