Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

To Slow Down Drug Resistance in Health Care, Buy an Antibiotic-Free Turkey for Thanksgiving

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Organic turkey poults, Lance Cheung, USDA. CC on Flickr

Organic turkey poults, Lance Cheung, USDA. USDA/Flickr

I thought it might be time to switch away from Ebola and catch up with other disease problems that continue to occur in the world. (If you miss Ebolanoia, though, I’m still collecting instances at my Tumblr. The latest: Indian authorities have force-quarantined in an airport a man who returned from West Africa with a clean bill of health and negative blood tests. They say they will not allow him to leave until his semen tests negative for Ebolavirus. Yes, they are insisting on samples.)

So: How can healthcare workers contribute to slowing down antibiotic resistance? A healthcare nonprofit suggests they commit to buying an antibiotic-free turkey for Thanksgiving.

If it feels like the problem in one sphere, medicine, doesn’t have much to do with the other, agriculture, then you are the perfect target for this pledge. (Even if you don’t actually work in health care.)

Here’s the backdrop to the campaign, created by Health Care Without Harm,the Sharing Antimicrobial Reports for Pediatric Stewardship (SHARPS) collaborative, and the Pediatric Infectious Disease Society (PIDS):

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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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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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Advice for the Annual Observance of Food-Poisoning, Umm, Thanksgiving Day

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My grandparents — children of Irish and Scottish immigrants, for whom calories per penny was a much more important food value than fine cuisine — had a little mnemonic for Thanksgiving. It went like this:

Turkey, tetrazzini, ptomaine.

Perhaps that requires a little explanation.

The turkey part should be self-evident. Tetrazzini — a cream-sauce casserole based on spaghetti, one of those early 20th-century dishes invented to honor Italian opera stars — was what they did the second day with the turkey leftovers. Ptomaine (the “p” is silent) was what they worried lay in wait for them on the third. A late 19th-century term that has passed out of use, it derived from the notion that poisonous compounds lurked in rotting food.

For people who grew up before the antibiotic era — and who learned to cook when refrigerators were literal ice chests that kept things cool at best — “food poisoning” was a reasonable fear, and a risk they refused to take. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, no matter how delicious it appeared, whatever remained of the turkey went into the trash.

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