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Farmers Carry Multidrug-Resistant Staph For Weeks Into Local Communities
An anonymous reader writes: Fresh research out of the UNC Gillings and JHU Bloomberg schools of public health shows industrial farm workers are carrying livestock-associated, multidrug-resistant staph into local communities for weeks at a time. "Among the [22 people tested], 10 workers carried antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria in their noses for up to four days. Another six workers were intermittent carriers of the bacteria. The 10 workers found to carry the bacteria persistently had strains associated with livestock that were resistant to multiple drugs, and one also carried MRSA. Three more of the workers tested positive for strains of S. aureus that were not resistant to antibiotics. So in total, 86 percent of the workers in the study carried the S. aureus bacteria, compared with about one-third of the population at large, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." This problem has grown since its last mention on Slashdot. Unfortunately, massive industrial lobbying continues to neuter government action.
Good, this indicates that doctors and people who think they should take antibiotics like vitamins haven't completely screwed up our natural immunities and that most of the world still fights off this infections even though drugs no longer work on them.
Can we please get back to the point where we take antibiotics when we're in need of them, not just because we might have an infection or have a mild infection?
I'm all for taking them in the cases where it will be life threatening not to, but FFS not just because we're sick. We're making all of these things capable of fighting off the drugs and getting ourselves to the point where first world countries with antibiotics are going to be less safe than 3rd world shit holes where the people at least have functional immune systems that can fight off what they see in their environment.
We have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without taking daily antibiotic doses, why do some people and worse still some doctors think we should take them like candy now when someone gets the sniffles.
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To stop this sooner rather than later. THEN get to the lawyers.
Disclaimer: I am no fan of mega-scale industrial farming but if 1/3 of us are carrying this crap around anyway and we aren't dropping in the street or fighting off the zombie apocalypse, I have to wonder how much of a problem it actually is.
The headline says farmers. The text says farm workers. Very much not the same thing. A farmer is the owner of the farm. A farm worker is generally a hired hand, often (though not always) a migrant, and if so typically from Mexico or farther south.
The story suggests that the multi-drug-resistant bacteria are the result of antibiotic treatment of the animals at the farm. This misses another possibility:
In Mexico, most antibiotics are over-the-counter, much like asprin here in the US. People who feel ill or have some infection often buy and take them. Typically they use them until they no longer show symptoms - then stop, rather than taking a full regimin and killing off all the bacteria. (Why take more of the non-free drug once the symptoms are gone? Waste of money, right?) This is a recipe for creating drug-resistant bacteria.
Of course if an infection is resistant to one antibiotic, a paitent is likely to try another, and another, and so on until they find one that works. THAT's a recipe for maintaining and improving the bug's resistance to the front line antibiotics while breeding resistance to others.
As a result, a substantial fraction of the workers arriving from south of the Mexican border are carriers of multi-drug-resistant baceria.
Meanwhile, a farming operation is likely to give a limited number of antibiotics continuously, so non-resistant infections are wiped out before they can develop resistance, and if they do develop resistance it will be to the particular drugs used, rather than the universe of antibiotics.
Of course, infected workers can infect livestock, just as livestock can infect workers. And infected workers can trade infections around, just as livestock can. (More so, since the livestock tends to be kept separated, to reduce both disease spread and breeding by unintended pairings, limitations that farmers can't impose on their workers - and would be unlikely to try even if they could.)
So it seems to me that responsible researchers would go a bit farther before reporting: Like by doing genetic testing on the strains of bug in the various workers and the livestock, and running models on the results to try to identfy whether the bugs are from the herd or the workers.
I don't see any such work alluded to in this popularized reporting. It seems to just assume that the bugs were developed on the farm and spread to the workers. I hope this is a disconnect between the actual research and the report, rather than an accurate characterization of the research.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The sad thing is that nowadays if you have the sniffles you can't get antibiotics without going to a doctor, and yet if your pet guppy isn't looking so good you can get some for your aquarium. And farmers seem to think antibiotic is an essential nutrient, no problem so long as it's not for humans! But try to get some for yourself and you'll get the lecture about antibiotic resistance. Unless it's for your soap.
On the other hand, at least they have a few antibiotics reserved for humans in real trouble, but on the other hand antibiotics everywhere breed antibiotic resistant bacteria, and many of the mechanisms bacteria use for antibiotic resistance give them total or partial immunity to other antibiotics.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Keeping animal captive and housed together is literally begging for worse and worse strains of diseases. Hoof and mouth, avian flu, mad cow.. Then we get stuff like e. coli from veggies, which isn't even from the plant: it's from the manure it's covered in. Adding antibiotics only accelerates the process. Yeehaw.
