3/14/09

Good Old MRSI

Update: There's a comment that has much more on this.

MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) doesn't even sound good and it isn't cause this is the flesh eater type of bacteria and it's pig farmers taking the hit along with some others.

From Nicholas D. Kristof
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS.
A new study by Tara Smith, a University of Iowa epidemiologist, found that 45 percent of pig farmers she sampled carried MRSA, as did 49 percent of the hogs tested. So what’s going on here, and where do these antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably from the routine use — make that the insane overuse — of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all. That’ll be the focus of my next column, on Sunday.

This bacteria can also be found in the meat itself but there are no cases of people getting this from eating pork at least up till now.

We need more Kristof's and Stewart's.

5 comments:

  1. For years, every meat product, or by-product, has been laden with antibiotics from the injections given to cattle, sheep, and swine. The viruses these antibiotics were intended to prevent mutated themselves to get around the very thing that was supposed to prevent them.
    This is why the medical world has to constantly update and improve the antibiotics that are given to humans.
    I remember when I was raising my kids that over a short period of time the antibiotics used for ear infections were made more potent because the previous one wasn't working anymore.

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  2. I have spent almost decade on this disaster, day after day: there at the beginning, with pigs and in pig country when the horror story started

    There is little doubt that MRSA in pigs has been leaking into the hospitals for some years.

    There was a nasty mutation to a porcine circovirus in Britain in 1999 which caused an epidemic that required huge quantities of antibiotics to handle the consequences.

    MRSA in pigs was the result, usually the ST398 strain. Oddly ST398 does not usually present as "flesh eating" but is just as deadly.

    The Dutch picked up the problem about four years ago and commendably made everything they knew public.

    Both circovirus and MRSA epidemics have now travelled the world along with accompanying cover-ups. It is quite a nasty situation - now coming to light in the USA.

    MRSA st398, mutated circovirus and various other unpleasant zoonotic diseases have now reached American pig farms.

    The people exposing the scandal in the US are to be commended.

    You do not need a cover-up on the scale of the one in Britain , that is a national disgrace

    I have extensive records available to anyone researching the link and can often answer general questions quickly and accurately.


    --
    Regards
    Pat Gardiner
    Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
    www.go-self-sufficient.com and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com

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  3. I used to work in the Pharmaceutical Industry at a one of the largest drug makers. One of this companies specialties was antibiotics and vaccines. Well, in the past two years, they stopped their research in new antibiotics because they spent 5 years looking for something new and failed each time. Folks - there are no new antibiotics.

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  4. I like my pork chops, but I'll make damn sure that there are no cuts on my hands when I handle them raw, thank you.

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