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"What you don't look for properly, you don't find."
The vets are attempting an embarrassed defence of the poor late testing of British pigs for MRSA following criticism.
Hidden within and behind the defence is a clear admission that the claim that Britain has no MRSA st398 in its pigs is founded on less than the best sampling.
Not only did the British government not rush to do the sampling, it had to be ordered by the EU, but Britain also delayed publishing the results claiming no MRSA in British pigs.
They still claim there is no MRSA in British pigs.
According to the vets, the test used, on dust rather then pigs, was adequate and to have done it better would have cost more money.
In the same article it admits that 45 percent of vets at a conference were carrying MRSA but only 9 percent of their families were the same. Would anyone like to go home with that story?
There is also an explanation showing how MRSA travels from one herd to another. Has the export and import of pigs stopped?
There a clear acceptance that MRSA in pigs is a risk to vets, pig farmers and meat workers.
Which rather confirms the point that poor late testing, with late reporting of the results by unenthusiastic government veterinarians is a scandal that is going to take rather better explanations.
The pigs have been sick for ten years and fed bucketfuls of antibiotics at the considerable profit of the prescribing vets to deal with the consequences of cirocvirus epidemics.
Does anyone seriously believe that Britain could possibly be clear of the MRSA in pigs sweeping the world?
Proper large scale testing could, and should, have been done years earlier and reported promptly.
To have done otherwise is not fair on the farmers, the meat workers, public health, trading partners and even the veterinarians' own families.
MRSA in pigs – where are we today?
...Some lobbyist organisations have criticised the results, especially for the UK being zero, saying the sampling method from pooled house dust was not accurate enough and that individual, nasal swabs should have been used. This would have added a significant cost to the whole exercise and also Schulz and others (2010) at the IPVS showed that pooled dust samples were 78% accurate in comparison with nasal swabs for the isolation of MRSA, thereby confirming the relative accuracy of the test and the validity of the result...
