Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Getting More Farm Antibiotics Data: What Will It Take?

By 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…]

"Sh*t, Just Ship It": Felony Prosecution for Salmonella-Peanut Executives

By Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

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

By 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…]

Antibiotics and Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in Meat: Not Getting Better

By Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

Why We Can't See Inside Poultry Production, and What Might Change if We Could

By Leave a Comment

 

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:

[Read more…]

U.K. 'Horseburger' Scandal: Did the Meat Originate in the U.S.?

By Leave a Comment

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…]

A Government Takes Ag Antibiotics Seriously — But Not Our Government

By Leave a Comment

Matt Rourke/AP

It’s always fascinating to me to see how seriously other parts of the world take the issue of antibiotic use in agriculture, given the long struggle in the United States to get the Food and Drug Administration to act and to get legislation through Congress. The European Parliament has voted down any prophylactic antibiotic use, and China has banned growth promoters.

And last week, the UK Parliament examined the issue for the first time in more than a decade, in a long debate that featured some stinging language by members of Parliament and, it must be said, some inadequate responses by a government agency.

[Read more…]

Livestock MRSA Found For First Time In UK Milk

By 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.

[Read more…]

One Family's Journey From Foodborne-Illness Victim to "Food Patriots"

By Leave a Comment

A quick post today, because I have deadlines, and because this Kickstarter closes tomorrow and you should take a look at it while you can.

In February of 2006, when he was 16 years old, Sam Spitz went out for lunch with his high school pals. They were athletes, and looking for a big meal, so they went to a pizza-pasta place. Sam, though, had an inkling of healthy eating from his mother, Jennifer Amdur Spitz, who liked to shop at farmers’ markets. He chose a chicken Caesar salad instead.

By the end of the school day, it seemed like a bad choice. He developed diarrhea so severe that Jennifer and his dad, Jeff Spitz, had to tape an adult diaper on him to get him to the emergency room. The ER staff assumed it was a foodborne illness, took a culture, and sent them home with a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

It had no effect. It took weeks, along with visits to specialists and more tests and more drugs and eventually a colonoscopy, before the family discovered that what had felled the strapping young athlete was an antibiotic-resistant foodborne illness: Campylobacter, a bug that frequently travels on chicken.

Sam Spitz was seriously sick for a month and recovering for many more. He was a pitcher, but missed his entire baseball season, along with the chance to be inspected by college recruiters. He was still on restricted activity when the football recruiters came around the following fall. He eventually recovered (and played football for University of Wisconsin) — but his family’s attitude toward food and food safety was forever changed.

The Spitzes, who are award-winning filmmakers, have documented their journey to a better understanding of our food system in a new film that they are now polishing, called “Food Patriots.” In it, they talk not only about their own dawning understanding of how our food is produced, but also about many other people who are trying to get food grown and distributed in a healthier, more equitable way.

“We were really insulated, as a family, from knowing where our food comes from, and from having the awareness that allows you to make healthy choices,” Jennifer told me. “But this film has a much bigger footprint than just our journey. We’re in it to provide a narrative, and some humor — but what we do is look at people who are inspiring us to think about, buy and eat food differently.”

The Spitzes are in their last 24 hours on their Kickstarter. They have made their initial goal, which was to fund post-production — but in the last day, they’ve been offered a match by a major donor. Anything they receive today will be doubled by the donor, and those funds will be spent getting the film out to communities for screenings.

Jennifer described the film to me as “zero-depth” — like the kind of public pool where you can stand at the end with just your toes wet, and move deeper at your own pace. “There have been a lot of scary, hit-you-over-the-head food films already, and people have already responded to that approach,” she said. “We don’t preach. We want to get people into conversation.”

Take a look.

[HTML1]

Footnote: If antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter sounds at all familiar, it may be because I wrote about it in my two-year investigation of foodborne illness for SELF Magazine last summer. Here’s that story and my post about it.

Flickr/mollyeh11/CC

 

Resistant Bacteria in Pork — And Problematic Pharmaceuticals Too

By Leave a Comment

Bad news today from an investigation conducted by Consumers Union that was released on the web and will be published in the January issue of the nonprofit’s magazine, Consumer Reports. Tests on pork chops and ground pork, bought in six cities under a variety of labels, showed high rates of contamination with a range of bacteria, many of which were antibiotic-resistant — and also showed evidence of a drug so controversial that it is banned in some other countries.

[Read more…]