For Immediate Release: July 27, 2010
Media Inquiries: Ira Allen, 301-796-5349, ira.allen@fda.hhs.gov
Consumer Inquiries: 888-INFO-FDA

Pennsylvania Dairy Farm Agrees to Stop Improper Medication
Owners agree to keep illegal drug residues out of animals sold for human consumption

A Pennsylvania dairy farm has agreed to abide by federal regulations that protect meat from illegal drug residues caused by the unapproved medication of cattle before slaughter, as part of a consent decree of permanent injunction obtained by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA action against H.B. Williams Inc., of Kingsley, Pa., and company owners Donna L. Williams, Jeffrey D. Williams, and Mark H. Williams, was taken July 26, 2010, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Under the decree signed by U.S. District Judge James M. Munley the farm is not permitted to sell animals for food unless and until it meets several requirements, including establishment of a recordkeeping system approved by the FDA to track the identity of medicated animals and the drugs and dosages given.  After the farm resumes selling animals for food, the decree authorizes the FDA to require the farm to cease operations and pay fines if FDA determines that the farm has violated the decree.

The FDA is concerned about the sale of animals for human food that may contain illegal levels of animal drugs because of the potential for adverse effects on human health. The FDA approves new animal drugs with requirements, including a specified time period to withdraw an animal from treatment prior to slaughter, to ensure that a drug has been depleted from edible tissue to a level safe for humans.

The dairy farm sold animals through local livestock auctions to slaughterhouses that ship beef products to customers in New Jersey, New York, Maine, and Michigan.

The drug residues detected in tissue samples of the farm’s dairy cows and veal calves during tests by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service included antibiotics such as neomycin, flunixin, desfuroylceftiofur, and sulfamethazine at levels not permitted by the FDA.

For more information:

• Inspections, Compliance, Enforcement, and Criminal Investigations
• FDA Issues Draft Guidance on the Judicious Use of Medically Important Antimicrobials in Food-Producing Animals

This story illustrates two distinct issues: government’s well-meaning meddling disrupting people’s lives, and perhaps even more disturbing, the fact that there are people on waiting lists to receive not food, but a place to grow their own food. I doubt that this is unique to the United Kingdom. Urban areas every where are planned to use up every last inch of space, leaving nothing but concrete and AstroTurf, neither of which grow good tomatoes. It occurs to me that Suzy Miller’s predicament in the UK could be solved by a little more planning. Do you really need a patch of land, complete with rules and regulations, to grow your own food? Absolutely not. Urban gardening is fast becoming a force in its own right. Urban gardeners are growing a significant amount of their own food, on almost no ground at all. The beauty in this is simple: the government doesn’t dictate what their garden has to look like.

To get an idea of how successful urban gardeners can be, watch the video below. This isn’t brain surgery, folks, and it’s certainly not government work.

We met at the library. It was a small gathering, with a three growers, the gal from the anti-fat group, and the manager of a large farmers market in the next town over. It was all sugar cookies and love for the first half-hour. This could work. Then, just as we were talking about how unique our farmers market would be, the other shoe fell and squashed our hopes into a slimy mass of ooze. There was a contract and a fee involved, of course.

The contract required that each farmer carry a one-million-dollar liability policy at the cost of $250 a year. Then, there was a list of restrictions and terms giving the market manager the authority to remove produce they deem unfit and limiting what items farmers could sell. Only a small percentage of merchandise could be handmade crafts. No live animals like chicks and no selling farm fresh eggs allowed. The list went on for two pages describing what farmers could and couldn’t do. To date, no one has signed it. Who would?

Some of you may know that I’m attending law school, and after looking at the proposed contract, it dawned on me that anyone selling a farmers market or running a CSA should have disclaimer for their customers to sign. I’m not kidding. If someone buys a tomato from you and gets a bad case of heartburn or slips on the tomato and decides to sue you, you could lose big time. That’s the world we live in. There aren’t enough obstacles to getting fresh, unprocessed food; some think we need another road block.

While I’m not a lawyer yet, I highly recommend having your customers sign something that indemnifies you. (How do you like that fancy schmancy lawyer talk?) I’m drawing up my own consent and release statement. It goes something like this:

You, the customer, agree to hold me, the farmer and seller, wholly blameless for any and all adversities that may befall you from buying and eating produce and other products from my farm. While we take painstaking steps to ensure the cleanliness of what we grow (unlike corporate spinach growers and dairy producers), you acknowledge that there is an inherent risk in consuming anything. Sign and date here or I won’t sell you a damn thing.

I leave you with a question. How can anyone hope to combat obesity when the people who grow and sell fresh produce are hog-tied by rules and regulations?

She didn’t seem all that different from us sitting there beside Arlen. Granted, she was a little darker and much thinner than most of us; other than that, there was nothing about her that hinted at the adventure she had embarked on, nothing in her humbled silence that suggested she was about to change my view of the world.

