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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Concerns growing over superbugs in our food
  • Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:01:11 -0600


Concerns growing over superbugs in our food
The meat you buy could be contaminated with drug-resistant MRSA
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31766160/ns/health-food_safety/
By Stephanie Woodard
Prevention Magazine
updated 6:16 a.m. MT, Wed., July 15, 2009

About two years ago, dozens of workers at a large chicken hatchery in
Arkansas began experiencing mysterious skin rashes, with painful lumps
scattered over their hands, arms, and legs.

"They hurt real bad," says Joyce Long, 48, a 32-year veteran of the
hatchery, where until recently, workers handled eggs and chicks with bare
hands. "When we went and got cultured, doctors told us we had a superbug."

Its name, she learned, was MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus
aureus. This form of staph bacteria developed a mutation that resists
antibiotics (including methicillin), making it hard to treat, even lethal.
According to the CDC, certain types of MRSA infections kill 18,000
Americans a year — more than die from AIDS.

Soon co-workers at the nearby processing plant, where hundreds of thousands
of chicken carcasses are prepped daily for sale, began finding the lumps.
Dean Reeves, 50, an 11-year employee, went to the hospital with an
excruciating bump on her thigh she thought was a spider bite.

It wasn't: She, too, had contracted MRSA, as had her husband, Bill, 46, who
also works at the facility. Since late 2007, Dean has had monthly relapses.
Even the safety glasses, gloves, and smocks workers wear (along with
upgraded regular cleaning of equipment) aren't enough to protect them, says
Bill. "We work so fast, we often stick ourselves with knives or scissors
and get blood on us from head to foot." When a swelling rose over one of
his eyes, he was told he might go blind; if the infection progressed to his
brain, he'd die.

Did any food safety agency test for MRSA in this plant's chickens, which
were then sold to the public and served on American dinner tables? Did any
government organization determine the source of the outbreak? Calls to the
USDA, CDC, and Arkansas Department of Health yielded a no to both
questions; the poultry company that owns the operation did not respond to
multiple requests for a comment from Prevention. Yet in recent years,
studies have found MRSA in retail cuts of pork, chicken, beef, and other
meats in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

To get answers, we investigated how MRSA has entered our food supply with
limited government response; we considered the massive use of antibiotics
in agriculture and its role in creating resistant microbes like MRSA; and
we examined the safety of supermarket meat. Here, we offer our findings and
expert advice to protect you and your family.

Are you at risk?
You've probably heard of people contracting certain strains of MRSA in
hospitals, where it causes many illnesses: postsurgical infections,
pneumonia, bacteremia, and more. Others encounter different types of the
bug in community centers such as gyms, where skin contact occurs and items
like sports equipment are shared; this form causes skin infections that may
become systemic and turn lethal.

Then in 2008, a new source and strain of MRSA emerged in the United States.
Researcher Tara Smith, PhD, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the
University of Iowa, studied two large Midwestern hog farms and found the
strain, ST398, in 45 percent of farmers and 49 percent of pigs. The
startling discovery — and the close connection between animal health and
our own that it implied — caused widespread publicity and much official
hand-wringing. To date, though, the government has yet to put a
comprehensive MRSA inspection process in place, let alone fix our
problematic meat-production system.

You may not have the same close contact with meat that a processing plant
worker has, but scientists warn there is reason for concern: Most of us
handle meat daily, as we bread chicken cutlets, trim fat from pork, or form
chopped beef into burgers. Cooking does kill the microbe, but MRSA thrives
on skin, so you can contract it by touching infected raw meat when you have
a cut on your hand, explains Stuart Levy, MD, a Tufts University professor
of microbiology and medicine. MRSA also flourishes in nasal passages, so
touching your nose after touching meat gives the bug another way into your
body, adds Smith.

Tainted meat exposed
Extensive research in Europe and Asia has found MRSA in many food animal
species, and in the past year, US researchers have begun testing meat sold
here. Scientists at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center tested
120 cuts of locally purchased meat and found MRSA in 4 percent of the pork
and 1 percent of the beef. A University of Maryland scientist found it in 1
out of 300 pork samples from the Washington, DC, area. And a study in
Canada (from which we import thousands of tons of meat annually) found MRSA
in 9 percent of 212 pork samples. The percentages may be small, but
according to the USDA, Americans eat more than 180 million pounds of meat
every day. "When you consider the tiny size of the meat studies, the fact
that they found any contamination at all is amazing," says Steven Roach,
public health program director for Food Animal Concerns Trust.

In some cases, the tainted meat probably came from infected animals; in
others, already infected humans could have passed on MRSA to the meat
during processing. Regardless of where it originated, even a small
proportion of contaminated meat could mean a tremendous amount of MRSA out
there. "We need more US research to figure out what's going on," says
Roach.

Facts about MRSA

A look at what causes this antibiotic-resistant and sometimes deadly
infection.
MRSA is so common in the United States that it accounts for more than half
of all soft-tissue and skin infections in ERs. The CDC estimates that
invasive MRSA infections (those that entered the bloodstream) number more
than 94,000 a year. Even more troubling, if you add up the other types of
illnesses MRSA can cause, including urinary tract infections, pneumonia,
and inpatient skin infections, the total could be 8 to 11 times more than
that, reports a study by epidemiologist William Jarvis, MD, of the
Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. The
numbers are high and rising: From 1996 to 2005, MRSA-related
hospitalizations increased nearly tenfold.

