agriculture Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Maryn McKenna

Livestock MRSA Found For First Time In UK Milk

December 26, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This paper almost slipped by me. It was published quietly a few weeks ago, and it’s a little eyebrow-raising. From EuroSurveillance, the open-access peer-reviewed bulletin of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (Europe’s CDC): The ST398 strain of MRSA, better known as “livestock-associated MRSA” or just “pig MRSA,” has been found for the first time in milk in England. (And therefore probably in cows, or at least on farms.)

Apparently there has been an ongoing study looking for any evidence of MRSA in UK cows, possibly because of this news from last year (of which more in a minute). Between last January and July, the program tested 1,500 samples of milk from farms’ bulk tanks — that’s the cooler in which milk from a number of cows is collected until it can be picked up by a truck for processing — and found seven of the samples were contaminated by MRSA. All seven isolates were MRSA ST398, the livestock-associated strain. Three came from one farm, so five farms had MRSA in their tanks. According to the paper, this is the first discovery of ST398 in the UK other than one finding in horses in 2009.

The FDA Is Holding Back Data on Farm Antibiotics Use — And Plans to Keep Doing So

December 17, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Tomorrow morning, the US Food and Drug Administration will consider whether to accept reauthorization of legislation that allows us to know a few details about how many antibiotics are sold each year for agricultural use.

The agency probably will accept the reauthorization, and you would think that would be a good thing. But the untold story of the legislation — known as ADUFA for the Animal Drug User Fee Act — is that the FDA is forgoing opportunities to compel companies to disclose data that it would be in the public’s interest to know.

Human Health, Hog Production and Environmental Harm

October 28, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I’ve been offline not just for deadlines (as usual), but also because I was preparing for the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers; I am a member and was a presenter on a couple of panels. The NASW meeting is twinned every year with a second meeting hosted by the nonprofit Council for the Advancement of Science Writing; NASW sessions are peer-to-peer journalism learning, whereas CASW ones feature academic researchers talking about their newest work.

This year’s meetings (collectively called SciWri12, or #SciWri12 if you want to find them on Twitter) were held in Raleigh, NC, and one of the most striking talks there was a report from epidemiologist Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill about his decade-long work investigating the local health effects of very large swine farms. (I’ve written about Wing’s work before.)

The newest news is a paper that he and his team published just as his talk commenced, in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which finds an association between air pollution and odor in the near vicinity of swine farms, and hikes in blood pressure in local residents. When you put the pieces together — most hog c0nfinement operations are in poor, non-white areas; cardiovascular disease is endemic in African Americans; North Carolina lies within the worst US area for cardiovascular disease, known as the “Stroke Belt” — you can see that anything that makes blood pressure chronically worse is bad news for public health.

CDC: First Death From "State Fair Flu"

August 31, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today reported the first death from influenza A H3N2 variant (H3N2v), the swine flu strain that has been crossing intermittently from pigs to humans since last year. The victim was an “older adult with multiple underlying health conditions,” according to the CDC, and the Associated Press fills in that the victim was a 61-year-old woman from “central Ohio’s Madison County [who] died this week… after having contact with hogs at the Ross County Fair.” In a statement, the Ohio Department of Health says that she was one of 102 cases so far in the state this year. In total, the CDC says, there have been 289 cases so far this year (with Indiana leading, at 138 cases); in 2011, there were 12. Fifteen people have been hospitalized.

News Round-Up: Sausage, Soil, Skeeters, Camping, China, Chimps And Other Hazards

August 31, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This has been my week: Oh, wow: I should write about that. No, wait — that. Damn, new news; I’ll blog this paper instead. Except, hold on — this one is great too…

So to solve my indecision before the week ends, here you go: Most of this week’s most interesting news, in round-up form.

News Round-Up: Meat, Superbugs, Denmark And Big Food

July 2, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I was off-line for a week with family issues, and while I was gone, news broke out. (It senses your absence, news does. This is the real reason why coups and major foodborne outbreaks happen in August.)

So while I dive into the bigger stories that seem to be happening — and get some fun summer stuff lined up — here’s a quick recap of things worth noticing:

People Want to Eat Meat Raised Without Excessive Antibiotics. Wouldn't You?

June 20, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This news is going to be everywhere today, but it’s solidly in the topics I care about (and you readers care about — at least I think you do), so I’m going to cover it regardless.

The magazine Consumer Reports is publishing a report and poll on US consumers’ attitudes toward the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. From everyone’s reactions when I write about this, I thought people cared about this issue, but the numbers are a little surprising even to me: 86 percent of shoppers in a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults said they wanted meat raised without antibiotics to be available in their local supermarkets. [Read more…]

Beyond Factory Farming: Creating An Appetite For Pastured Poultry

June 11, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I get this a lot: “I understand that the things you write about are important — but they’re so depressing. Couldn’t you write some, you know, good news, for a change?”