Well they feed the livestock Tetracycline by the shovel full. Of course, a person that needs the drug has to pay at least 10000% more and can't afford to go see their doctor unless they have insurance. Lucky pigs.
they're literally disease farms
And, not to mention, the single largest consumer of water and the single largest source of carbon emissions.
.: Semper Absurda
sdfdsfdfdsfsf
And like our only source of food...
Tragedy of the commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Indeed. Or restated in simpler form: A community that does not keep its egoistic idiots under control, eventually collapses. That seems to be the primary problem of the human race at this time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Good, this indicates that doctors and people who think they should take antibiotics like vitamins haven't completely screwed up our natural immunities and that most of the world still fights off this infections even though drugs no longer work on them.
The problem with Staph Aureus is that it's omnipresent in the respiratory tract and skin. It seems to have spent a long time evolving with immune systems, because it has two lines of defense (producing catalase and carrotenoids) which neutralise two of the chemicals that white blood cells use to break down foriegn bodies (superoxide and singlet oxygen). Additionally the protein A in the cell wall confuses the shit out of white blood cells, making them difficult to detect.
Add that to producing some really nasty toxins, and that's why a Staph Aureus bacteremia, even MSSA has about a 30% kill rate, even if you're in a modern hospital.
So it would be nice to have some antibiotics to fall back on, at least in the case of golden staph.
Can we please get back to the point where we take antibiotics when we're in need of them, not just because we might have an infection or have a mild infection?
Your favourite ID doctor, and mine, posted about this today. He has a solution:
The solution? We do not want to make antibiotics more toxic to the patient, so I suggest that every time there is an order for Zosyn and vancomycin (or whatever your decerebrate choice is at your institution) the ordering physician receives a short, painful shock from the keyboard. If you really think the patient needs the antibiotics you will take the shock. That would likely solve a lot of issues with inappropriate antibiotic use and be simpler than a stewardship program.
Although in this case the problem is prophylactic antibiotics given to livestock.
Let's send 3000 Army guys to an Ebola hot zone. When their tours are over, and they come back; we'll have bigger problems to deal with. Staph infections? Boooooring.
to report on farms these days.
I believe 'Sheep Looking Up' and on a minor scale 'Stand on Sanzibar', both by John Brunner, should be mandatory readings in school. And if you are into such literatur: 'Schockwaverider'.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
In light of this, it makes perfect sense that the former Plum Island animal disease institute be moved to the center of the country within eyesight of a fucking football stadium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bio_and_Agro-Defense_Facility
It made me worried now. I guess I have to use a condom each time when I pay for boston steamer from farm girls. Does that involve only farmers or farm animals too? Because I like to have fun with them too.
75% of the subjects had S. aureus in their sinuses, 51% had non-livestock associated penicillin resistant SA (MRSA), 46% had livestock associated MRSA. But the sample size is so small (22 people) the study doesn't prove much beyond the fact that once colonized by S. aureus you tend to stay colonized.
to quarantine them for weeks, like the early astronauts, before letting them come into town for supplies.
Yup, and we are worried about ebola when a bigger danger is lurking right in our very noses.
There is a film (Resistance) about this. I think it will be free to view sometime soon, but I saw it in NYC at a theater and it has been previewing at various places around the country.
Looks to me like this study was about how long bacteria live in noses of people. So they found people that would have a lot of bacteria in their noses, like farm workers, and looked for bacteria. BIG SURPRISE! They find some.
So I wonder how much MRSA and Multi-resistant other stuff they would find in noses of healthcare workers, or noses of teachers. Both groups that are exposed to a lot of mammals, in this case people, and thus flying bacteria, and thus all kinds of bacteria, including the nasty resistant stuff.. Compare those counts with farm works and then get back to me. Maybe we will have a reason to get wound up then...
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
A community that does not keep its egoistic idiots under control, eventually collapses.
But there is so many politicians, what can we do?
That is, they give it to livestock not because the livestock is sick, but because it makes the livestock larger - with more muscles.
As a direct result, the livestock develop antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Congress keeps letting them do this because the companies that sell it give them lots of money.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
maybe our leaders will rally the people to fix this national security issue.
well we can just scale that up and apply the results to millions of farm workers worldwide (not)
this is such a small pool of tested people that the results cannot be applied beyond that specific group.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Yes the way your farmes are organized is the only way to grow food.
"industrial farm workers" is WAY different from "farmers".
Those aren't farms that these people work at, they're food concentration camps. You won't see a single farmer there.
