Merck pushing to renew cattle fattening/growth drug deemed dangerous and inhumane
WSJ - (July 2014)
Merck Pushes to Revive Beef Drug with new studies. Meeting resistance from meat processors.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/merck-pushes-to-revive-beef-drug-1405380749?mod=rss_whats_news_us
Reuters (Apr. 2014)
Exclusive: Merck wants to test Zilmax on 240,000 cattle but beef industry resists
(Reuters) - Merck & Co Inc wants to feed its controversial feed additive Zilmax to 240,000 U.S. cattle to prove it is safe. But there is a problem: giant meat processors like Cargill Inc don't want to touch animals fed with the drug.
Merck plans to conduct the biggest ever test of its kind in an effort to reintroduce the weight-adding drug into the United States and Canada after suspending sales last August. A test herd of this size is currently worth up to $500 million.
Feedlot owners, however, are reluctant to participate in the study until they get a guarantee that slaughterhouses will be willing to buy the Zilmax-fed animals.
MORE -
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/04/04/us-zilmax-cattle-test-idUKBREA331H520140404
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Article from 2013 NPR (can also listen)
Inside The Beef Industry's Battle Over Growth-Promotion Drugs
When the drug company Merck Animal Health announced plans to suspend sales of its Zilmax feed additive last week, many observers were shocked.
Yet concern about Zilmax and the class of growth-promotion drugs called beta agonists has been building for some time. In an interesting twist, the decisive pressure on Zilmax did not come from animal welfare groups or government regulators: It emerged from within the beef industry itself, and from academic experts who have long worked as consultants to the industry.
Among them is Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and a world-renowned expert on how cattle react to their environments. Grandin, whose life is the subject of an HBO biopic, has redesigned slaughterhouses to make them more humane.
Around the summer of 2006, she says, she started seeing a new kind of problem among the cattle, especially when the weather got really hot. "You had animals that were stiff and sore-footed, animals that were reluctant to move," she recalls. "They act like the floor is red-hot. They don't want to put their feet down. And I had never seen these kinds of symptoms before, ever!"
The problems, she says, affect as many as 1 out of every 5 animals. She's become increasingly convinced that the problems result from the drugs called beta agonists.
MORE -
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/08/21/214202886/inside-the-beef-industrys-battle-over-growth-promotion-drugs
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