Well, my point was not to dismiss the concerns of the article, it was literally to have a closer look at the scale of things.
I didn't do any comparing to human uses because most people are familiar with the facts that they don't usually take antibiotics and that when they do, they take a small amount for a couple of weeks.
The human dosing for tetracyclin is ~1 gram per day (http://www.drugs.com/dosage/tetracycline.html), so I would want to look a lot further into the impact of giving that amount to animals before I got too worried about it (I favor careful regulation of animal antibiotic use whether I am worried about it or not). I would also want to see some reliable reporting on the actual administration patterns (i.e., is it literally mixed into the feed or is it simply the case that industrial animal growers have a lot of sick animals to treat?).
I didn't do any comparing to human uses because most people are familiar with the facts that they don't usually take antibiotics and that when they do, they take a small amount for a couple of weeks.
The human dosing for tetracyclin is ~1 gram per day (http://www.drugs.com/dosage/tetracycline.html), so I would want to look a lot further into the impact of giving that amount to animals before I got too worried about it (I favor careful regulation of animal antibiotic use whether I am worried about it or not). I would also want to see some reliable reporting on the actual administration patterns (i.e., is it literally mixed into the feed or is it simply the case that industrial animal growers have a lot of sick animals to treat?).