Drug-Resistant Staph Spells Trouble For Meat Industry
posted by Laetitia Mailhes Apr 17, 2011 1:03 pm
The Science has spoken. Nearly half of the meat and poultry (47 percent) sold is U.S.
grocery stores is contaminated with staphylococcus aureus (“Staph”), a bacteria linked to
a wide range of human diseases, and this bacteria is resistant to at least three classes of
antibiotics in more than half (52 percent) of contaminated samples, according to a
nationwide study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) published this
week in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Researchers collected and analyzed 136 samples–covering 80 brands–of beef, chicken,
pork and turkey from 26 retail grocery stores in five U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago,
Fort Lauderdale, Flagstaff and Washington, D.C.. DNA testing suggested that the food
animals themselves were the major source of contamination. The study was funded
through a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts as part of The Pew Campaign on Human
Health and Industrial Farming.
“The fact that drug-resistant S. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from the food
animals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in
food-animal production today,” said Lance B. Price, Ph.D., senior author of the study and
Director of TGen’s Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health [emphasis
added].
Up to 70 percent of all antibiotics produced in the United States are used for ‘nontherapeutic’ purposes in industrial food animal production, according to The Union of
Concerned Scientists, which defines ‘non-therapeutic’ as the use of antibiotics in the
absence of diagnosed disease.
So there you have it. In the words of a reputable scientist, for a change, and not from the
usual anti-CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations) ranks or other organic-food
nuts: stuffing food animals with antibiotics is a bad idea.
At the risk of clarifying the obvious, industrial animal farms that feed the poor creatures
food that Nature never intended for them (such as GM corn), and with antibiotics
designed to mitigate the side-effects of such inappropriate food and of appalling living
conditions, are breeding mutant super-bacteria in the food chain. That includes us, human
beings.
The report underlines that Staph should be killed with proper cooking. However, it may
still pose a risk to consumers through improper food handling and cross-contamination in
the kitchen. Staph can cause a range of illnesses from minor skin infections to lifethreatening diseases, such as pneumonia, endocarditis and sepsis. What is a doctor to do
when antibiotic treatments have no impact on her patient’s condition?
“The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria–including Staph–remains a major
challenge in clinical medicine,” said Paul S. Keim, Ph.D., Director of TGen’s Pathogen
Genomics Division and Director of the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at
Northern Arizona University (NAU).
To be sure, consumers are not going to desert fast-food joints and the innumerable
sources of cheap meat en masse overnight. However, each of us retains the power to
“vote” with our dollars. Let’s boycott the damn food and be loud about it! Equipped with
the new piece of evidence offered by TGen, let’s educate and embarrass restaurant and
supermarket managers into reevaluating how they source their meat. Now, they surely
would want to avoid losing business or being subjected to litigation, now would they?
For those of us who are not quite ready for radical action, quiet vegetarianism is an
obvious option. And if we’re not prepared to forego meat, the good news is that healthy
alternatives do exist: at a minimum, check the labels for the “no antibiotics” seal; even
better, favor “organic” (which officially guarantees the absence of antibiotics), or even
“pasture-raised” meat. Sure, it is more expensive. Which is as it should be: the price
premium factors in the extra-cost of farming practices that leave planet and people
unharmed. And truly, we don’t need as much meat as we’ve become accustomed to
consuming anyway.
Laetitia Mailhes is a French journalist. After many years as the technology and
innovation correspondent of the French "Financial Times" in San Francisco, she recently
decided to focus on what truly matters to her: sustainable food and farming. Her blog,
The Green Plate Blog, launched last summer.