Maryn McKenna

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Antibiotic Use in Chickens: Responsible for Hundreds of Human Deaths?

August 9, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Flickr: Thousand Robots, CC

In the long back and forth between science and agriculture over the source of antibiotic resistance in humans — Due to antibiotic overuse on farms, or in human medicine? — one question has been stubbornly hard to answer. If antibiotic-resistant bacteria do arise on farms, do they leave the farm and circulate in the wider world? And if they do, how much damage do they do?

A multi-national team of researchers recently published their answers to both questions. Their answer: In Europe, 1,518 deaths and 67,236 days in the hospital, every year, which would not otherwise have occurred.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, cephalosporins, E. coli, food, food policy, food safety, poultry, Resistance, Science Blogs

More on MRSA on Farms and in Farm Workers, and the Arguments for and Against

July 12, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Photo: ROIrving/ Flickr

In my last post I promised to catch up on some of the other research that has been published on the flow of MRSA (and other resistant organisms) between farm animals and farm workers as a result of farm antibiotic use.

Before I do that, though, I want to nod toward two other great pieces published on this. First, Mark Bittman  examined this issue closely at the New York Times. And Clare Leschin-Hoar also covered the new research at Take Part. (Bonus: Don’t miss her dissection of the news that a National Geographic photographer was arrested in Kansas after taking pictures of a feedlot — from the air.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, food, food policy, food safety, hogs, MRSA, Science Blogs, ST398

"Pig MRSA" Carried by Workers from North Carolina Intensive Hog Farms

July 5, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Pig farms from the air. Maryn McKenna, Creative Commons License

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 mainly in only one state in the US, Iowa. With this paper, the count rises to two(see Update): 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.

The question of whether livestock production’s use of antibiotics causes antibiotic-resistant bacteria to move into the wider world is much argued-over, and pig MRSA, or ST398 to be polite, is crucial to that dispute. That’s because, unlike most resistant bacteria, it has a genetic signature that makes an inarguable link back to farm drug use. More on that below. (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. Quick summary, with more unpacking to follow: Researchers checked livestock-farm workers in North Carolina to see whether they were carrying staph, and also drug-resistant staph. The workers formed two groups: one group worked at conventional hog operations, which routinely use antibiotics, and the other group at antibiotic-free farms. Both groups carried staph and also drug-resistant staph, which would be expected; about 30 percent of the population carries sensitive staph and about 4 percent carries the drug-resistant form. But, the key difference: 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.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, food, food policy, food safety, hogs, MRSA, North Carolina, Science Blogs, ST398

G8 Meeting Begins: Ag Antibiotics on Agenda?

June 17, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Photo: Caro’s Lines (CC), Flickr

Quick post today as I’m getting ready for some travel. Just to note: The G8 summit is beginning in Ireland, and there is a push on to put intensive agriculture and its antibiotic use on the agenda for discussion by the major Western economies.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, food, food policy, Science Blogs

The Cool Factor (With Feathers): New York Chefs React To Pastured Poultry

June 11, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Photo: OZinOH/Flickr

If you’ve been around here a while, you might remember a couple of posts about the pastured-poultry movement. Pastured poultry is new old-style: beyond cage-free, beyond free-range, it puts chickens out on grass for most of their lives, producing a bird that lives longer, looks healthier, and tastes distinctly different from standard supermarket chicken. (“They have huge, old-fashioned taste,” Shaun Doty, a chef who has been working with them, told me last year. “They cook differently, and they eat differently.”

Pastured poultry represents a radically different way of raising chicken than the standard large-intensive model: no antibiotic use, no crammed chicken houses, no genetic-monoculture birds with their inevitable physical vulnerabilities. So far, it’s a niche in the market: The number of producers is small, the birds are more expensive — and even though the chickens taste like what our grandparents would have eaten, most of us have never known chicken tasted like that, so they can be a challenge to sell. The first problem, though, is raising awareness that the alternative exists at all.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, chicken, poultry, Science Blogs

How Do You Know Which Chicken to Buy? This Kickstarter Might Help.

