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UK Milk Supply Contains New MRSA Strain
Tests on milk from several different farms across the U.K. have turned up evidence for a new strain of MRSA — bacteria which have evolved resistance to common antibiotics. As long as the milk is properly pasteurized, it poses no threat to consumers, but anyone working directly with the animals bears a small risk of infection. According to The Independent,
"The disclosure comes amid growing concern over the use of modern antibiotics on British farms, driven by price pressure imposed by the big supermarket chains. Intensive farming with thousands of animals raised in cramped conditions means infections spread faster and the need for antibiotics is consequently greater. Three classes of antibiotics rated as 'critically important to human medicine' by the World Health Organization – cephalosporins, fluoroquinolones and macrolides – have increased in use in the animal population by eightfold in the last decade."
They just need to be sure they regularly dose their cows with the right antibiotic...
#DeleteChrome
With an ever increasing pressure to drop prices so that the numbers in the next quarter (or, for the long-term corporate leaders, next 2 years) are met. Screw the fact that we're raising a whole class of nasty bugs that will enable us to relive the glory of pre-penicillin times, when something as simple as a cut meant possible amputation of the affected limb.
Antibiotic resistance is probably one of the worst things we're facing down in the coming century or so, right next to AGC. Both have the ability to have a tremendous negative impact on our lives, and both are a long time off - in other words, they are things no politician or corporate owner will want to touch while they're still working.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Big agribusiness preemptively pumping their animals full of antibiotics to kill off their gut flora as "growth promotors", which packing them in like sardines, to make a quick buck -- a hack to make the animals bigger and more productive, but also to compensate for the filth and squalor the beknighted creatures are kept in...
What could _possibly_ go wrong?
...I'm a pharma researcher at we have active programs trying to create next generation antibiotics, but the simple fact is evolution works. Eventually things will become resistant. These kinds of practices HAVE to stop because, frankly, it's getting harder to come up with new antibiotics. We have some new ideas, new biology is being uncovered, and different routes to attacking bugs are being explored. But the fact is that there will be fewer and fewer new classes of antibiotics rolling out. Pay the higher price for milk so that when you get strep throat you don't die from it. This clearly penny-wise pound-foolish thinking. A politician would do well to stand in the way of these practices under the guise of making sure that being able to protect our citizens and children from the ravages of infection wasn't just a "really nice period of humanity during the 20th and early 21st century before everything was resistant to everything." Think about someone sawing your kids leg off and then decide if milk is worth a buck / gallon more to you.
Obligatory XKCD. It seems that Randall Munroe is the Nostradamus of our time, having predicted all future events in his humorous comic strip:
http://xkcd.com/1147/
A rise in population density is what drove us to become farmers, which in turn gave us all the technological innovations we know and love today. Who is to say that the problems created by even greater population density will not give us the nudge we need to make even more amazing technologies?
Synthetic milk, and/or a means of keeping cows clean without the antibiotics, both spring to mind.
And, be that as it may, if you want to reduce the world's population all you need to do is find a means of providing a high, luxurious quality of living for everyone (seeing as how luxury has proven to be the best form of birth control).
Whether your brain fails to understand the problem, or is the cause of the problem.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
In Australia we also have unsustainable pressure from our 2 supermarket overlords driving down diary farmers to at-cost or loss prices. Our milk is at $1 a litre now, you pay more for bottled water! Are the rest of the world's supermarkets pushing down milk prices? I wonder if the cookie industry will take notice and capitalize on this free flowing milk...
Obviously you have forgotten the meaning of a 'nerd'. Many are xkcd resistant strains.
Just stop using cow's milk.
60% of the global population can't digest milk once they become adults.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-08-30-lactose-intolerance_N.htm
Health researchers at Harvard have even come out and said cows milk isn't a necessary part of a healthy diet, it is something that is TOLERATED in a healthy diet if people don't get too much:
http://beforewisdom.com/blog/milkandbones/experts-lose-the-cows-milk/
Some dairy foods can have as much or more cholesterol and saturated fat as meat.