I have long thought that recreational drugs should be legalized, while antibiotics should be treated the way we treat controlled substances. After all, recreational drugs hurt no one, except in a minority of cases, the user, while misuse of antibiotics threaten everybody. Besides, it'll provide employment to drug cops once we've finally ended prohibition.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Your post exemplifies a W.C. Fields quote: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
Rather than intelligently respond, all you've done is throw up a bunch of links like spaghetti at the wall, most of which have only an indirect relationship--at best--to the issue of dosage-vs-resistance. For fuck's sake, your very first link involves the pure-algorithmic problem (one some programmers might recognize) of finding the smallest circle that contains a bunch of points in a 2D plane. Even if this somehow figures into estimating cells on a petri-dish, it's so many steps removed that you're giving people nonsense homework in order to distract them from what's being discussed.
If you're half the intellectual you're pretending to be, stop trying to spook people away through sheer quantity of low-quality links and make a logical argument.
OK, first, how are the people posting about doctors over prescribing antibiotics being modded insightful? That's not really a problem any more, and it's specifically NOT what the article is about....
This should be a test case for those people that say that the Free Market is good and Government is bad. We have a problem with industrial farmers (I hate calling them farmers. I grew up on a farm. What they do has little resemblance to farming) abusing antibiotics. This is NOT new news. We've known this for a long time. There is no government oversight on this issue.
If all the libertarians and righties were correct, people would stop buying meat from these industrial farmers and they'd stop the practice. I should note that most of the people I see buying meat that's grass fed, organic, and cruelty free are all lefties (but that's because we're the only ones that actually give a shit about other people. Wow. That sounded jaded even to me. I'm going to leave it up there, but... there's some hidden anger I didn't realize I had.. I should examine that. anyway)
What we see is the opposite of that. Without a strong cop (government) regulating for the common good, the market is doing what it's designed to do.... Maximize profit and let society deal with externalized losses. The solution to this is to have the government stop pussyfooting around and regulate. It is heavily lobbied to make sure that doesn't happen, because our system is corrupt.
Yes, it's corrupt. The solution to that isn't to get rid of big government. That's exactly what the people doing the corrupting WANT. We need regulation of industry (not take over, regulate. No one's saying to socialize. Calm Down.) because industry always tries to externalize the losses to maximize profits, and someone needs to tell them "knock it off.".
Also, the free market is a myth. A useful tool to demonstrate and idea, much like a frictionless wheel to demonstrate basic physics ideas to a student... but we've known about this for a LONG time. We have many examples of companies acting badly in the last decade, but no examples of people punishing them into changing their behavior..... I'm still looking at you BP...
You mean illegal alien migrants in the fields the shit and piss on the foods we buy? Brilliant. Please, we need more of them. :rolleyes:
I had one of these infections. The only way my doc could cure me of it was by putting me on an anti yeast diet... Ie... No yeast, no bread, no wheat, & no sugar! The infections thrive on those items. However, by doing this diet for 3 weeks + you can starve the infection out of your body.
You missed the real issue... while you still have a point. But the issue the article is about is not the prescription of antibiotics to humans but to cattle, that's actually why it talks about farmers
Cattle is fed antibiotics as a "preventive measure" just in case and with the aim of lowering production costs by avoiding diseases. Note that I haven't used quotes around 'fed' as they are literally doing that shoveling massive amounts of antibiotica in the the cattle's fodder.
You have clearly understood the dangers of prescribing unnecessary antibiotica to humans... now think about that at a ten of hundredfold scale which is what is happening right now
These antibiotics affect the public health in several manners:
The issue is not new and actually already causing quite some trouble, deaths and huge economical costs: You may recall the bacteria 'Salmonella' that is practically ubiquitous in all poultry products that you can find in a common supermarket. This microorganism causes thousands of infections yearly and including deaths to such an extend that in warm EU countries like Spain it has been forbidden to use eggs and egg products in public establishments during the summer. These organisms are actually resistant strains that have been selected and thrive in the antibiotic laden bodies of industrial poultry.
Another source of concern is the proliferation of "superbugs" in the hospitals which are already causing intra-hospitalary infections to humans ending many times in chronic diseases which are expensive to treat
This goes to such an extend that here in Holland personel of risk groups (farmers, meat-industry workers, veterinaries, etc) are required to access the hospitals and sanitary instalations through a separate entry and are also held in isolated precincts
.And there is the risk of direct infections such as we saw with the bird flu or the 2009 Q Fever epidemics here in Holland, not to forget the Mad Cows episodes.
And the problem is not only the fact that these medicines are being used, the problem is the humungous scale of the operation as cattle's biomass exceeds the mass of the human population several times (!).
Summing up: We are wasting a valuable weapon in the fight against diseases and at the same time creating new and costly health hazards just to get some extra bacon. Most of which we directly throw away
Some interesting texts:
Antibiotic Residues - A Global Health Hazard [Nisha A.R.],
-- 29A the number of the Beast