May 31, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

 

There’s a project I’ve been watching on Kickstarter and I’m a little surprised it hasn’t gotten more traction, so I thought I’d call it out. TL;DR: You know those wallet cards and apps that help you make good choices about buying seafood: what’s endangered, what’s overfished, what’s responsible to eat? This effort, BuyingPoultry.com, hopes to do the same for chicken — but it’s only halfway to its goal.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, chicken, Kickstarter, NARMS, poultry, Resistance, Science Blogs

Industrial Slaughter, Antibiotic Use and Unhealthy Meat: Ted Conover in Harper's

April 29, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I don’t often recommend print magazines here, because I figure they already have their own megaphone, and whatever power we at Wired have to push along other writers, I’d rather use to promote bloggers who might not have high traffic. That said: There is a piece in the current Harper’s which should be a must-read for anyone interested in livestock agriculture and meat production in America, written by long-time immersive journalist and NYU professor Ted Conover. It is entirely behind a paywall, and so (to my perception) is not being talked about — but it should be. It is a detailed and unbiased account of how large-scale slaughter happens, and it makes some important points about routine antibiotic use.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, food, food policy, meat, Science Blogs

Gene Sequencing Pinpoints Antibiotic Resistance Moving From Livestock to Humans

March 28, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The antibiotic era was barely 20 years old when people started raising concerns about using the new “miracle drugs” in agriculture. Penicillin first entered use in 1943, streptomycin in 1944, tetracycline in 1948 — and by 1965, the United Kingdom’s Agricultural Research Council was hearing testimony that organisms common in food animals, especially Salmonella, were becoming resistant to the antibiotics being used on the animals while they were alive. By 1969, the UK government had compiled an official report outlining the danger, and by 1973, a task force of the US Food and Drug Administration had concurred, and concluded the only safe action was to withdraw approval to use antibiotics in animals. (At which, as we now know, they would never be successful.)

The policy difficulty regarding this long-recognized problem has never been the emergence of resistant bacteria on farms; no one seriously disputes that resistance emerges whenever antibiotics exert selective pressure on bacteria, killing the vulnerable and opening an ecological niche into which the surviving not-vulnerable can expand. The  sticking point has been the difficulty of proving that those resistant bacteria depart from farms, cross to humans, and cause resistant illness in them. Stuart Levy demonstrated it in 1976, on an experimental farm plot he set up just to make the proof. Most of the rest of the research, though — and after decades, there are hundreds of pieces of research — has been observational and retrospective: Looking at the drugs administered to populations of animals (about which we have very little data), measuring the antibiotic-resistant illness that arises in the human population, and making increasingly sophisticated backward matches between the resistance factors that show up in humans and the drugs that are deployed primarily on farms.

Demonstrating the bacterial traffic prospectively and experimentally, as Levy did, is challenging not just logistically but also ethically. It is difficult to imagine a study design that could trace specific animals, their meat, and their eaters in a large group of free-living humans; and unless you have volunteers, as Levy did, the study would push ethical boundaries as well. But having that lack of definition in the middle of the animal-to-human bacterial flow permits uncertainty — which proponents of continued ag antibiotic use exploit.

A new study of Danish farmers and their livestock may have ended that uncertainty. It is still retrospective, but its observations — using whole-genome sequencing — are so fine-grained that their tracing of the bacterial traffic seems to me to be difficult to challenge.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, food, food policy, MRSA, Resistance, Science Blogs, ST398

Getting More Farm Antibiotics Data: What Will It Take?

March 5, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Sorry for the radio silence, constant readers: I’m preparing for the big annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists, where I am on the board, and the tasks are piling up. Here’s one of the things that happened last week, while I was off getting ready: The Senate committee charged with oversight of agricultural antibiotic use took up re-authorization of the regulation that delivers data on ag drugs, without allowing any testimony about the negative, unintended consequences of misusing and overusing those drugs.

Fortunately, the House of Representatives provided a partial corrective: Members there introduced a bill that would require better data collection. Unfortunately, that bill is a long way from law — and the re-approval of the FDA regulation is close.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, congress, FDA, food, food policy, Science Blogs

Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Surround Big Swine Farms — In China as Well as the U.S.

February 12, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I suspect we think of large-scale confinement agriculture as a uniquely American issue. Possibly that’s because growth-promoter antibiotic use, which makes meat-raising efficient, originated in the United States; more likely, it’s because some of the largest firms in that sector — Smithfield and Tyson, for example — are US-based. But public and private research efforts (including the US Department of Agriculture, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the Pew Charitable Trusts) have documented that intensive livestock-raising is increasing in emerging economies such as India and China; as incomes rise, demand for meat does too.

A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that the unintended consequences of confinement agriculture are occurring in those countries as well. A multi-national team of researchers from Michigan State University and two campuses of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found — well, I can’t put it better than their paper’s title does: “Diverse and abundant antibiotic resistance genes in Chinese swine farms.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, China, food, food policy, food safety, pigs, Resistance, Science Blogs

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