How do you get an infected callous and then get half of your leg amputated.

                The man I am talking about is 80 years old. He complained of pain in his foot, near the big toe. There was an open sore, that was supposed to be an infected callous. There was a red streak going up his leg, which was an infection. He ended up in the hospital. This was on Easter.

                    Since Easter he has been home for maybe a month. We could not understand why the sore wasn’t healing. It just continued to get worse. That is when we found out he had a vascular disease and was borderline diabetic. The small blood vessels in his lower extremities were not pumping blood, slowing down the healing process. Mind you the toe was black and so was part of the foot.

This is when they originally started talking about removing the foot. They needed demarcation, the point when the cells stops dying, in order to determinne how much of the foot to remove. When they told the Doctor that they wanted a second opinion, the Dr. changed his mind giving him another option. They decided to replace the vein in his leg, when it was finished he had 100 staples running from his groin to his ankle.

After having the surgery done, the wound was progressively looking worse. There was even a smell, which was putrid, for lack of a better word. He didn’t see the surgeon for 2 or 3 weeks. He was at home for 10 days and progressively looking worse. They had a nurse coming everyday to care for the wound. Yesterday he looked horrible, the wound from the surgery was black in some areas. His family forced him to go to the hospital.

Today he was told they are going to remove his leg from the knee down on Friday, in 2 days. The Dr. said he did all he could. I an confused as to how it got this bad. Why were they waiting for cells to die before they removed part of the foot, but now are going to remove half the leg in 2 days. This progression was very confusing to me and I have lost faith in the Doctors in my area. I will travel 1, 000 miles before I let a doctor in my area touch me again and refuse to go to these hospitals.

I wish I had s better grasp on this. I said at least 10 days ago it was infected, my only medical knowledge is taking a Tylenol or putting on a bandaid. I think they should have caught this earlier, it could have saved his leg and pain. I think these doctors did a horrible job and the for-profit hospital he is in is a joke. They do nothing, keep you for weeks and then send you to a Rehab center that costs $2,000 a day. But I guess as long as they get paid it is ok.

Is the use of antibiotics on livestock causing antibiotic resistant bacteria.

            For decades the meat industry has denied ant problem with its reliance on routine, everyday antibiotic use for the nations chickens, cows and pigs. Antibiotic use on livestock farms has surged in recent years- from 20 million pounds annually in 2003 to 30 million pounds in 2011. Over the same period, the entire human population has consumed 8 million pounds per year. Which means that livestock farms now suck in 80% of the antibiotics consumed in the U.S. Meanwhile the industry routinely churns out meat containing an array of antibiotic resistant pathogens.

                The meat industry does not seem to take any of this seriously. The websites of the major industry trade groups, the American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the National Pork Producers Council, all insist current antibiotic practices are safe. The main reason they can claim this with a straight face is that while scientists have long suspected that drug resistant pathogens can jump from antibiotic treated animals to humans, its been notoriously difficult to prove. The obstacle is ethics, you wouldn’t want to extract, antibiotic resistant salmonella from a turkey and inject it into a person just to see what happens. The risk of what the Center for Disease Control and Prevention politely calls treat and failure, death, would be to great. But this reason is fraying quickly. The latest gene sequence study from Denmark that documents 2 cases of MRSA, a deadly antibiotic resistant staph infection, jumping from farm animals to people.

          After analyzing the mutations of the MRSA strains in the women and animals, the researchers concluded that it had been circulating among the livestock before jumping to the people. This study comes on the heels of a 2012 paper by a consortium of U.S. and European researchers. It used gene sequencing to show that another common strainer of MTSA originated in humans as a common staph infection, jumped to livestock, where it evolved resistance to the common antibiotics tetracycline and methicillin and then jumped back to humans. If course you can also contract antibiotic resistant pathogens through contanct with raw meat. For example, more than 109 people did when the agribusiness giant Cargill sent out 10s of millions of pounds of ground turkey tainted with antibiotic resistant salmonella in 2011.

         The studies shine a hard light on another key industry claim. The public needn’t worry about antibiotic use on farms because the FDA has extensive guidelines about how antibiotics must be used to ensure the safety for both humans and animals. It is true the FDA has limited the use of a few specific antibiotics on farms. But the GDA was restricting antibiotics that weren’t used anymore.

              In fact the FDA offers only voluntary guidelines on judicious use. In fact antibiotic use on feedlots is a free for all. The FDA operates with very little information about the gusher of antibiotics entering factory farms is being used. Both the animal pharmaceutical industry and the livestock industry treat most data on antibiotic use as a tightly held secret. How much of the 30 million pounds of antibiotics now used on factory farms goes to sick animals and how much goes to making them grow faster? None of this is public information.

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