So here you go: a solutions post for once, instead of another problem. (But I can’t promise to make a habit of it.)

What Industrial Farming Has to Do With Devastated Seas

May 24, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I spent the end of last week at the latest iteration of the Sustainable Foods Institute, an intense two days of discussion that the Monterey Bay Aquarium (home of Seafood Watch, the guide to sustainable seafood choices) puts on every year to bring together journalists, advocates and chefs. The Institute takes place within Cooking for Solutions, an overlapping food and wine conference dedicated to the proposition that sustainability and care for the planet are inseparable from deliciousness.

This is not as universal an idea as you might think. As the conference was opening, the New York Times ran a joint interview with the globally influential chefs Thomas Keller and Andoni Luis Aduriz in which they explicitly rejected ecological concerns over where or from whom they source the food they serve. Keller: “Is global food policy truly our responsibility? … I don’t think so.” Aduriz: “To align yourself entirely with … sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.” (In a great response piece, Grist food editor Twilight Greenaway explains why their thinking is so short-sighted.)

But “global food policy” ought to be the concern of anyone who raises, grows, catches, fishes, forages, sells or even just eats food — because, as University of Minnesota academic Jonathan Foley said in a devastating talk halfway through the two days: “We’re running out of everything. We’re running out of planet.”

Mothers, Farmers and Chefs Against Antibiotic Misuse

May 15, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you may remember Everly Macario and her son Simon Sparrow: I told their story in my 2010 book Superbug and blogged about them in 2011. Everly is a public health researcher in Chicago and the sister and daughter of physicians. Yet despite all her own knowledge, and all the knowledge resident in her family, she was unable to protect 17-month-old Simon from the MRSA infection that killed him in 24 hours in 2004.

Simon, as I wrote about him last year, was:

[A] big, sturdy child with no health problems except a touch of asthma. The day before he died, he woke up feverish and disoriented, startling his parents with a cry unlike anything they had heard from him before. It was a busy morning — his older sister had a stomach virus — but they got him to the pediatric ER, got him checked, and brought him home when doctors found nothing unusual going on.

A few hours later, Everly was working at home, watching both kids, and Simon’s breathing changed. Her husband James, a history professor, had driven a few hours away to give a speech. She called a friend who is a pediatrician, held the phone up to Simon’s nose and mouth so she could hear, and then got back on the line.

“Hang up,” her friend said. “Call 911.”

She did, and then she called her husband, who reversed course and began tearing back to the city. At the hospital, Simon failed rapidly: His heart raced, his blood pressure crashed, his lungs filled with fluid. His skin darkened with pinpoint hemorrhages. He died the following morning.

Simon Sparrow. Photo: Courtesy Everly Macario

High Levels of Resistant Bacteria on Meat (Again)

March 3, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A new report is out from the federal collaboration that monitors antibiotic resistance in animals, retail meat and people, and the news is not good.

The full title is the 2010 Retail Meat Report from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System. This report is issued by the Food and Drug Administration; the humans one comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the animals one from the US Department of Agriculture. It reports the results of testing on 5,280 meat samples collected in 2010 in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. (Those are sites of state labs participating in a federal surveillance network, FoodNet, plus one volunteer lab, Maryland.)

The report — which is broken down first by foodborne organism and then by meat type — notes a number of instances where either the percentage of bacteria that are antibiotic resistant, or the complexity of the resistance, is rising. Quoting from the report:

Also Receiving Antibiotics on Factory Farms: Shrimp

February 24, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Tom Philpott of Mother Jones had a great post earlier this week looking at the vast environmental damage caused by shrimp farming in South and Southeast Asia. He takes off from a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science by J. Boone Kauffman of Oregon State University, which examined the destruction of coastal mangrove forests that allows shrimp farms to be established and found that shrimp’s carbon footprint is 10 times higher than that of beef cattle. Tom says:

'Pig MRSA' Came From Humans, Evolved Via Farm Drugs

February 23, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In the summer of 2004, a 6-month-old girl who lived in the southeastern part of the Netherlands — prime, intensive hog-farming country — went in for surgery for a birth defect of her heart. As is routine in the Netherlands, which has excellent hospital infection control, she was checked before surgery for MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that can live on the skin without causing infections and can be unwittingly transmitted from one patient to another. The girl was carrying MRSA, which was a surprise — but the bigger surprise was that her MRSA strain did not render any results on the standard identification test, PFGE.

Looking for a source for the mysterious strain, the hospital epidemiologists where the girl was being treated asked to check her family: father, mother, school-age sibling. They were carrying it. They asked to check the family’s social circle; some of them were carrying it too. Then, flailing about for an answer — the Netherlands has such low rates of MRSA that these persistent findings were really rather odd — the epidemiologists asked what the family and their friends all did for a living, and received the answer that they were all pig farmers. So they checked the pigs, and the pigs were carrying the MRSA strain as well. And if a new MRSA strain in humans was odd, then a MRSA strain in pigs was very odd — because swine have their own varieties of staph, and are not supposed to get S. aureus, the usually human strain that accounts for the “SA” in MRSA.

