Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Hog-based MRSA infection spreading to farmers in Europe, Canada
http://www.agriview.com/articles/2007/12/06/livestock_news/livestock04.txt

A new study published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention’s Emerging Infectious Diseases links a new strain of
methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), once found only in
pigs, to more than 20 percent of all human MRSA infections in the
Netherlands.

The resistant strain—NT-MRSA—emerged in the Netherlands in 2003 and
increased steadily until, by 2006, it accounted for more than one out of
five human MRSA infections, many of them in either pig farmers or cattle
farmers. The cases clustered in regions of the country with high densities
of pig and cattle farms. The new strain has high rates of hospitalization,
suggesting that it causes severe disease.

Despite these studies and others from Europe dating back to 2005, the
United States does not systematically test pigs, cattle or other food
animals for MRSA. As a result, the U.S. public health establishment does
not know whether the use of antibiotics in food animals in the United
States is contributing to the reported surge of MRSA cases.