Maria’s World

Once the curtains were closed, the viewing screen in place, and the coffee poured, Arlen formally introduced Maria and began his Power Point presentation on a country far away, both in distance and development. Nicaragua is the largest, but most sparsely populated country in South America, with a total land mass of about 50,000 square miles (Infoplease 2007). A quick look at the birth and infant mortality rates explains the low population growth of 1.9 %. The birth rate stands at 24.5/1000 while the infant mortality rate is 28.1/1000 (Infoplease 2007). In this underdeveloped nation of 5,500,000 people, infancy is a treacherous time of life.

Indigenous people of Nicaragua have very large families. Maria told us (with Arlen translating, she speaks no English) that she has 10 children living and two who died at birth or shortly thereafter. Women in rural Nicaragua are under great pronatalist pressure to bear children to replace aging members and those who have died. Children are viewed as valuable workers and contributors to the family. In Nicaragua, 53% of the population is under 18 (UNICEF 2007).

Poverty is rampant in Nicaragua. Continued environmental degradation compounds the situation. The harvesting of firewood from Nicaragua’s tropical rainforests and tropical seasonal forests contributes to growing deforestation. Worldwide firewood accounts for nearly half of all wood harvested. In Nicaragua, most of the harvested wood is used for cooking.

Maria and all the women in her village used to spend hours each day cooking for their large families in poorly ventilated kitchens with open fires. This practice causes carbon monoxide, particulates, and cancer-causing hydrocarbons to reach toxic levels inside of cramped homes. Breathing these particulates can cause lung cancer and other serious respiratory ailments. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that half the world’s population, nearly 2.5 billion people, is affected by this form of indoor air pollution .

It is estimated that firewood produces 800,000 metric tons of soot worldwide each year . The noxious particles released into the atmosphere from burning wood are darker than those produced by grassland or forest fires, because of this they absorb light and quickly increase atmospheric temperatures.

Today Maria and every woman in her tiny village cooks on an enclosed wood/corn burning  stove with a chimney, thanks to the efforts of Arlen Albrecht and Partners of the Americas. This group raised the funds to build a stove for every home in the tiny hamlet of Buenos Aires, Nicaragua (not to be confused with Buenos Aires, Brazil). Volunteers built the stoves in 30 small homes and trained the residents to use them properly. Maria said most of the coughing among the women has stopped, and the children don’t get ill as often as they used to.

The new wood stoves help slow the consumption of Nicaragua’s resources. Over 50% of Nicaragua’s rainforests have been harvested in the last fifty years. Logging has caused erosion of the exposed forest floor, leaving rivers and streams suffocating with silt. As bad as this is for the nation’s fishing industry, it is even worse for the air quality.

Deforestation is directly responsible for changing  precipitation patterns. The tall canopy of the forest transpires, keeping vast amounts of moisture available for wind currents to carry into the atmosphere as rain. The dense forest also helps to moderate the temperature near the ground. With so many trees harvested for export, the land is barren and vulnerable. In the coming years the average temperature of Nicaragua is expected to rise 3° C and rainfall is expected to decrease 25%.

Deforestation  is effecting  Maria’s family and the people of her village. They eek out a living by farming a few acres and hunting for food in the forest. As the forest around them disappears, so does the wildlife they depend on for food. Tapirs, deer, buffalo, and wild turkeys move deeper into the old-growth forests when their habitat is destroyed. The remaining land makes poor cropland because of the ensuing erosion, leaving indigenous people unable to provide food for themselves.

Nicaragua’s President enacted a ban on logging in 2006; the government has yet to enforce it. After the years of conflict in the 1980’s, the government is still counting on Nicaragua’s rich forest resources for economic growth. This slash and burn style of management is creating great environmental hardships for the people of Nicaragua.

My World

The United States has a land mass of 3,794, 083 square miles, nearly seven times that of Nicaragua. The 2000 Census reports that there are over 300 million people in the United States. We are not a sparsely populated nation by anyone’s measure. The birth and infant mortality rates are much different here than they are in Nicaragua. In 2004, the birth rate for the United States reflected a decade of decline with 14/1000 births, while the infant mortality rate held steady at 6/1000. As I grappled with these numbers, the seriousness of Maria’s life began to dawn on me. She has it rough, much rougher than I had previously imagined.

Here in the United State, where women are better educated and have opportunities to earn a salary, families are smaller. Socioeconomic status is inversely related to reproduction in developed countries . In developed countries, wealthy people have fewer children. In the United States children are often seen as status symbols, requiring parents to spend lavishly on them. The average American family spends $15,000.00 a year on each child. This isn’t the case in Nicaragua.

Our homes are much different than the average Nicaraguan’s. American homes use much more energy than those in Nicaragua. Appliances and electronics are responsible for 25% of the average household’s energy usage. In 2003 the average American used 923.5 kilograms of oil equivalent (kgoe) per person, while Nicaraguans used only 269.4 kgoe per person .

