Quite a while ago, I wrote about connections between human disease and the factory farming of animals. Recently, some new observational data has supported the link between the two. In the Netherlands, a new form of the superbug MRSA has emerged. It is strongly resistant to treatment with tetracycline antibiotics: a variety heavily used on livestock. The animals need the drugs because they are kept in such appalling conditions (unhygienic and constrained) that they would get infections too easily otherwise.
Xander Huijsdens and Albert de Neeling found that 39% of pigs and 81% of pig farms in the Netherlands were hosts to the potentially lethal antibiotic resistant bacteria. People who came into contact with pigs were 12 times more likely to contract this form of MRSA than members of the ordinary population; those who come into contact with cattle are 20 times more susceptible. The strain has since been found in Denmark, France, and Singapore. A study conducted by the University of Guelph found the strain in 25% of local pigs and 20% of pig farmers.
Maintaining the effectiveness of antibiotics for the treatment of people is highly important for human welfare. Antibiotics are one of the major reasons why modern medicine is valuable: they help people die dramatically less often after childbirth and surgery than was the case before their development. They have also helped to make diseases that would formerly have been probable death sentences treatable. The fact that we are allowing farms to deplete their value so that they can produce meat more cheaply (by forcing more animals closer together in less clean conditions) seems profoundly unwise. In Pennsylvania, legislators have even banned farmers who produce hormone and antibiotic milk from saying so on their packaging - on the grounds that it would make consumers unduly worried about the other milk on offer.
{ 6 trackbacks }
{ 32 comments… read them below or add one }
See also:
Diseases and factory farming
Not particularly notable day (and dietary justifications)
Shrimponomics
Guelph Researchers Find MRSA in Pigs
November 08, 2007 - News Release
Pigs can now be added to the list of potential carriers of the drug-resistant “superbug” methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
A tale of pigs, people and germs
“A lot of these bacteria are going to be washed off into the waterways, into the environment, and we just don’t know what it really means,” said Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
There was one piece of good news from the Canadian study: Neither the pigs nor the people got sick from the MRSA.
That’s to be expected with the pigs, who make for good carriers precisely because the germ usually doesn’t make them ill.
People, though, aren’t always so lucky.
What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?
San Manilla was not known or widespread before chicken factory farms.
I have some questions,
Are humans who are getting this infection dropping dead? Or are there other antibiotics to treat it?
You said 20% of those who come into contact with cattle are getting it, but you don’t otherwise mention cows having it. Do cows get it?
What are the risks for consumers, eating this meat?
Will Nalgene bottles no longer symbolize health and enviromental engagement?
Mountain Equipment pulls water bottles off shelves
Country’s largest specialty outdoor-goods retailer cites concern over possible health risks
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
From Friday’s Globe and Mail
December 7, 2007 at 3:00 AM EST
Mountain Equipment Co-op, the country’s largest specialty outdoor-goods retailer, says it has pulled most food and beverage containers made of polycarbonate plastic from its shelves, citing concern over possible health risks.
The plastic in question is made mostly from bisphenol A, which mimics estrogen and is derived from petrochemicals.
San Manilla?
Do you mean Salmonella?
Are humans who are getting this infection dropping dead? Or are there other antibiotics to treat it?
MRSA Morbidity and mortality
Treatment
You said 20% of those who come into contact with cattle are getting it, but you don’t otherwise mention cows having it. Do cows get it?
Staphylococcus aureus freuqently lives on the skin and in the noses of many animals.
“S. aureus may occur as a commensal on human skin (particularly the scalp, armpits, penis and vagina); it also occurs in the nose (in about 25% of the population) and throat and less commonly, may be found in the colon and in urine. The occurence of Staph. aureus under these circumstances does not always indicate infection and therefore does not always require treatment (indeed, treatment may be ineffective and re-colonisation may occur). It can survive on domesticated animals such as dogs, cats and horses, and can cause bumblefoot in chickens. It can survive for some hours on dry environmental surfaces, but the importance of the environment in spread of S. aureus is currently debated. It can host phages, such as the Panton-Valentine leukocidin, that increase its virulence.”
What are the risks for consumers, eating this meat?
MRSA does not survive proper cooking, though the antibiotics in the meat can contribute to the development of resistant strains in people.
See also: Antibiotic resistance: Role of animals
“Currently, it is estimated that greater than 55% of the antibiotics used in the US are given to food animals (e.g. chickens, pigs and cattle) in the absence of disease. Antibiotic use in food animal production has been associated with the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria including Salmonella, Campylobacter, Escherichia coli and Enterococcus, among others. There is substantial evidence from the US and European Union that these resistant bacteria cause antibiotic-resistant infections in humans. The American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) have called for substantial restrictions on antibiotic use in food animal production including an end to all non-therapeutic uses. The food animal and pharmaceutical industries have fought hard to prevent new regulations that would limit the use of antibiotics in food animal production.”
One other notable fact is that bacteria exchange genes between species fairly regularly. As such, antibiotic resistance in a relatively harmless species can be transmitted to a more dangerous species by plasmids or bacteriophages.
Because of antibiotic resistance, tuberculosis is becoming a very serious problem again, even in rich parts of the world.
On the Nalgene front, I certainly hope bisphenol A turns out to be fairly harmless. I have lots of stuff that probably includes it.
There’s sh*t in the meat
NYT on the surge in E. coli outbreaks
Posted by Tom Philpott at 1:19 PM on 07 Dec 2007
“I have a better idea. E. coli 0157:H7 can’t thrive in cows that feed primarily on grass. So end the confinements and raise animals outside, replacing as much of their current rations with grass as possible.
