University of Iowa finds high levels of MRSA in pigs and farmworkers
If anyone in Seattle was eating bacon for breakfast this morning, Post-Intelligencer Senior 
Correspondent Andrew Schneider,made them think twice about it.
Schneider reported that Tara Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa Department of Epidemiology (along with her graduate researchers) found MRSA in more than 70 percent of the pigs they tested on farms in Iowa and Illinois.
MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus –is a potentially fatal bacteria. Schneider reports:
In what is apparently the first testing of swine for MRSA in the U.S., Smith and her team swabbed the noses of 209 pigs on 10 farms. They also found the bacteria among livestock workers employed by those hog operations.
On Friday, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, Abby Harper, one of Smith's graduate assistants, presented the results of the study on farmworkers. She said she and Michael Male tested 20 workers at the Iowa swine farms and found that 45 percent carried the same MRSA bacteria as the pigs.
The entire Post Intelligencer article is online.
