Posted on 07/07/2009 3:57:04 PM PDT by SJackson
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration found recently that feed byproduct samples from dozens of corn-ethanol plants were contaminated with antibiotics. With that news, producing fuel from grain is looking like a danger to human health, in addition to being wasteful and inefficient.
Growing corn is a leading cause of soil erosion, water depletion and pollution. Corn-ethanol plants further stress water supplies by consuming 4 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced.
To the list of ethanol's environmental insults we add pharmaceutical pollution.
There's nothing inherently wrong with getting help from biological processes to meet industrial needs. But when colossal volumes of product and enormous profits are at stake, as they are in the alternative-fuel industry, biological methods can backfire disastrously.
To survive economically, ethanol plants depend on sales of distillers' grains, the solid material left over from corn fermentation. Distillers' grains are a nutritious, high-protein livestock feed. But they can be laced with multiple antibiotics, the FDA and University of Minnesota scientists found.
Adding antibiotics is one of several methods ethanol manufacturers use to control bacterial contamination. Bacteria interfere with the yeast cultures that convert sugars to ethanol. Antibiotics can increase ethanol output by 1 to 5 percent, according to Ethanol Producer magazine.
That sounds small, but that extra efficiency could boost profits by millions as national production increases from its 9 billion gallons a year.
The discovery of antibiotics in distillers' grains has raised concern that ethanol plants could breed and disperse drug-resistant bacteria, and that those bugs could share their genes with bacteria that cause human diseases. Sampling by university and industry researchers has turned up antibiotic-resistant bacteria at ethanol plants.
This case of pharmaceutical contamination comes on top of a half-century of over-prescribing antibiotics for medical and veterinary use, along with routine feeding of the drugs to healthy livestock to promote growth.
Nature's predictable response is bacteria that can no longer be killed by drugs. Now, of 90,000 Americans who die of bacterial infections each year, more than 60,000 are killed by drug-resistant types, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Johns Hopkins University researchers have argued that health officials have taken a narrow approach to antibiotic resistance, thinking clinically "rather than ecologically in terms of reservoirs of resistance genes that may flow across the microbial ecosystem."
Use of antibiotics in agriculture is more widespread than in medicine, and, they contend, creates excellent conditions for the spread of resistant organisms. It's already happening, with germs borne via manure, air, groundwater, soil, flies and irrigation water.
The Johns Hopkins review concluded that overuse of antibiotics in agriculture "has compromised the efficacy of most antimicrobials used in the United States and throughout the world."
Distillers' grains are set to move beyond the feedlot, having been tested as fertilizer on farms, lawns and gardens, and as feed in fish and shrimp farming. The pet food industry also is starting to use distillers' grains, and we don't know what evolutionary mischief might go on in the feces of dogs, which harbor an especially rich range of bacterial species.
Meanwhile, methods being developed to manufacture new biofuels also depend on biological processes. When fuels from algae or cellulose are taken to the billions-of-gallons scale, vast new quantities of antibiotics could be deployed.
Ethanol can be manufactured without using antibiotics - just ask the liquor distillers. In fact, ethanol's drug problem is just the latest of many reasons to impose a moratorium on production of fuel from grains. If industry can't supply sufficient quantities of alternative fuels without risking an even deeper medical crisis, it might just be another sign that our thirst for vehicle fuel has outgrown all ecological limits.
I'm guessing he does his work in New York City, or maybe Houston ~ where they make salsa outta' cactus seeds.
Ethanol is garbage. Shame on Bush for pushing this crap onto us.
Ethanol is good.
For what? Certainly not for your engine.
At best, there is one gallon of water that ends up in a gallon of ethanol (consumed if you will).
That means 3 gallons are somehow evaporated or used, cleaned, then returned to the environment (not consumed but used and released).
Water does not cease to exist. Even the maximum 1 gallon per gallon of ethanol is locked in chemically only to be released during combustion.
I wish we would start being honest about the "water crisis". There may be a local water supply problem but water does not cease being. There is no global water crisis.
Yeah....tell the Oxygen sensors on my 2005 Honda....a 10% ethanol gas concentration trips the sensors and the check engine light....you can drink that ethanol - don’t put it in my gas....
Only when we decide to do silly things like burn our food.
Potential Water Czars!
You lost me. What does this have to do with the point of the article?
But don't let that get in the way of a perfectly paranoid rant aimed at keeping us dependent on fossil fuels or the ever-elusive electric car.
We should not burn food.
No, shame on Bush for continuing subsidies and tariffs on imports. Let the markets provide the solution.
Yeah, but humans eat that, cars don't. I agree, it makes little sense.
Ah... you got it first.
But all that said, I'm not sure what the deal is with antibiotics in fuel. We're not going to be drinking it. It's going to be burned.
There was definitely 4 gallons available this year ~ and probably more to come.
Tell that to the Latinos over the way who burn the beans every Saturday afternoon.
Houston has been having this big ol’ drought most of the year. It’s at the center of a semi-permanent high pressure zone.
Houston has been having this big ol’ drought most of the year. It’s at the center of a semi-permanent high pressure zone.
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