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New Superbug Strain Found In Cows and People
sciencehabit writes "A novel form of deadly drug-resistant bacteria that hides from a standard test has turned up in Europe. Researchers found the so-called MRSA strain in both dairy cows and humans in the United Kingdom, suggesting that it might be passed from dairies to the general population. But before you toss your milk, don't panic: The superbug isn't a concern in pasteurized dairy products."
It doesn't even matter if it's pasteurized. How many people in the general population even know what pasteurization means? Some food purists only know that the process makes food taste a little different, even if it's healthier as a result.
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"... in pasteurized dairy products."
Right. As if the only route by which this organism could get to humans is through dairy products. Scenario: dairy worker, gets scratched and infected with superbug at work, sees doctor for treatment (unsuccessful), enters hospital for treatment, infection spreads, becomes one more nocosomial infection we have to deal with.
Not long ago, there was a story about a group suing the FDA to stop antibiotic use on cows.
It has been known for a long time that the continuous use of antibiotics lead to the cultivation of "superbugs." And here we have it now.
Will the FDA actually take notice on this issue now? We'll see I guess...
I can buy unpasteurized milk (and maybe yogurt) at the local farmers market, but I think you are right about the cheese (and butter). FYI and off topic: Taste testers at America's Test Kitchen showed that organic milk has a taste inferior to "normal" milk because it has to be pasteurized at a higher temperature.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I just posted on reddit under reddit/r/science because I got tired of reading news pieces like this. Antibiotic resistance has been taken care of by the use of bacteriophages. Basically phages are viruses for bacteria and they continually evolve with the ever evolving strains of bacteria. For each type of bacteria and the different strains there is a phage which will kill it.
For more info please read my post: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/hr0gk/hey_redditrscience_just_so_you_all_knowwe_have/
Now if we could just get big pharma behind these non-patentable viruses found in nature and we'd see wide spread use of them in the west...
Do they really expect these things to never evolve? We feed them enough drugs for long enough, the survivors will pass on whatever it was that allowed them to survive to the next generation. Sooner or later, they have a whole colony that is immune to drug X and Y, we just need to find drug Z and AA, and in another 50-100 years, repeat. Sooner or later, we'll be able to go back to drug X and Y.
Unless I'm missing something, it's the widespread use of antibiotics in general, not just on cows, that leads to so-called "superbugs".
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/new-superbug-found-in-cows-and-p.html?ref=hp
A novel form of deadly drug-resistant bacteria that hides from a standard test has turned up in Europe. Researchers found the so-called MRSA strain in both dairy cows and humans in the United Kingdom, suggesting that it might be passed from dairies to the general population. But before you toss your milk, don't panic: The superbug isn't a concern in pasteurized dairy products.
MRSA, short for meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a drug-resistant form of the widespread and normally harmless S. aureus bacteria. Many people walk around with MRSA in their noses or on their skin yet don't get sick. But in some hospital patients and people with weakened immune systems, MRSA thrives, and it is blamed for about 19,000 hospital deaths a year in the United States.
Mark Holmes of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and colleagues stumbled upon the new strain while studying mastitis, or infected udders, in U.K. dairy cows. Some milk samples from sick cows contained S. aureus bacteria that grew in the presence of antibiotics, which is one test for MRSAs. Yet the same samples turned up negative for the drug-defying bacterium when the team used PCR, a DNA amplification technique, to detect a gene called mecA, which is found in all MRSA strains.
The PCR test doesn't always pick up variants of the gene it's meant to detect, however. To check this, the researchers sent a cow S. aureus sample to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, which sequenced the bacterium's entire genome. "Lo and behold, there was a mecA gene there," one whose sequence overlapped with the better-known mecA by a surprisingly low 60%, Holmes said today in a press conference.
The researchers then looked for this mecA gene in people. They tested 74 samples of S. aureus isolated from people from the United Kingdom and Denmark that were drug resistant in the antibiotic growth test but not in the PCR test—most from carriers but some from patients who were sickened by MRSA. They found the new mecA in about two-thirds of the samples, they report today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. A nearly identical mecA gene has also now been reported in human samples from Germany and Ireland.
