Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

High Levels of Resistant Bacteria on Meat (Again)

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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:

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Also Receiving Antibiotics on Factory Farms: Shrimp

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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:

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

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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.

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Moving Beyond Factory Farms: Pastured Poultry

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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.

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Fast-Spreading Animal Virus Leaps Europe, UK Borders

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Photo:

A newly identified disease is moving rapidly through livestock in Europe and has authorities both worried and puzzled. The disease, dubbed Schmallenberg virus for a town in west-central Germany where one of the first outbreaks occurred, makes adult animals only mildly ill, but causes lambs, kids and calves to be born dead or deformed.

The United Kingdom’s Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AVHLA) said today that the virus has been found on 29 farms in England; in the past few weeks they found it in sheep, but today announced that they have identified it in cattle as well. In mainland Europe, it has been identified on several hundred farms in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, and most recently in France. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has said that the new virus’s closest relatives do not cause disease in humans — but that other more distantly related viruses do:

The new virus belongs to the Bunyaviridae family, genus Orthobunyavirus, Simbu serogroup (preliminary information, based solely on genetic information)… Genetic characterisation has shown that the new virus is closest to the following Simbu serogroup viruses: Shamonda-, Aino- and Akabane-viruses, which do not cause disease in humans.
However, at least 30 orthobunyaviruses are zoonotic and may cause disease in humans, with symptoms ranging from mild to severe — e.g. La Crosse encephalitis virus, California Encephalitis virus, Cache Valley virus, Batai virus, Tahyna virus, Inkoo virus, Snowshoe Hare virus, Iquitos virus and Oropouche virus.

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Drug Resistance in Pork: More Going On Than Appears

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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.

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SUPERBUG Is Dark To Protest SOPA And PIPA

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Constant readers: Today, Wikipedia is locked, Boing Boing is dark, and I join with many bloggers much more important than me to protest legislation that would destroy the Internet as we know it. Superbug is dark today to protest the ill-conceived Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.

I humbly request that you consider visiting these sites for more:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s explainer

Google.com’s petition, which our parent Wired.com has also bannered and linked

A letter from leading tech companies.

Why is a journalist taking a position on legislation, when we are bound by professional practice to be objective and fair? This letter from the Online News Association explains journalists’ opposition to SOPA.

I’ll see you back here tomorrow. If SOPA and PIPA passed, on the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t.

Totally Drug-Resistant TB: A Patient Is Missing

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There was a lot of interest in  in TDR-TB Friday; both The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC and Science Friday kindly asked me to be on to talk about it. While I was waiting for the phone link to Science Friday to become live, an alarming bulletin arrived in my e-mail. The early-warning list ProMED reported that the existence of two additional cases of TDR-TB have been disclosed, in Bangalore, 600 miles from Mumbai where the first known Indian cases were identified. The patients, a 56-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman, had been coming to a hospital for directly observed administration of their TB for more than two years; they were initially recognized as MDR-TB patients, with disease that was highly resistant but not untreatable, but were not getting better. For the past two weeks, though, the man has not shown up, and no one appears to know where he is.

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More News: FDA Curbs One Class of Farm Drugs

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Here’s a bookend to the Food and Drug Administration’s disappointing Christmas Eve notice that it will cease trying to regulate the largest classes of growth-promoter antibiotics. Today, the agency announced that it is forbidding certain uses of a different class of drugs, cephalosporins.

To those who are concerned about antibiotic overuse in agriculture, though, this is good news — though it may be more good news-bad news-bad news-good news.

The dialectic looks like this:

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FDA Documents Show Agency Once Strongly Opposed Farm Antibiotic Overuse

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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.

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