There are substitute milks made out of almonds, rice, hemp or soy in many supermarkets now. You can use those or fortified orange juice to get plenty of calcium without the digestive stress or the many health, digestive issues of cows milk
Ummm good....
What about the Free Market?
I think, and have always thought, that the natural way of cultivating foods for human consumption is better. The business people strive to reduce loss and to increase production. But they forget to ask questions which has less to do with money such as environmental costs or anything to do with "long term" effects of short term gains.
Of course, as long as "everyone" is doing it, no one is responsible and of course if a few hold back from those practices, they will be swallowed up by those who do in the short term.
Welcome to the system.
The government regulators exist to prevent these types of systemic problems. What's that? Bought and paid for you say? Hrm... didn't see that one coming.
they already do it to meat. What's the harm, right?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Every supermarket has also 'greener' products with better conditions for the animals. Nobody is forcing customers to buy intensive farming products. Just buy greener products and intensive farming will diminish.
As long as the milk is properly pasteurized, it poses no threat to consumers, but anyone working directly with the animals bears a small risk of infection.
Pasteurize the cows.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Where's your MRSA mustache?
It is far easier to cook a piece of meat sufficiently to kill germs than to cook your salad/fruits.
Not to mention your left arm, once it gets infected.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It's not only the "cramped conditions" (sic) that produce infections, also the corn they are fed and the Posilac (TM) hormone they get injected produce more infections. Also antibiotics promote growth, so they are given to healthy animals as well.
If you stop consuming milk and cheese, you become permanently lactose-intolerant before too long. Where I live (America) most restaurants put cheese on most everything, so it is hard to go out anywhere with your friends if you can't eat that. Also, the favorite food for many social gatherings is pizza.
So, giving it up means suffering some degree of social friction. Whenever you go out with the group, suddenly there are several places the group can't go, and wherever you all DO go you are always the one asking whether there is cheese or butter in everything and eventually just ordering a salad. It sucks to be that guy.
If you figure out a way to make everybody else stop consuming milk, so that most of my options at most restaurants are devoid of milk products, then I will fall in line and give it up too. Until then, I have enough other quirks serving as social barriers to introduce yet another one.
And I like cheese.
This is what is wrong with corporations (and is also the fundamental flaw in american style libertarianism aka anarcho-capitalism) - the greedy bastards simply DO NOT GIVE A FUCK about the consequences of their actions, they just want a short-term boost to profits, no matter the cost to others.
They're not the ones who are going to be paying for it when people lose their limbs or organs or die horribly from MRSA, so it does not matter in the slightest.
We need a corporate death penalty for crimes like this - i.e. complete nationalisation when found guilty, and subject the now state-owned corp. to a charter requiring them to act solely as a non-profit in the public interest (so that the services/products they supplied are still supplied and especially so that the low-level employees don't suddenly find themselves unemployed); with all current and future copyrights and patents instantly and automatically public-domain, and with all existing contracts subject to immediate re-negotiation to align with the public-good and anti-exploitative rules of the new charter.
also criminal charges with enormous fines and long jail sentences for execs and board who knew (or had a duty to know but somehow conveniently didn't or can't remember) or authorised or perpetrated criminal behaviour.
in short - make the consequences of behaving like sociopathic arseholes utterly terrifying to the bastards. Nothing else will make them act even remotely civilised.
Well, if they give fluoroquinolones to cattle, we can be confident it will be unefective on most bacteria soon, and therefore that it will not be prescribed anymore. Given the toxicity of the thing (it destroy tendons), that is a good news.
This is pretty serious. We usually need to take care to switch medicines as bacteria adapt to it through natural selection. Not even bacteria, but also viruses, you know like HIV. A good and big counterattack against this resistant *%$^%$ is medicine alternation. If you preselect the "adapted clones" already in the farm you are seriously exposed. I know, the factory stuff will be very carefull but it is always very difficult to avoid accidents... For funding, research and peer finding please refer to the non-profit Aging Portfolio.