The strain is still relatively rare—it probably makes up less than 1% of all detected MRSA cases, the U.K. team says. But its prevalence appears to have risen in the past decade. "More likely it's been around in the environment for a long time, and it's just getting into the human population," says University College Dublin microbiologist David Coleman, whose team reports on the Irish samples today in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
The new superbug probably isn't leading to missed infections, at least in the United Kingdom, because hospitals that suspect a patient is infected with an MRSA nearly always use the antibiotic growth test in addition to PCR, Holmes says. (Patients with a confirmed infection then receive antibiotics that work on MRSAs.) However, many hospitals in continental Europe are moving toward using only PCR tests; this is a warning that those tests need to be modified to test for the new mecA gene, Holmes says.
The study also points to dairy cows as a possible reservoir for the bug, just as pigs seem to pass MRSA to humans in the Netherlands. The bug probably doesn't get to humans through the milk supply, because almost all milk in the United Kingdom and Denmark is pasteurized, a process that kills bacteria. But workers who come into contact with infected dairy cows could be carriers. Holmes's team reports "circumstantial evidence" for this, such as the fact that genetic subtypes of the human and cow samples from the same geographical areas were nearly identical. "The main worry would be that these cows represent a pool of the bacteria" that farm workers spread into the human popula
I am getting tired of reading these news articles about antibiotic resistance. We have the solution to dealing with antibiotic resistance from nature. Bacteriophages are viruses that only attack bacteria and can be used to treat patients or food for bacterial infections. They evolved with bacteria as new strains appear. For each type of bacteria and their different strains there are phages that will work against them. I made a post on reddit about my ordeal with an antibiotic resistant infection I had and how phagetherapy saved me. Feel free to pm me on either site if you have more questions. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/hr0gk/hey_redditrscience_just_so_you_all_knowwe_have/
You mean the one NOT squeezed out by robot-cows?
I just love how people use that magic-yet-imprecise word for absolutely everything.
Hey, you know why Han Solo's kids are the healthiest in the Galaxy?
Cause they are organaic.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You heard it here first! MoooooooooooooooooooCHOMP!
Maybe this will put a stop to the raw milk nonsense.
So don't worry about this, worry about EHEC in vegetables instead. Haw-Haw!
Raw milk is quite dangerous.
http://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/cheesespotlight/cheese_spotlight.htm
Didn't pasteurization become routine because people died from contaminated raw milk?
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Except in your example, and that of the CDC, the cheeses are all soft. Soft cheeses don't develop proper cultures to kill off the bad bacteria cultures that promote proper flavoring, textures and so on. Then again, I drank raw milk for 20 years. My parents, grand parents, and their parents before them drank it for years as well. I suppose there's more of an issue in this day and age of people not following what we'd call on the farm of 'don't wipe your mouth with shit' method of keeping things clean. Seriously? My grandmother, mother, and so on were religious in cleaning prep before doing kitchen work. The shit I see today from people makes me cringe.
Personally? I'd lay more blame at the generation of people who use the antibacterial handsoaps/wipes/lotions/etc for contributing to this mess than anything. And I'll say it again. I fucking told you, that you'd doom us all.
Om, nomnomnom...
antibacterial is completely different from antibiotic, topical antibacterials do not function at all the same way they are just general antiseptics.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Triclosan use doesn't promote bacteria resistant to antibiotics.
Really now? You could just use google and have saved me the 10 seconds to point out what I already knew what right. It does indeed promote bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/3/621.short
Om, nomnomnom...
They do. Much like I replied to the other post, google and other search engines are your friend. Antiseptics kill(not all are equal however). Antibacterials can promote selective resistances, and force bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics.
Om, nomnomnom...
No, you can buy unpasteurized cheese in the US.
Yes, many diseases were transmitted via unpasteurized milk, particularly tuberculosis.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Good organic milks are actually pasteurized at a lower temperature, I can not find this taste test in their archive, but it appears the poster has made up his own reasoning. The reason that most organic milks taste different is the cows eat very different diets than their conventional counterparts. In fact with many organic milks the taste varies by season as the grasses/diet changes with the seasons. I would be willing to bet the taste testers didn't like the organic milk because it actually had flavor, in comparison to the bland over pasteurized conventional milk everyone has been accustomed to.
For you, there's a version in Spanish cucumbers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then again, I drank raw milk for 20 years. My parents, grand parents, and their parents before them drank it for years as well. I suppose there's more of an issue in this day and age of people not following what we'd call on the farm of 'don't wipe your mouth with shit' method of keeping things clean.
