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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.
You seem to be under the same misapprehnsion as much of the farming community -- that high doses of antibiotics are dangerous, whereas the reverse is true. Low doses are far more likely to cause resistance than high doses given for the proper lenght of time.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
RTFP (read the fucking paper).
While I'm sure you're much more of an expert then the researches who actually conducted this study, they do specify that the strains present are from livestock based on genetic testing. The introduction in the paper specifies why those strains are livestock-associated and what that means.
Here's the link, since you seem to have missed it even though the link is the first two words of the summary:
http://oem.bmj.com/content/ear...
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.
So it seems to me that a responsible commenter would go a bit farther before accusing the researchers of not thinking of something that they in fact did think of and went to great effort to do genetic testing on hundreds of samples for. But I guess you couldn't be bothered to at least RTFA (read the fucking abstract).
I'm actually pretty impressed that the summary linked to the actual paper and not just the journalist article. I'm not impressed that you didn't at least read the abstract before commenting.
Given that you bothered to reference "lenght (sic) of time," I find it disheartening that you have also demonstrated apparent failure to comprehend or intelligently consider bounding problems, population density, transmission risks and rates, practical effects of seemingly low mutation rates, microbiology, and systems thinking. In short, all activities involving large scale administration of antibiotics to livestock at dosages resulting in appreciable treatment/prevention efficacy are practices which drive substantial and increasing risks to public health.
The math doesn't lie, and the trending curves of probabilities associated with widespread epidemics aren't exactly uplifting. I'll make a preemptive recommendation that you suppress the urge to post anything resembling a cliché "citation needed" response here. Given the circumstances at hand, devotion of your time to even a cursory review of the aforementioned subject matter would likely be a more productive activity. Such study will necessarily involve your review of all citations referenced in said materials, review of nested citations, etc. You wouldn't want to compound foolishness with yet more foolishness, would you?
I'm willing to admit that I may be entirely wrong in my assessment of your level of knowledge, with the corollary that you are simply betting that your benefits will outweigh your risk in this area for the duration of your lifespan. However, given that I know nothing of your mode of living or the measures of your personal resource reserves on hand for reaction/relocation/adaptation/insulation in response a large scale communicable disease crisis, I must hazard a guess that you're either (A) dangerously ignorant of reality or (B) very well prepared to deal with things turning shitty in a hurry. It is my measured estimation that the odds of your membership in the intersecting set are quite low, given your mid-range UID and the generally incongruous nature of the respective attributes of the A and B sets.
Write failed: Broken pipe
This. For the love of god, people need to mod the parent up. In classic Slashdot fashion, the entire conversation on this thread has missed the point, which is that the farm workers are carrying these antibiotic-resistant bacteria BECAUSE THEY CAME IN CONACT WITH LIVESTOCK THAT CARRY THE BACTERIA.
Why do the livestock carry these bacteria? Because they were fed low doses of antibiotics for long times. Antibiotics work great when you use a nice high dose for a specified period of time, and kill all the targeted bacteria. If you use low doses that don't kill all the bacteria, then some survive and eventually the survivors evolve a resistance to the antibiotics.
By using these low doses of antibiotics in livestock, we are *helping* bacteria develop resistance to the very drugs we use to treat those same bacterial infections in humans. In other words, we are setting the stage for an epidemic of disease that we can't treat because we rendered the treatment tools ineffective.
MRSA is the first. What this article is pointing out is that more are on the way, because they now have direct evidence that the resistant bacteria have a means of getting from the livestock to human populations.
This article ain't a political discussion, folks. It's a canary in a coal mine.