That summer of detective work (which is told in full in my book Superbug) provided the first sighting of what would come to be called MRSA ST398, or in Europe CC398: a strain which was not quite like hospital MRSA, and not quite like community MRSA, and which carried a distinctive signature of resistance to tetracycline, a drug that is not much used for human MRSA but is routinely used in confinement-style farming. From its first identification, ST398 spread rapidly through Europe, and then into Canada, and then to the United States, being found first in pigs and pig-farm workers, and then in retail meat, and then in people with no connection to farming at all.

The only mystery was where it had come from.

Moving Beyond Factory Farms: Pastured Poultry

February 10, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

It’s astonishing what you can not know about the place where you live. Me, for instance: I live mostly in Atlanta. I’ve lived here twice, once for 10 years as a newspaper reporter, and now — after a four-year break — for 15 months so far as a writer (and trailing spouse, which is how I got back here). Between working for one of the (formerly) largest papers in the country, liking long drives, and regularly indulging my ungovernable curiosity, I thought I knew Georgia pretty well.

I was wrong. Here’s what I learned about Georgia on Thursday:

It raises more meat chickens than any other place in the United States, about 1.4 billion of them a year.
That’s 15 percent of all the animals raised in confinement agriculture in the United States. Not just 15 percent of the chickens; 15 percent of everything.
All those chickens produce 2 million tons of poultry manure and litter a year, one-fifth of what the entire U.S. poultry sector produces.
That waste is applied on land — including land where other food crops are grown — from which it can run off and contaminate water supplies.
40 to 80 percent of gut bacteria recovered from confinement chicken-houses are multi-drug resistant.
Caring for foodborne illness from organisms carried on chicken, and making up for lost productivity when people are made sick, costs about $2.4 billion per year.
Chicken catchers, who cage the birds on their way to slaughter, may lift 5,000 pounds in an hour. Slaughterhouse line workers may perform the same repetitive cutting motions 20,000 to 30,000 times in a work shift.
Slaughterhouses in Georgia kill 1 million chickens per week.
Poultry is exempt from humane slaughter regulations.

Drug Resistance in Pork: More Going On Than Appears

January 31, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A paper released recently, by the University of Iowa team that is the lone US research group tracking “pig MRSA” ST398, caused a ripple. (It came out while I was at ScienceOnline and it’s taken me a while to catch up.) The paper compares the occurrence of MRSA, drug-resistant staph, on various cuts of retail pork from pigs that were raised either conventionally in confinement, with routine use of antibiotics, or in an alternative rearing scheme with no antibiotics. (NB: Not “organic,” despite what some headlines said; that’s a separate issue of USDA licensure.) The team found that both conventionally raised and antibiotic-free meat carried MRSA, both the human-associated kind and the pig-adapted kind.

The TL;DR over the past week has been: There’s just as much resistant bacteria on drug-free meat as there is on conventional meat, so why spend the money — or raise the alarm over farm antibiotic use?

My interpretation is a little more nuanced. But my takeaway is that, in its underlying data, the study proves what campaigners against ag antibiotic use keep saying: that once you use antibiotics indiscriminately and drive the emergence of resistant organisms, you have no way of predicting where that resistance DNA will end up.

FDA Documents Show Agency Once Strongly Opposed Farm Antibiotic Overuse

December 29, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The use of antibiotics and sulfonamide drugs, especially in growth promotant and subtherapeutic amounts, favors the selection and development of single and multiple antibiotic-resistant and R-plasmid-bearing bacteria.

Animals that have received either subtherapeutic and/or therapeutic amounts of antibiotic and sulfonamide drugs in feeds may serve as a reservoir of antibiotic resistant pathogens and non-pathogens. These reservoirs of pathogens can produce human infections.

The prevalence of multi-resistant R-plasmid-bearing pathogenic and nonpathogenic bacteria in animals has increased and has been related to the use of antibiotics and sulfonamide drugs.

Organisms resistant to antibacterial agents have been found on meat and meat products.

If you give the text above a close read, you might think it was written by Mark Bittman or Tom Philpott or Tom Laskawy, or me — or any of the small number of journalists who focus on the safety and policy perils of giving scarce antibiotics to confinement-raised farm animals. After all, what it says is what any of us would say: Routine administration of antibiotics to livestock spurs the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria that move through the food chain, threaten human health, and lend their DNA to yet other bacteria, increasing the reservoir of resistance in a dangerous and untracked manner.

As it happens, though, the text above wasn’t written by any of us. It was written by the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA.

