There has been a major conference underway in the USA and much material of interest to livestock farmers is emerging.
Maryn McKenna's blog provides the best journalistic source.
I'll just whet the appetite and encourage you to read the whole.
Britain does not have to stay in a state of abject ignorance and blatant disinformation enforced by Britain's government veterinarians and their cronies.
International eyes are quite rightly on any country reporting abnormal, unreal patterns, or indeed failing to provide any believable information
That's how it is done in real science, by real scientists, folks!
Maryn McKenna's blog is here
E. Coli Behaving Badly: Hospitals, Travel, Food (ICAAC 2)
By Maryn McKenna Author September 11, 2012 | 12:41 pm |
...Out of the first two days of (hundreds of) papers and posters, here are just a few unnerving reports.
Infections with multi-drug resistant E. coli — known by the acronym ESBL for “extended spectrum beta-lactamase,” indicating resistance to penicillins and cephalosporins — have been assumed to be a hospital phenomenon...
... but also found that 107 of the patients, or 37 percent, had acquired their infections before they entered the hospital. In other words, multi-drug resistant E. coli is now spreading in the everyday world, in an undetected and untracked way.
More than half of the cases the Doi team found were due to a specific strain of E. coli known as ST131...
...The group say: “Most of the … ‘recent’ isolates (2005-2011) were extensively multi-drug resistant, i.e., resistant to ampicillin, amoxicillin-clavulanate, ciprofloxacin, nalixidic acid, sulfamethoxazole and tetracycline.”
Finally, a team from the Netherlands examined the rapid emergence of ESBL E. coli in that country — a particular puzzle, because...
...the Netherlands has one of the lowest rates of antibiotic use in humans in Europe. Nevertheless, when the researchers examined fecal samples that were volunteered by 1,713 Amsterdam residents living at home — that is, not hospital patients — they found that 8.5 percent were ESBL. That is, these community E. coli were resistant to penicillins and cephalosporins — and also in many cases to gentamicin, co-trimoxazole and Cipro.
Knowing that antibiotic use is kept to low levels — and therefore that there ought not to be selective pressure that would drive the emergence of resistance — the group looked for other ways that selective pressure might be being applied. They found two. I’ll quote from a statement they released to media attending ICAAC:
The 8.5 percent resistance… is approximately the same as we found a few years ago in the community in Spain and France, two countries where antibiotic use in general and resistance rates in hospitals are much higher than in Dutch hospitals. The prudent use of antimicrobials in the Netherlands contrasts with a very high use of antibiotics in food-producing animals. In the questionnaires, we have asked about antibiotic use, travel history and eating habits… The question remains whether the rise is due to travel to countries with higher resistance rates or to contamination through the food chain.
