No comment....

Wednesday, April 17, 2002

After reports emerged earlier this month that someone is deliberately contaminating milk from New York dairy farms with antibiotics, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) announced that she had written to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III requesting that the FBI get involved in the investigation.
Clinton said,


They [the FBI] certainly have many more resources at their disposal to assist local and state law enforcement. Given the heightened awareness. . . . this is the kind of activity that the FBI needs to know about and keep track of.

Clinton added that the intentional contamination was "a form of terrorism" and that federal officials could help by creating a central clearing house for information on these sorts of crimes.

The Buffalo News reported that it had contacted Lt. John Hibsch, who is in charge of the state police investigation, who said that while state police had been in contact with federal authorities, no decision had been made yet on whether or not to open a federal investigation into the matter.

Source:

Clinton describes milk tainting as 'terrorism'. John F. Bonfatti, The Buffalo News, April 12, 2002.

Thank God Hillary caught this! I was just about to down a tall glass of this antibiotic-laced .... wait a minute. This tastes suprisingly refreshing and free of biological contamination, unlike the organic crap my neighbors down. Thank you, mr "terrorist!".

Jeez what an idiot. More camera hogging for her.

Ya know, terrorists are patient.....but I don't think they are patient enough to wait for the antibiotics to cause bacteria in our bodies to become abic-resistant and infect the populace to epidemic proportions.

I give Hillary another point on my chart, the one of the Stupidest Self-Important Tree-Hugging Gun-Hating Bitches of America Club.

Got Milk

Well hotdamn! I certainly feel safer now! And who says the Shebeast has done nothing for us NYers?

Just goes to show how desperate she is to jump in to any available news story. I'm surprised Chuckie didn't think of it first.

Most likely some PETA-freak type(s) behind this series of events.

Don't laugh this one off so easily.  This is the liberal style of creating a frenzy for a non existant problem.  I think what she's doing is finding an issue, no matter how small and trying to trump up her find of moo juice terrorism!  If she can make this a terrorist act, then she can taut her find in the next election, which we all know would not be a laughing matter after she gets elected again.  

Please, someone, anyone, get Hillary laid, maybe she'll go away!

I have one suggestion:

[img]http://www.renoforflorida.com/images/portrait.jpg[/img]

Unfortunately the most basic part of her premise is sometimes correct in that sometimes there are antibiotics in milk.  This is almost always the result of a farmer treating a cow for some type of mastitis and not throwing out that cow's milk.  There are plenty of regulations, state & federal, that already address this issue & it has probably been going on ever since antibiotics first came out.

It's really an economic concern, not a terrorism concern, because dairy farmers operate on small to nonexistent margins.  They do not want to throw out that milk because it reduces their profits, so they take a chance that it will not be detected because their milk is picked up in bulk tankers.

If the milk with antibiotics is taken to a cheese factory it could result in a huge loss for the factory because the antibiotics will prevent the cheese culture from working.  If it is bottled the resultant product will be technically illegal, but probably harmless because the antibiotics are so diluted.

Trust me, the NY state authorities & the FDA are probably all over this.  It's such a minor issue compared to the greater problems that the country faces that she is wasting valuable resources with the state police & the FBI.

This is one more instance of a liberal not knowing what they are talking about & having it cost the very people who voted for her, the farmers.  Every time something like this happens milk consumption goes down, costing farmers money.

Probably more than you wanted to know, right?

Antibiotics don't evaporate overnight.  Traces of them last in your body (and likewise in cows' bodies) for a month or more after you (or Bossie) stop taking them.

Such small traces won't kill off the sort of massive "infection" used to make cheese.  What they will do is gradually increase antibiotic resistance in general.

Last night's news talked about an outbreak of strep throat, at a school in Pennsylvania, which was fully resistant to erythromycin.  The infections were successfully treated with other drugs, fortunately.  But it's only a matter of time before the bugs are immune to the others as well.

Fluoroquinolones (Cipro, Maxaquin) are used very heavily in agriculture.  Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics in this family very quickly.  Unfortunately, Bayer AG likes to make lots of money, and so they refuse to stop selling ag-grade fluoroquinolones to farmers.

Resistance is futile.  You WILL be infected.  Question is, do you want to be able to be cured?

Note to self: In case of anthrax attack, drink milk. [%|]

71, you are wrong.



That "infection" is a bacterium that can and, in fact, has been killed by antibiotics.  The result has been extremely expensive to cheese factories.

The sequence of events is usually a case of a farmer shipping "hot", i.e., antibiotics laden milk to the factory.  It sometimes isn't tested on receipt because farmers are presumed to be law abiding and honest.  Then the milk is commingled in  a silo of perhaps another 300,000 lbs. of untainted milk thereby contaminating the whole thing.

Then the cheese factory puts the milk into a vat, perhaps many vats if it is the start of the work day, & then it is cultured.  When the milk is heated & does not separate into curds & whey, every vat of milk becomes worthless.  It has no value for anything except pig feed which is to say that it has no value.

Even if the milk remaining in the silo is caught before it is heated & cultured it is essentially worthless because it is illegal to sell the tainted milk.  (The cheese factory buys the milk on receipt.)

The rough rule of thumb is that ten lbs. of milk will make one lb. of cheese.  You are obviously a genius so maybe you can compute the value of 30,000 lbs. of cheese lost at approximately $1.50/lb.

If that you can't, it comes to $45,000.  Can you say "No profit that day, or week, or month?"

It has been a while since Buddy-the-dog committed suicide rather continue to service Hitlery.
Any volunteers ?

Your reading comprehension obviously leaves something to be desired.

Yes, cheese is made with bacteria.  Glad you managed to comprehend that.  Do you also notice the word "[red]massive[/red]" that I put next to "infection" in my post?  Did you happen to notice the phrase "[red]Such small traces won't kill off[/red]" in front of that??

Do you comprehend the difference between high doses (and residues) during treatment versus traces remaining after a week or a month?  Which would you say is closer to your phrase of "antibiotics-laden"?  Or are you just a dumbass, er, hardcase looking for an argument?


I wasn't referring to a farmer dumping massive quantities of antibiotics in.  I was -- quite obviously -- referring to the traces left in the body for weeks after treatment.

Note that even so, I express doubt that after diluting "antibiotic-laden" milk by, oh, say 6000-to-1(*), that it would kill off the culture.  Try taking 1/6000th of a dose yourself (ignore the fact that the dose is even more diluted than that, since the whole dose wouldn't end up in the milk to begin with) and see how fast an infection clears up.

(*)guesstimate derived from one infected cow with typical milk production of 50lbs per day, as per this web page:
[url]http://www.foodsci.uoguelph.ca/dairyedu/biosynthesis.html[/url]
15400lbs / 305days ~= 50.5lbs/day.  Throw away the .5 since the cow is sick, and besides, they aren't giving three significant digits in the numbers anyway.

Thank you.  Geniuses are rarely recognized in their own time.  I am glad to have been an exception.

Can you say "antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is deadly"?  I knew you could!

If the cheese factories are experiencing problems, then either (1) antibiotic tainting of dairy and meat products is a hell of a lot worse than even the most wild-eyed envirofreak is screaming, or (2) the losses are 99.99% because of laws (which you claim exist) prohibiting the sale of known-tainted milk, and not because of problems in culturing said milk.