Yes, the FDA — the federal agency that, as I wrote last Friday, has just backed off a 34-year attempt to assert regulatory control over “growth promoter” antibiotic use, opting instead for voluntary self-policing by the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries.

News: FDA Won't Act Against Ag Antibiotic Use

December 23, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

With no notice other than a holiday-eve posting in the Federal Register, the US Food and Drug Administration has reneged on its long-stated intention to compel large-scale agriculture to curb over-use of agricultural antibiotics, which it had planned to do by reversing its approval for putting penicillin and tetracyclines in feed.

How long-stated? The FDA first announced its intention to withdraw those approvals in 1977.

From the official posting:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA or the Agency) is withdrawing two 1977 notices of opportunity for a hearing (NOOH), which proposed to withdraw certain approved uses of penicillin and tetracyclines intended for use in feeds for food-producing animals based in part on microbial food safety concerns.¹ … (¹FDA’s approval to withdraw the approved uses of the drugs was based on three statutory grounds: (1) The drugs are not shown to be safe (21 U.S.C. 360b(e)(1)(B)); (2) lack of substantial evidence of effectiveness (21 U.S.C. 360b(e)(1)(C)); and (3) failure to submit required reports (21 U.S.C. 360b(e)(2)(A)).)

There is a lot of background to this, but here is the takeaway: For 34 years, the FDA has been contending that administering small doses of antibiotics to healthy animals is an inappropriate use of increasingly scarce drugs — a position in which it is supported by organizations as mainstream as the American Medical Association. With this withdrawal, it backs away from the actions it took to support that assertion — which may indicate there will be no further government action on the issue until after the 2012 election.

More MRSA Found In U.S. Retail Meat (Turkey, Too)

November 22, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

There are two new studies out that confirm, once again, that drug-resistant staph or MRSA — normally thought of as a problem in hospitals and out in everyday life, in schoolkids, sports teams, jails and gyms — is showing up in animals and in the meat those animals become.

The strain of staph that shows up in farm animals, known as “livestock-associated” MRSA or MRSA ST398, first emerged in pigs in the Netherlands, and has been widely identified in retail meat in Europe. (You can find a long archive of posts on ST398 here, and more here.) But that same strain has been difficult to identify in the United States. That may be due in part to the U.S. having a uniquely massive epidemic of community-associated MRSA, far larger than in any other country, which likely both obscures any animal epidemic from detection, and possibly also fills the ecological niche that livestock-associated staph might otherwise occupy. But, it must be said, there’s also remarkably little political will to look for livestock-associated MRSA (though the U.S. Department of Agriculture has now funded a study).

Nevertheless, individual investigators keep trying, and when they look for the pathogen, they find it, such as in these studies from May and this one from April. Now, two other teams have as well.

Running Out of Antibiotics: Europe Gets It

November 20, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In the United States, it’s been “Get Smart About Antibiotics” Week this past week, an annual observance in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its medical and public health partners try to raise awareness of antibiotic resistance. The real action this week though was in Europe, where individual researchers and the EU’s version of a CDC — the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control — are speaking out about the problem with unusual candor.

Here’s the short version: In Europe, according to the ECDC, 25,000 people each year die as a result of multi-drug resistant infections, causing an additional cost to society of 1.5 billion Euros ($2.02 billion): 938 million Euros ($1.27 billion) in hospital and outpatient medical costs, and an additional 596.3 million Euros ($806 million) in lost productivity.

Dr. Marc Sprenger, director of the ECDC, said Friday:

This certainly is an underestimate of the true economic impact of antimicrobial resistance. In particular, the figures were based on data for just five multidrug-resistant bacteria.The estimate was also based on a conservative figure for the cost of a day in hospital… We think the real cost of treating a patient with a multidrug-resistant infection would be higher than this. My take home message is that antimicrobial resistance is one of the most serious public health challenges that we face.

EU Parliament Votes To Oppose Most Farm Antibiotic Use

November 7, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A quick post, because I’m on a ferocious deadline, but still can’t let this news go by. In a vote that’s non-binding but high profile and influential, the European Parliament has resolved to end “prophylactic use” of antibiotics in farming, and to prevent any “last resort” antibiotics from being used in animals, in order to keep resistance from developing so that the drugs will still be effective in human medicine.

This is a significant development. The European Union has already banned “growth promotion,” the use of micro-doses of antibiotics that cause meat animals to fatten more quickly. What the Parliament is doing here is asking the European Commission, the EU’s law-making body, to add “disease prevention” use to the ban. That’s the delivery of treatment-strength doses of antibiotics to all animals on a farm in order to prevent their becoming ill as a result of the confinement conditions in which they are held. It accounts for a substantial portion of the antibiotics used in agriculture, and is a major driver of the emergence of antibiotic-resistant organisms.