There are some blogs that I read for snark fodder. They are always wrong yet still popular and so provide material that needs dispute.

Here's a regulatory move that I think everyone except industrial livestock farmers can applaud: the federal government is considering restricting the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in livestock.

First, let me say that I do raise livestock but not in an industrial manner. I have no dog in this fight.

To me, restricting antibiotic use is a legitimate public health measure. Antibiotics have been responsible for much of the increase in human lifespan over the last century, as well as dramatic improvements in the quality of our years. But they have a real collective action problem: the more they're used, the more bacteria resist them.

Cheap meat is not worth having your kid die of an antibiotic-resistant infection. Farmers use these things indiscriminately because it allows them to pack the animals into filthy conditions that would otherwise make the animals very, very sick.

Breathe darling, you'll have an aneurism. Antibiotics are never used "indiscriminately". They are expensive and so are only used where the benefit exceeds the cost. It is never the case that they are used "to pack the animals into filthy conditions that would otherwise make the animals very, very sick." It would be far cheaper to clean things up than to pay for antibiotics, even if this was a useful characterization, but it is not. Wild animals live in far less antiseptic conditions, and have a proportionately higher rate of illness as a result.

Antibiotics are used in subtherapeutic doses because they promote animal growth. They are not used to keep animals from being sick, they are used to make them even more rudely fat.

Obviously, for someone like me who is basically opposed to factory farming, the tradeoff seems even less compelling than for someone who likes to pack in a Tyson's chicken every other day. But even if you're a big fan of treating animals like widgets, I don't see any way that somewhat cheaper meat is worth the risk of returning to an era when the president's son could die of an infected blister he picked up playing tennis. It is possible to have a perfectly rich and fulfilling life without eating most of a pound of meat every day. On the other hand, the world pre-antibiotics really was visibly much grimmer.

This is muddle minded in so many ways. If there was any sincere concern about antibiotic resistance then a far more useful target of regulatory ire would be the pervasive used of antimicrobials in nearly every human product, and the epidemic over-prescription of antibiotics in our sickly therapeutic culture. What we have here is bog standard urban bashing of "Elmer", for an audience of co-ignoramuses, by someone who has an uncomfortable relationship with livestock at every level and a number of food fetishes and eating disorders.

Where bans on subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics have been in place for some time the result was an initial rise in disease, which required increased use of therapeutic doses of antibiotics, followed by a return to previous norms for disease incidence but a continuing lower level of performance. The animals grow a bit less well, but that's it.

This would not have the effect of making meat more expensive though it would make some premium meats that are sold at higher prices because they are not produced using antibiotics be worth less. Where abstinence is the norm there is no premium for abstinence.

There's a deeper confusion in the anti-meat rant. The idea that there is some fixed supply of antibiotics and that when germs develop resistance to them we will once again have people die from minor cuts and abrasions is really far too stupid to comment on except that it is so common among urban celebutantes that the general population gives it some undeserved credence. In reality we are continually developing or discovering newer and better antimicrobials. In reality the eternal battle between organisms - some of which secrete antibiotics to defend themselves against other germs - has gone on since the beginning of life and will continue so long as there is life. It's their immune system, which evolves continually just as our own does. There will always be new antibiotics and germs will always evolve resistance to them. The battle is eternal. We will never be safe, the problem will never be solved once and for all.