I congratulate you and your family for not getting sick from raw milk.
But what works on the farm rarely works when scaled up to industrial quantities.
Further, your anecdotal evidence is overruled by the mountains of historically reported illnesses and deaths from raw milk contamination of:
e-coli, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid fever, salmonella, listeria, campylobacter and brucella
Pasteurization is not some conspiracy to pollute your precious bodily fluids or restrict your god given rights.
It saves lives.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Maybe so, but all the organic milk you can buy around here is ultra-pasteurized (higher temperature). As for me, I buy the organic milk because I can buy it and not have to worry about it going bad before I use it. (Shelf life is typically five or six weeks.)
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As you may already have heard, a new strain of E. Coli (EHEC) is spreading in Central Europe (northern Germany seems to be the epicenter) and has killed 18 people so far.
Don't drink and sudo
I agree and that was my point. AKA the 'don't wipe your mouth with shit' because when you're doing things on your own farm, you're more careful about how you're cleaning a teat. The same reason why when you're slaughtering, you're careful not to puncture the intestines, kidney's, bladder too. But on an industrial process? Pft.
Pasteurization is fine and all that, but don't dictate to me that it's illegal if I own cows and want to get milk unpasteurized, and drink it myself, for my own use.
Om, nomnomnom...
80% lactose intolerant? Only for certain populations. In others, 90% of the population can handle lactose, and 10% lactose intolerant. Globally speaking, lactose intolerance is around 50%.
When you can have organic water, from organic land and organic charcoal air filters that I suppose will give you organic air.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'm not sharing the bathroom with the cows anymore.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Funny, I grew up on raw milk. Then again, it was from my own farm. I don't drink raw now, but only because of convenience and cost.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
..if a standard, common practice like Pasteurization easily kills it off? Or maybe I just don't really understand the definition of a super bug. I understand once you're infected, it's damn hard to get rid of, but when it's so straightforward to kill off before ingestion, it doesn't sound so invulnerable.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Right, because antibiotic-resistant superbugs in raw milk obviously killed off most of humanity prior to the discovery of pasteurization....?
So here's the issue: all industry gets scaled up for the sake of profit. works great for manufacturing and mechanized processes, but the process of creating food isn't mechanical. we aren't purely mechanical beings, and we shouldn't be gaining energy from chemical food; this is a fairly clear statement and it's not difficult to see the ramifications of doing so (e.g. extremely obese indivuduals suffering from malutrition, child onset adult diabetes, etc.)
In the process of scaling up food production, we've created artificially toxic environments that demand the use of prophylactic antibiotics, a process that is known to create antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogenic germs.
This has nothing to do with raw milk being unsafe when consumed from a dairy that even remotely resembles the concept of a true farm. i drink raw cow's milk daily, and have done so for two years. i trust the producer, i know what they do to process the milk; the milk i drink comes from a situation that is far more hygienic than anything you would buy in the store.
TLDR: create large food operations for profit, have disease outbreaks which are entirely a result of the large size of the operation, create stringent rules that are necessary only due to problems which arise from being an industrial-sized food producer, turn food from smaller producers which may be more wholesome into a criminals. continue profiting from processes which will inherently produce dangerous corollary outcomes.
Definitely not yoghurt because yoghurt from unpasteurized milk would leave you the whole day sitting on the pot trying to shit your guts out.
In fact, even pasteurized milk is somewhat dangerous as yoghurt base, UHT is safer.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Perhaps, although this is a highly controversial area at the moment.
What is clear is that:
1. There is no apparent health benefit from using antibacterial soaps.
2. There are no apparent health consequences from the induced antibiotic resistances found in some in vitro experiments.
All in all the best thing would be to not have these products as there is no benefit from them.
I guess I'm less concerned if a bacteria evolves resistance to bleach, since bleach is useless as a medicine. If I get infected with a sodium hypochlorite resistant bug, then I doubt the doctor was going to prescribe me a tablespoonful of Chlorox for it anyway.
...
Because normal pasteurisation doesn't kill all bacteria.
UHT milk works just fine for yoghurt by the way. And at least in Germany it is labeled as H-Milch (H stands for "haltbare" - durable) and is sold unrefrigerated. I haven't done any cheesemaking, though, so I cannot speak about that.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap