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New Avenue For MRSA 'Superbug': Pigs
smitty777 writes with news that researchers have discovered another way methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics. According to the study (abstract), the bacteria made the jump to pigs on livestock farms, developed greater resistance through the rounds of antibiotics commonly used to keep the pigs healthy, and then jumped back to humans.
"The important development in the story of ST398 is its move back off the farm into humans, causing first asymptomatic carriage in that original family, and then illnesses in other Dutch residents, and then outbreaks in healthcare settings, and then movement across oceans, and then appearance in retail meat, and then infections in people who had no connection whatsoever to farming—all from an organism with a distinctive agricultural signature. That’s an important evolution, and an illustration once again that, as soon as resistance factors emerge, we really have no idea where they will spread. So it would be a good idea to take actions to keep them from emerging, or at the very least to implement surveillance that would allow us to identify them when they do."
Seriously, why was it considered ok to dump antibiotics into animal feed? It seems like total idiocy from this angle, regardless of the short term benefits.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Sausage,
Baby Back Ribs,
Scrapple,
Baloney,
Capicola,
Pork Fried Rice,
and Bacon
Thus MRSA is an acceptable risk
please remind me again how the modern human is 'designed to eat meat', and how 'natural' meat is, and how vegetarians suffer from various delusions and alarmist theories about the health and quality of the food supply.
I half joke that all the hub-bub over the bird-flu research papers being released is unnecessary - all any 'terrorist' has to do to get a 'superbug' is to get involved in any chicken farm. (Or pig farm.)
And no, small-scale farms show no evidence of being any less likely to reduce chances of 'growing' and spreading disease. Keeping a bunch of animals in confinement is asking for it. Period.
Also, take my wife, please.
Authoritarian Left : Antibiotics in animal feed increase yields thus benefiting the proletariat.
Authoritarian Right : Antibiotics in animal feed increase yields thus benefiting the shareholders.
Libertarian Left : If the superbug kills you then you can sue the farmer in court.
Libertarian Right : If the superbug kills you then you can sue the pathogen in court.
I blame the animal lovers. Hands off the pigs.
the "keeping healthy" phrase in connection with animal feed.
Story is that continuous small amounts of antibiotics in animal feed are causing increased growth in animals.
(told verbally by a farmer relative I know) Internet search comes up with:
Quote from: http://www.udel.edu/chem/C465/senior/fall97/feed/present.html
"Antibiotics have been used in animal feed for about 50 years ever since the discovery not only as an anti-microbial agent, but also as a growth-promoting agent and improvement in performance. Tetracyclines, penicillin, streptomycin and bactrican soon began to be common additives in feed for livestock and poultry."
and:
" In chicken feed, for example, tetracycline and penicillin show substantial improvement in egg production, feed efficiency and hatchability, but no significant effect on mortality."
And yeah, the loosing jobs argument again further down in that. Reverse the argument, do something unwise, create jobs and buy medical services stock.
Keeping a bunch of animals in confinement is asking for it. Period.
The obvious answer is to slaughter all animals currently in confinement, clean and eat the carcasses, and replace them all with new animals. Problem solved.
Stay away from pigs.
No, that's an intelligent design
No it is not. Period.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wash your hands after handling meat, wash all the implements and counter tops that may come into contact with raw meat. Cook the meat well.
Be careful with restaurants; to minimize your chances of exposure, just say no to eating out unless you can't avoid it. Once in a while is OK but several times a week is a good way to pick something up, if not MRSA then hep-C or some other nasty microbe that the waiter carried to your plate from someone else's plate. If you don't see the waiters wash their hands after taking your plates away, then you can bet they didn't wash their hands after taking the previous customer's plates either. When the water boy comes over to refill your glass, hand it to him by the rim, so he's forced to pick it up by the bottom. Use a straw.
And stay out of hospitals. Those places can make you sick. MRSA is one nasty infection that you don't want to get, but there are others as well. Basically it's a rather closed environment full of sick people, and also full of well people carrying the germs from one sick person to another, and your life may depend on how well they washed and sanitized their hands before touching you.
This may seem kind of paranoid, but we live in an increasingly crowded and mobile world where a nasty little microbe in some little corner of the globe can make its way into your soup literally days or hours later.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Nothing more.
A book where she conviently ignors the fact that if this was true, superbug would be PIGS AND COWS.
Her book draws several correlations to gether, does NOTHING to lok at causation, ignores anything that is counter to her claim, tells scary stories.;however it demonstrates nothing.
All this for her over arching goal to end industrial ag.
Actual well done scientific studies have show it priparily comes from hospitals, and to a lesser extent peopel not complete there antibiotic treatment.
IN this case:
"and their friends all did for a living, and received the answer that they were all pig farmers."
That is her big piece of evidences. As if the pig couldn't have got it from a person, or they couldn't have gotten in form a non immediate family matter.
This is typical of her 'evidence' . When ever question about her evidence, ot question about other paths she take the cop out:
"I'm just a journalist and report what I find."
Curiously enough, she doesn't seem to take that stance when trying to bolster the evidence(lack of) to her support her agenda.
This is a serious issue, and issue that we should be putting more money to get a better idea of what exactly going on,ass wipes like this twist it to their own agenda, and they should be shunned. They cause a misdirection in the public and that leads to bad policy decisions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
ah. i see. thanks for reminding me that i am a stupid vegetarian, and that super MRSA is not, in fact, related to the fact that people eat pork when it is entirely unnecessary.
by the way, if there is something wrong with the food supply, then perhaps restaurants and grocery stores could stop throwing it out when its perfectly good to eat, . . . or perhaps the government could stop paying farmers to not grow things. and maybe most of food costs , if they were not related to packaging , marketing, reprocessing, re-reprocessing, value added, etc,..... until those things happen, i am not sure i will ever be convinced there is a 'food shortage'.
what? hey, you might bring about the end of human civilization becasue 'you dont like tofu', or 'pork tastes great', but at least you arent a self righteous fucking moron
and a host of other horrific diseases that have killed millions of people are directly related to the fact that humans eat meat when it is, in fact, not necessary to sustain life.
http://lifeinthefastlane.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/swine_flu_spread.jpg
Have gnu, will travel.
The Jews had the right idea all along. If we didn't eat/farm pigs then this wouldn't be happening. The problem is that Pigs are Physiologically too similar to Humans, so when you eat Pig products, physiologically, it is not too dissimilar from eating a human. A human and a pig would probably taste the same given the same diet.
Don't deal with pigs without a lawyer.
I may be quite drunk, but I know in my heart that I'm right. This is a thermodynamic phenomenon. You don't know when/how/how long it will take for the bug to make a leap, but IT WILL. There really is no safe method. Just stopgaps. Good luck, Humanity.
Instead of eating pigs (which is discouraged in the Bible because supposedly they carry nasty diseases and bacteria), we should all just eat cans of beans. Bush makes a nice vegetarian version, and Heinz makes an excellent vegetarian (but British) version. All we need in addition to that is maybe some oil (for fat), a multivitamin, lots of water, and some B12 (which is the main reason we eat animals).
A nice side effect of eating the same food every day is that we will also tend to not get very fat as most normal people get sick of eating the same crap every day.
Especially when we pump our livestock full of them whether they need it or not. It's a breeding ground for drug-resistant bacteria.
It also makes the species weaker because sick and defective animals don't die off, and instead are used to procreate offspring.
It's not even a political issue. It's just common sense.
Farmers are a resourceful bunch.
It takes a lot of capital to run a farm - and if there is a way to save money and produce food, they jump on board.
Increasingly in US and EUROPE farms have moved from the quaint red barn with rolling hills to industrialized production where a bean counter sits behind a desk making potentially risky decisions - and this includes not only meat and poultry, but milk, eggs and even row crops like corn, wheat and produce.
Today, you take your life into your own hands eating a raw ANYTHING in America. Profit motive drives all decisions.
Such concepts as "common sense" have no place in big agriculture.
Take for instance, your toilet waste. What happens when you flush? It goes to sewer treatment plant, gets "treated", dewatered and is placed on a truck and shipped to a local farm field.
Common sense says that you shouldnt eat food grown in your own waste. Common sense has no place in Big Agriculture.
Food Rights Network - Toxic sludge is good for you video
What is Sludge?
Look for the "Certified USDA Organic" green label or grow it yourself - its your only protection.
