Journalist and Author
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.
[Read more…]
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.
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.
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.)
Pig farms from the air. Maryn McKenna, 
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.
A pretty extraordinary thing happened Thursday, here in Georgia: A district court in the middle part of the state unsealed a 76-count, 52-page indictment of former officials of the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), charging them with fraud and conspiracy for knowingly distributing peanut products contaminated with Salmonella.
The 2009 outbreak caused by the contaminated peanuts reached, literally, nationwide. Hundreds of products were recalled; 714 people were known to have been made sick by it in 46 states, one-fourth of them were hospitalized, and nine died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (As with other foodborne outbreaks, in which only a fraction of cases are confirmed by lab analysis, the actual number of victims may be much larger.) While that is not the largest outbreak recorded in the United States — the Salmonella in eggs scandal of 2010 sickened almost 2,000 people — it is definitely large: Most of the multi-state foodborne outbreaks analyzed by the CDC involve fewer than 100 known victims.
The PCA outbreak’s size makes it unusual, but so does the decision to press for prosecution: That happens in very few foodborne-illness cases. But if you read the indictment (which I extracted from the federal PACER system and put up at my Scribd account), you’ll see why the Department of Justice decided to prosecute this time. It alleges a trail of not only negligence — unrepaired roof leaks, ignored rodent infestations — but also deliberate deception which ranged from faked origin labeling to falsified lab results.
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.”
A few days ago, the Food and Drug Administration released two important documents related to antibiotic use in livestock raising, and what the results of that antibiotic use are. I’d say that they released them quietly, except, when it comes to this issue, every release seems to be quiet, never accompanied by the press releases or briefings that other divisions of the FDA use to publicize their news.
The two documents are the 2011 Retail Meat Report from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, or NARMS, and the 2011 Summary Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food-Producing Animals, which is known for short as ADUFA, after the 2008 Animal Drug User Fee Act that mandated the data be collected.
These two reports capture almost all the data we receive from the federal government about antibiotic use in livestock production (which is not the same thing as “all the data the federal government possesses” — there is evidence they receive more than they release). So their annual release is an important indicator for whether antibiotic use in meat production, and antibiotic resistance in meat, are trending up or down.
The news does not appear to be good.
In the past months, there have been several troubling research reports, from different parts of the world, exploring aspects of the same problem: Multi-drug resistant bacteria are present in chicken, apparently because of the use of antibiotics in poultry production, and are passing to people who work with, prepare or eat chicken, at some risk to their health.
Here are a few of the publications:
There’s a very fast-moving story breaking in the United Kingdom this past 24 hours: Millions of pre-made burgers sold by supermarkets in the United Kingdom and Ireland have been taken off the market after the meat they contain was found to contain DNA from both horses and pigs. More than a third of the products tested contained some DNA not from cows, and in individual burgers, the amounts ranged from very small to one-third. (Here are overnight stories from The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph.)
The adulteration was discovered by Irish food authorities; Ireland’s food-safety rules are so tight that they include DNA testing for meat (as highlighted on Twitter by Irish food journalist Suzanne Campbell). At this point, the adulteration has been traced to three beef-processing plants, two in Ireland called Liffey Meats and Silvercrest Foods, and one in the U.K. called Dalepak Hambleton. Silvercrest, a subsidiary of ABP Foods, has pointed to “two continental European third-party suppliers who are the suspected source of the product in question,” and the Daily Mail says the source may be processors in Spain and the Netherlands that supplied a powdered protein, used to bulk up the burgers, which was supposed to be beef.
The illegal horsemeat may well be of European origin. But if I were a European journalist following this story, I’d look further afield as well. I’d look at Canada, Mexico and the United States, and I’d ask whether it is possible that the horsemeat originated in North America — and whether its risks include not just the non-disclosure of its presence, but undisclosed drug residues as well. [Read more…]