Instead of cooking on a wood stove, most Americans use a gas or electric range. While we aren’t subject to indoor air-pollution caused by thick particulates from wood smoke, we are by no means free of indoor contaminants. On the whole, Americans spend more time inside than outside . More time indoors means more exposure to the chemicals used to produce the vast amounts of consumer goods we stuff into our homes. In newer homes, compounds like chloroform, formaldehyde, and styrene can be seventy times higher than outdoors. In older homes, molds, dangerous radon gas, and lead paint pose serious health risks to those who spend large blocks of time inside.

Cigarette smoke is another dangerous contributor to indoor air pollution. Twenty percent of all deaths in the United States were from diseases caused by smoking. Recently, the government has taken steps to curtail smoking in public places, including those privately owned. As a result, cigarette consumption has dropped nearly fifty percent (Infoplease 2007).

Like Nicaragua, the United States has rich timber resources, but we differ drastically in our conservation structures. Our government often meanders between utilitarian conservation, which views resources from an economic point of view, and biocentric preservation, which views resources in a moral context. Nonetheless, in the United States, we care about our natural resources, especially our national forests.

In the United States there are 155 protected national forests, on about 190 million acres . Compared with Nicaragua’s 1.8 million acres this seems like a huge amount of designated protected public land, but it is only 8.5% of the US land mass.

Unlike the people of Nicaragua, who depend on their forests for food, Americans depend on their forests for recreation. The nation’s parks are visited over 280 million times each year. All of the nation’s parks have unacceptable levels of carbon monoxide in the air, caused by heavy traffic through the preserved areas.

Many of the nation’s parks are also wild life refuges. These preserves are home to many protected species, but most aren’t large enough to support a viable population of large predators, such as grizzly bears . One of the solutions to this problem would be to bring more land into the park system; thereby lessening the stress on migratory animals. However, most of the land in the United States is privately owned, making acquiring new land difficult.

The Collision

Arlen’s presentation was winding up; as I sat waiting for the lights to come on and the discussion to begin, I was focused on the differences between my world and Maria’s. I could feel the stirrings of bewilderment in the back of my mind. This whole experience must have been overwhelming for her. Other than a visit to Managua here and there, she had never traveled. She had never been on a plane before. She had never seen a forest turn color in autumn, she had never known on-demand water or electricity, and now she found herself in a northern rural American community during the peak color of fall. What did she think of us?

I wasn’t the only one considering the enormity of the query; when Arlen asked if anyone had any questions for Maria, someone in the back blurted it out.

With Arlen translating at lightening speed, Maria explained her fascination with all the machines she had seen. It seemed to her we had machines to do everything, the farm work, the garden chores, and the household chores. While she was staying with Arlen and his wife, she learned about microwaves, food processors, smooth-surfaced electric ranges, clothes washers and dryers, and her favorite machine of them all-the dishwasher. The glee in her eyes was child like, she was genuinely awed by the technology we take for granted every day.

I was amused at the thought of being in her shoes; experiencing technology in all its grandeur for the first time. It’s the stuff of science fiction films, first contact with an alien society. As enthralled as I was, I was still keenly aware of how different our worlds were. I didn’t think it was possible for me to see her as anything other than a visitor from a distant place with no connection to me.

I began to think differently once the questions turned to gardening, as questions are apt to do at Master Gardener meetings. It turned out Maria was an avid gardener. Through Arlen, and using animated gestures, she told our group about large watermelons, and sweet tomatoes growing in her garden in Nicaragua. It was at that point I began to appreciate our shared interest in the natural world. Through a shared understanding of gardening I came to understand how we impact each other and our shared environment, even at a distance.

This morning, I listened as an oil worker from Louisiana explained the economic impact of the moratorium on off-shore drilling. I understand that this spells economic doom for Louisiana, but how can we justified continuing if we admittedly don’t have the wherewithal to fix a problem should it arise? Sure, we can get to the oil, and we can get it out, but what if there’s another explosion? I’m not suggesting that a moratorium on drilling should be permanent. I am however, suggesting that each and every step of the process—from the construction of the rig to the availability of emergency response and clean-up equipment—be examined, and corrected where need be. This could take awhile, but probably no where near as long as it’s going to take to clean up the mess from a raging river of underground oil unleashed by technology that is obviously controlling us rather than the other way around.

We broke it. We bought it. We’re stuck with it. The question now becomes one of time. How long will this suffocating sludge continue to surge from the bowels the Earth? It’s possible, even though no one wants to say it out loud, that BP’s relief well—the one that’s supposed to come online in August and divert the oil from the broken pipe to a new one—won’t work. They are trying to hit a seven-inch target a mile down. All of the experts agree that this is a difficult proposition, at best. It could fail. Then what? Anything short of success, any unforeseen and unintended consequences will surely be beyond our scope of technology. What we don’t know will surely kill us.