The general principle has been known for many many years. I worked in a lab in the 1980's that was doing ressearch on the use of antibiotics in feed because we knew it would lead to resistence being spread given the prevalence of the genes on plasmids. It's obvious to any microbiologist.
The antibiotic companies sell the bulk of their product ( and manufacture it cheaply ) to agriculture. The large agribusinesses whose cost cutting 'efficiencies' would fail disasterously without it run the Dept of Ag in the US and Ag committees in US Congress.
This does relate to the GMO issue, as I see it.
The problem with GMOs is not instrinsically about GMOs it is about the process that is used to mange them. As long as those responsible for regulating GMOs have a primary financial interest in them ( including regulatory capture ) then GMOs are not safe. We cannot trust that the sane decision will be made based on environmental / scientific reasons if money is the overriding factor. There is no reversal of the damage possible in such a case.
How the hell is this crap modded up? It doesn't just seem paranoid, it is paranoid.
You need to get some help, dude. It's called germophobia. Do you seriously avoid going out to eat because you're that afraid of germs? Hepatitis C?! I'll bet you've got quite the social life!
I'm not saying it doesn't happen and I have absolutely no numbers to back this up, but I have a feeling you're much more likely to get in a serious car accident on the way to the restaurant than you are to get hepatitis C!
I stopped using antibiotic soaps. I avoid them. I always check to make sure that triclosan isn't in any hand soaps I buy. I find these "hand sanitizers" popping up and the people who use them obsessively yet still seem to get sick for months on end every winter just completely absurd.
My body is covered by billions of microbes right now, and there are probably trillions all in all swimming around inside me. I've never felt better and my complexion has never been better.
Your immune system needs to be exposed to germs. Then the next time everyone else is rushing to Walgreens in some OMG BIRD MAN BEAR PIG FLU hysteria for their good little citizen vaccine and still getting sick anyway and being miserable for weeks, then you'll be the one who for some reason only gets sick once a blue moon and maybe for 2 days tops!
Good grief. Undoing a mod to reply because your post is just sheer paranoid lunacy, and I am absolutely sick of seeing paranoid lunacy being passed off as reasonable. It's called diminishing returns and sometimes simply just not knowing why things work and turning to superstition and self-fulfilling prophecies.
I'd agree about hospitals, though, just because of the massive derp of all the hypochondriacs who run to the ER every time they've got the sniffles.
Cheers
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"researchers have discovered another way methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics"
It stands to reason that if you kill off roughly 90% of the bacteria, the remaining sample will have increased resistance to the antibiotic.
AccountKiller
First of all this is old news. It shouldn't be up on the front page.
Second of all, you can vote with your wallet against this. Just buy all natural pastured pork instead of the factory farmed pork. When the pigs are raised out on pasture using managed rotational grazing they don't have any need for antibiotics in their feed to stay healthy. This results in healthier meat for you so you stay healthier.
If you care, support your local pasture based farmers. Yes, it will cost more than the government subsidized factory farmed anti-biotic laced crap. Because it is better.
Because a lot of those results show no such thing. They are spurious hits for that search string. I didn't read past the first half dozen, but it appears only the first two discuss the contribution of antibiotics in animal feed to antibiotic resistance. I didn't read the papers (just their abstracts) so I don't know if those pests also infect humans. But you are certainly wrong that "A quick Pubmed search [nih.gov] turns up a whole lot of papers indicating that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is a major contributor the rise of resistant strains." Not your search, anyway.
46 & 2
Move over ZOMBIE apocalypse, there's a new player in town... Will we be brought down by the evil's of industrial agriculture? Has bringing affordable pork to the masses been worth the risk of creating the new plague? Stay tuned.......
None of the papers in that search show that antibiotics in animal feed contributes to resistance in humans. And exactly 4 of all the search results are new work showing a connection between antibiotics in animal feed and *changes* in animal pathogens - let alone resistance. Albeit, pathogens developing resistance from antibiotic doped feed is well known. I suppose PubMed just isn't the place to go looking. Anyway, you obviously did a quick search and didn't give more than a cursory glance at the results. So, to say it again, you are just wrong. That search doesn't turn up a whole lot of papers showing any such thing. Which is what makes the methicillin-resistant human st398 bug news.
46 & 2