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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Bugs, Drugs, and Pigs: "Killer" Bacteria Found in Midwest Hog CAFOs
  • Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:16:37 -0600


Bugs, Drugs, and Pigs: "Killer" Bacteria Found in Midwest Hog CAFOs
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/sustainable_farming/gre
en_cuisine/issue-5/green-cuisine.html

Since his painful personal experience with antibiotic-resistant bacteria,
Missouri hog farmer Russ Kremer has led the way in producing and marketing
quality pork from without using unnecessary antibiotics. Many small and
mid-size livestock and poultry producers across the country are employing
similar methods to keep their animals healthy. But most large-scale
producers are not. In fact, an estimated 70 percent of all antibiotics and
related drugs used in the United States are used as feed additives for
chickens, hogs, and beef cattle. Antibiotic feed additives are used without
a prescription to help animals grow slightly faster – and to compensate
for crowded, often unsanitary conditions in very large CAFOs (confined
animal feeding operations). This outdated practice is putting at risk the
public’s health and the antibiotics doctors need to treat their patients.

A Growing Resistance Threat

Recently, new evidence has suggested a link between antibiotic use in
animal agriculture and rising rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus
aureus (MRSA) infections. Once primarily a hospital risk, MRSA increasingly
occurs in healthy people in community settings. A 2007 editorial in the
Journal of the American Medical Association noted that U.S. deaths from
MRSA in 2005 exceeded those from HIV/AIDS that year. Over the past several
years, studies examining livestock and retail meat samples in Europe and
Canada have detected a strain of MRSA (ST398) originating in livestock
operations where the use of antibiotics is intense.

Now, a pilot study published by researchers at the University of Iowa has
found high prevalence of this same strain of MRSA in 49 percent of swine
and 45 percent of swine workers on a CAFO operation with sites scattered in
Iowa and Illinois. The study is the first to demonstrate the presence of
MRSA ST398 in the United States. This strain causes serious human
infections, including skin, wound, breast, and heart infections, as well as
pneumonia. In the Netherlands, where MRSA ST398 was previously detected in
hog CAFOs, it accounts for one-fourth of all human MRSA cases.

The Iowa study adds to the mounting body of evidence pointing to livestock
as "reservoirs" for antibiotic resistant strains of MRSA that can be passed
to humans. Resistance can be spread to the community in several ways,
including human-to-human transmission; consumption and handling of infected
meat; and environmental contamination of air, water, and/or soil.

A Solution to Keep Antibiotics Working

Public health advocates have called for testing of U.S. livestock to better
understand the linkages between the presence of the resistant strain and
the use of penicillin, tetracycline, and other antibiotics in animals
raised for food. In addition, legislation has again been introduced in
Congress that would require the Food and Drug Administration to take up the
review of antibiotics that are important in human medicine to determine
whether they also can continue to be used as animal feed additives. The
Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA) would help
combat the antibiotic resistance crisis America is currently facing. The
American Medical Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America,
the American Academy of Pediatrics, and hundreds of health, agriculture and
other groups nationwide have joined UCS to endorse this legislation. Click
here to tell your member of Congress to support PAMTA!




  • [Livingontheland] Bugs, Drugs, and Pigs: "Killer" Bacteria Found in Midwest Hog CAFOs, Tradingpost, 04/17/2009

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