That would detoxify the shit; but how to keep it out of the meat? Let’s try deindustrializing the slaughterhouses. Instead of a few enormous ones, why not have hundreds of small and mid-sized ones all across the country?”
Are antibiotics given to animals exclusively because it lets them live in less clean circumstances, or are there other motivations as well?
Meat Processors Look for Ways to Keep Ground Beef Safe
“In the last decade, Tyson Fresh Meats has transformed its slaughterhouse here to combat a potentially deadly type of food poisoning, adding huge chambers to scald carcasses and wash them in acid, steam vacuums to suck away microbes and elaborate gear to test hundreds of meat samples a day.”
“After each cut is made to remove the hide, a worker follows behind with a steam vacuum to kill and suck away microbes. The carcass, pulled along on an overhead rail, is then sent into a cabinet with pivoting nozzles that soak it with water at about 185 degrees.
After the head is removed and before the animal is gutted, the carcass is sprayed with a mild acid wash, again to reduce the level of microbes. Besides removing the hide, one of the most critical steps to prevent E. coli 0157:H7 comes when the animal is eviscerated and its internal organs are removed.
The workers who remove the organs are careful not to cut the bowel, which could spread manure, and a worker looks over the internal organs to make sure the intestines are intact. The carcasses are then sawed in half, and the cut line is steam vacuumed.”
Recently there a news report here in Houston about a study done on drug-resistant bacteria in the border communities in Texas and Mexico. Many antibiotics are available over the counter in Mexico. The researchers openly admitted they expected there to both be more types of resistant bacteria in Mexico and more incidence of drug-resistant infections. They found the opposite.
@JesusChristHimself
What are you arguing? Can you provide a source on that study?
11 slaughterhouse workers ill, inhaled pig-brain matter suspected
By Mark Frauenfelder
Inhaling aerosolized pig brains could be hazardous to your health.
In the slaughterhouse floor at Quality Pork Processors Inc. is an area known as the “head table,” but not because it is the place of honor. It is where workers cut up pigs’ heads and then shoot compressed air into the skulls until the brains come spilling out.
But now the grisly practice has come under suspicion from health authorities.
Over eight months from last December through July, 11 workers at the plant in Austin, Minn. — all of them employed at the head table — developed numbness, tingling or other neurological symptoms, and some scientists suspect inhaled airborne brain matter may have somehow triggered the illnesses.
Hmm.. inhaling aerosolized pig brains is hazardous?! I guess my patent on pig-brain sensual body spray is useless now.
I am always disheartened when my doctor prescribes antibiotics for an infection (or potential infection) that could be easily cured with a pile of vitamin C, and an abundance of water to clear out your system. I get throat infections fairly often, (whenever I catch a cold) and I’ve been prescribed antibiotics for a sore throat that is easily salved by gargling some table salt and water.
It’s almost as if the pharmaceutical companies have something to gain by pushing the superfluous usage of antibiotics! Something like .. oh, huge profit margins.
Pig excrement has been mentioned here before.
Hillary and Big Meat
By Tom Philpott
“A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.”
— Jeff Tietz, “Boss Hog,” Rolling Stone, Dec. 14, 2006
Meat wagon
A roundup of outrages from the meat industry
Posted by Tom Philpott at 1:37 PM on 13 Dec 2007
In 2005, Human Rights Watch — which usually finds its services most useful in dictatorships and war-torn regions — saw fit to issue a blistering report on the wretched working conditions in the meatpacking industry.
Our Decrepit Food Factories
By: Michael Pollan
“The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.”
“The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.”
“A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.”
Tracking global E.coli ‘crucial’
A system must be set up to monitor the global spread of a drug-resistant form of E.coli which can cause fatal blood poisoning, Canadian scientists urge.
Meat wagon: pork superbug!
Then, sometime in the 1990s, MSRA cases began to pop up among folks who had never gone near a hospital. Around the same time, the pork industry was undergoing a massive wave of consolidation — more and more hogs crammed into tighter and tighter spaces. And since hogs raised under such conditions essentially cede their immune systems, the only way to keep them alive was , you guessed it, by dosing them liberally with antibiotics.
Can anyone guess what happened next?
Evidently, FDA and USDA regulators couldn’t. As MRSA cases — and deaths — piled up, these folks looked the other way, Schneider reports. And they remain slack-jawed and flummoxed, even as evidence mounts of a link between the deadly bacteria and industrial pork production.
“Recently, though, a researcher at the University of Iowa decided to do what U.S. authorities have avoided: test U.S. CAFO-grown pigs for MRSA. Evidently, it wasn’t t that hard. Schneider reports that assistant professor of epidemiology Tara Smith and her team of graduate students merely “swabbed the noses of 209 pigs from 10 farms in Iowa and Illinois.”
The results were unsettling: they “found MRSA in 70 percent of the porkers.” Stunningly, this apparently marked the first-ever publicly released test of U.S. hogs for MRSA. “
In the presence of drugs, pathogens have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to inactivate these compounds (e.g. by pumping out compounds, mutating residues required for the compound to bind, etc.), and they do so at a rate that far exceeds the pace of new development of drugs. Examples include drug resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumonia, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) among bacterium and HIV-1 among viruses. Indeed, no new antibiotics have been developed against TB in thirty years. Efforts to develop new antibiotics by the pharmaceutical industry by large-scale screens of chemical libraries which inhibit bacterial growth have largely failed, and new tetracycline and sulfanilamide analogs will likely engender resistance and will quickly be rendered useless.
Vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
If [the pasture] system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these — the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it — has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.