People who get MRSA need ever more powerful medication. "Staph-related
infections have become serious illnesses that can require hospitalization
and stronger drugs," says Georges C. Benjamin, MD, executive director of
the American Public Health Association (APHA). For hatchery worker Long,
doctors went through several antibiotics, with little success. The
swellings would subside, then reappear. "Every time I went back to work, I
got it again, for a total of 10 times," she says.

Antibiotics in animals

Scientists know that antibiotic overuse in humans caused ordinary staph to
become resistant, says Levy. And they know the large amounts of meds used
by agriculture caused other bacteria, such as E. coli and salmonella, to
develop resistance. "Now we're looking at the relationship between
antibiotic use on farms and MRSA," he says.

It's an important mission, as industrial agriculture is the country's
largest antibiotic user: Animals consume nearly 70 percent of these meds,
perhaps more than 24 million pounds a year, says the Union of Concerned
Scientists. The drugs compensate for the often unsanitary conditions in the
country's 19,000 factory farms — also called concentrated animal feeding
operations, or CAFOs — where about half our meat is produced. Long gone
are many family farms with animals grazing on pastureland, says Bob Martin,
senior officer of the Pew Environment Group. "Instead, they're packed into
cramped quarters, never going outdoors, living in their waste." A swine
CAFO may house thousands of hogs; a poultry operation, hundreds of
thousands of chickens. "As a result, you need to suppress infection," he
says.

The large amounts of antibiotics used in CAFOs include drugs critical to
curing human illnesses, he says. Premixed animal feed can contain
medications you may have taken, such as tetracycline and cephalosporin
(Keflex is a familiar brand); you can also buy a 50-pound bag of
antibiotics at a feed store to add to your animals' chow — no
prescription necessary, confirms Amy Meyer, executive director of the
Missouri Farmers Union.

Most of the antibiotics given to CAFO animals are not only used to fight
infection, but also to stimulate growth, says David Wallinga, MD, Food and
Health Program director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
The near constant exposure to less-than-therapeutic levels of antibiotics
allows the resistant bacteria to survive; they can then be transferred to
people, he says. This needless use of medication is what docs try to avoid
when they don't prescribe antibiotics for a simple cold. "These operations
are reservoirs of antibiotic resistance," says researcher Smith.

In the areas surrounding CAFOs, docs see firsthand how MRSA impacts the
community. Philip McClure, DO, practices in Trenton, MO, which is home to
many hog farms. MRSA infections have risen as the number of pigs has grown,
he says. "Both CAFO workers and others get them," says McClure, who treats
a MRSA-related skin problem every month. That may be because you can pick
up MRSA and not show symptoms for years. Meanwhile, you can pass it to
others by something as simple as sharing a towel. Kim Howland, 44, a former
hog CAFO worker in Oklahoma, fears she did just that, when in 2007, her
husband and daughter developed MRSA skin infections. "My co-workers told me
about lumps they had and I realized I could have become a carrier," she
says. Howland, who left her job, wasn't tested at the time, so she'll never
know if she gave MRSA to her family.

Concerned about the risks of CAFOs (including increased antibiotic
resistance, pollution, and disease in nearby areas), the APHA back in 2003
called for a moratorium on building new ones.

Who's watching out for you?
Until recently, the CDC has acknowledged the presence of MRSA in meat but
downplayed the danger. In 2008, then CDC director Julie Louise Gerberding,
MD, MPH, wrote that foodborne transmission of MRSA is "possible" but, if it
happens, "likely accounts for a very small proportion of human infections
in the US." Liz Wagstrom, DVM, assistant vice president of science and
technology for the National Pork Board, agrees, saying that this kind of
transmission would be extremely rare. Neither group could provide an
estimate when queried by Prevention, but considering the high numbers of
MRSA infections, even a tiny percentage could be a lot of people.

One reason the CDC and the National Pork Board must guess about
transmission rates — and why we don't know exactly how many MRSA-related
infections occur — is that the federal government doesn't collect data on
MRSA outbreaks, says Karen Steuer, director of government operations for
the Pew Environment Group. According to the US Government Accountability
Office, there's no testing for MRSA on farms. And the National
Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System tests just 400 retail cuts of
meat each month for four drug-resistant bacteria — which don't include
MRSA.

"These gaps in data keep us in the dark," says Steuer. Without farm-to-fork
surveillance, it's difficult to connect problems at a certain farm to MRSA
outbreaks. "If we don't fix this, mortality rates will go much higher," she
says. "We have an impending crisis."

A rising tide of concern is firing up health care activists and
congressional policy makers to contain the MRSA threat. Several ideas are
on the government's table. Keep Antibiotics Working, a national coalition
of health and science organizations, calls for more federal research on
MRSA and meat. In Congress, Representative Rosa L. DeLauro suggests giving
all supervision of food — now split among many agencies — to just one,
which may improve oversight. And Representative Louise Slaughter, MSPH,
reportedly Congress's only microbiologist, wants to trim agriculture's use
of antibiotics only to those drugs that are not essential for human use.
Earlier this year, she reintroduced the Preservation of Antibiotics for
Medical Treatment Act, and Senator Edward Kennedy submitted a related bill
in the Senate.

Bottom line, says Roach of Food Animal Concerns Trust, we need to think of
ways to raise animals that prevent them from getting sick in the first
place. And we must move quickly, adds Slaughter: "As a scientist and
mother, I cannot overstate the urgency. We should be able to buy food
without worrying about exposing our family to potentially deadly bacteria
that no longer responds to medical treatment."






  • [Livingontheland] Concerns growing over superbugs in our food, Tradingpost, 07/15/2009

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