The incomparable Maryn McKenna explains the significance of Pig MRSA and the latest research or, as she says, "to be polite", MRSA st398.(cc398)
Now Britain does not have MRSA st398 in its pigs or pig people according to Britain's corrupt agricultural ministry Defra and its dodgy veterinarians.
That's the people that brought us Mad Cow under their previous name of MAFF and spread it about the world and have recently been caught selling meat from bTB reactors, calling complainants "scaremongers" whilst failing to catch those selling horse meat as beef.
Our civil service veterinarians claim to have protected Britain, almost alone in the world, by the sheer brilliance of their work. Or, just maybe, their criminal world of deception and denial is about to crash about their ears.
The Americans are going to want to know how Britain, almost alone amongst nations, does not have MRSA st398 in its pigs.
We all want to know.
Be sure to read the whole. Insurers of farms will be asking just what employment liability risks they are unknowingly underwriting, through civil service deception.
Article in full here
“Pig MRSA” Carried by Workers from North Carolina Intensive Hog Farms
I saved this post until today to allow everyone to get their holiday hot dogs guilt-free. Now that’s over: An important study has just been published which makes a close connection between the emergence of
antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the use of antibiotics on large-scale conventional hog farms. Bonus: It involves the resistant bacterium MRSA ST398 (known in shorthand as “pig MRSA”), which is widespread in Europe but up to this point has been found in only one state in the US, Iowa. With this paper, the count rises to two: The study subjects in this paper are hog-farm workers in eastern North Carolina.
A quick explanation of why this is important: “Pig MRSA” is a particular strain of drug-resistant staph that is slightly different from the hospital and community (sports, gym) varieties. It was first spotted in the Netherlands in 2004, in the toddler daughter of pig farmers and in the family’s pigs. Since then, it has spread widely across Europe, not just in agriculture, but in healthcare and in everyday life, and has also been found widely in retail meat...
... (If you want more, here’s an archive of my posts on ST398; the
story of its emergence in 2004 and what happened afterward is told in
my 2010 book SUPERBUG.)
Now, the study...
... Workers from the conventional, antibiotic-using farms were many times more likely to carry staph with the specific signature of farm-drug use.
That illuminates a potential occupational risk to the workers — and it also suggests that the workers could be a channel for that farm-influenced bacterium to move off the farm...
...Imagine how much more we would know about this difficult problem if the barriers they hint at did not exist.
