Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

MRSA in UK Turkeys Raises Questions of Communication, Transparency and Risk

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Image: OZinOH (CC), Flickr

Two years ago, I celebrated Thanksgiving here on Superbug by announcing some new studies on resistant bacteria being found in turkey meat in the US. That did not go over well; so this year, I saved the bad-turkey news for the post-holiday week. And here you go:

Just in time for our Thanksgiving — and in the ramp-up to English Christmas, for which turkey is a traditional dish — the UK’s Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency announced that livestock-associated MRSA, drug-resistant staph, has been found in UK poultry for the first time. From their not-very-informative press release:

The Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA) has identified the presence of Livestock-Associated Meticillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (LA-MRSA) in poultry on a farm in East Anglia… Once the poultry have been slaughtered and sold the owner will carry out cleansing and disinfection of their accommodation to ensure the next birds do not become colonised when they arrive on site. The AHVLA will revisit the farm after depopulation and thorough cleansing and disinfection to determine whether LA-MRSA is still present.

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Antibiotic Overuse on Farms: Is the Opinion Tide Turning?

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USDA Photos by Lance Cheung/Flickr

It’s been a busy few weeks here at Casa Superbug — including some conference appearances, more on them later — so the first thing I’d like to do is point out some things that appeared while I was offline. Notably: In editorials, three newspapers recently challenged the way antibiotics are used on farms and asked why we can’t do better.

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Shutdown Salmonella Outbreak Continues. CDC Food Safety Chief: 'We Have a Blind Spot.'

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Image: Ben Husmann, (CC), Flickr

We’re 11 days now into the federal shutdown and four days since the announcement of a major foodborne outbreak in chicken that is challenging the shutdown-limited abilities of the food-safety and disease-detective personnel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture. Here’s an update.
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Two Former FDA Commissioners Agree: Ag Antibiotic Policies Must Change

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source: Anselm (CC), Flickr

This is an ICYMI (“in case you missed it”) post, twice over. Last week, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Donald Kennedy, Ph.D., wrote a piece for the Washington Post in which he urged that the FDA change how it regulates antibiotics that are used in agriculture as part of meat production.

His prescription is notable, not just in itself, but because it marks the second time in a few months that a former commissioner of the FDA used a major paper’s op-ed page to criticize his former agency’s conduct on farm antibiotic use. David A. Kessler, M.D., did the same thing, hitting many of the same points, in the New York Times in March.

Kennedy was FDA Commissioner from 1977 to 1979, just as scrutiny of antibiotic use in livestock-raising was beginning. (There’s a timeline in this post.) Kessler was Commissioner from 1990 to 1997, during the time in which the FDA began to look for, and find, antibiotic-resistant bacteria on retail meat. There were almost 20 years between their tenures — and 16 years from Kessler to now — and yet almost nothing has changed.

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

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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.

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

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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.)

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

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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.

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G8 Meeting Begins: Ag Antibiotics on Agenda?

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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.

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News Round-Up: Food, Foodborne Illness, And Antibiotic Resistance In Food

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OK, still catching up. Today: food, foodborne illness, and antibiotic use and resistance in food — lots of news in a multi-item rundown. (Under normal circumstances, I’d give each of these items a post of its own; but since they all happened in the past few weeks, it seems better to note them and move on.)

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

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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.

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