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This is the follow-up from the Kristof piece earlier in the week that did 
discuss small farms and farmers.  Today's NYT.............

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Pathogens in Our Pork 

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: March 14, 2009 

We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get 
fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of 
antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.



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Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal 
feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy 
percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, 
according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and 
that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 
samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an 
antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study 
published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent 
study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork 
sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland 
scholar who conducted the study.

Regardless of whether the bacteria came from the pigs or from humans who 
handled the meat, the results should sound an alarm bell, for MRSA already 
kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.

MRSA (pronounced “mersa”) stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus 
aureus. People often get it from hospitals, but as I wrote in my last column, 
a new strain called ST398 is emerging and seems to find a reservoir in modern 
hog farms. Research by Peter Davies of the University of Minnesota suggests 
that 25 percent to 39 percent of American hogs carry MRSA.

Public health experts worry that pigs could pass on the infection by direct 
contact with their handlers, through their wastes leaking into ground water 
(one study has already found antibiotic-resistant bacteria entering ground 
water from hog farms), or through their meat, though there has been no proven 
case of someone getting it from eating pork. Thorough cooking will kill the 
bacteria, but people often use the same knife to cut raw meat and then to 
chop vegetables. Or they plop a pork chop on a plate, cook it and then 
contaminate it by putting it back on the original plate.

Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even 
South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by 
permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s 
unconscionable.

The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that 
antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in 
antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to 
animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire 
human population.

“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a 
Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why 
give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and 
unsanitary conditions?”

The answer is simple: politics.

Legislation to ban the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture has 
always been blocked by agribusiness interests. Louise Slaughter of New York, 
who is the sole microbiologist in the House of Representatives, said she 
planned to reintroduce the legislation this coming week.

“We’re losing the ability to treat humans,” she said. “We have misused one of 
the best scientific products we’ve had.”

That’s an almost universal view in the public health world. The Infectious 
Diseases Society of America has declared antibiotic resistance a “public 
health crisis” and recounts the story of Rebecca Lohsen, a 17-year-old New 
Jersey girl who died from MRSA in 2006. She came down with what she thought 
was a sore throat, endured months in the hospital, and finally died because 
the microbes were stronger than the drugs.

This will be an important test for President Obama and his agriculture 
secretary, Tom Vilsack. Traditionally, the Agriculture Department has 
functioned mostly as a protector of agribusiness interests, but Mr. Obama and 
Mr. Vilsack have both said all the right things about looking after eaters as 
well as producers.

So Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack, will you line up to curb the use of antibiotics 
in raising American livestock? That is evidence of an industrial farming 
system that is broken: for the sake of faster-growing hogs, we’re empowering 
microbes that endanger our food supply and threaten our lives.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15kristof.html