MRSA and the Food Connection

Posted on November 17, 2007 by MRSA Attorney

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (usually pronounced in short as "Mursa" or spelled out as MRSA), is a bacterium responsible for some difficult-to-treat infections in humans. 

Heather Moore, senior writer for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), wrote a concerning Op-ed on MRSA and its relationship with antibiotics fed to animals titled “Your supper & superbugs” . 

Here are some of the more worrisome points:

  • Approximately 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States aren't given to human patients -- they are fed to farmed animals. The filthy, crowded conditions on factory farms are breeding grounds for disease.
  • One USDA study showed that 66 percent of beef samples were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have reported that 96 percent of the chicken flesh they tested was contaminated with antibiotic-resistant campylobacter bacteria.
  • Another study conducted by the CDC indicated that chicken sold in supermarkets is often tainted with potentially fatal bacteria called Enterococcus faecium. This bacterium was not even affected by Synercid, a drug commonly used to treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
  • A recent Belgian survey showed that MRSA has been found in 68 percent of the pig farms in that country. In 37 percent of the cases, the farmer and the farmer's family carried pig MRSA -- a variant of human MRSA.
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Does MRSA come from animals?

Posted on November 9, 2007 by MRSA Lawyer

Salon.com features an interesting article about Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus that focuses on the origins of MRSA and how it is spreading to humans.  Following is an excerpt from the article:

"Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA -- or, in the parlance of New York tabloids, "super staph" -- is an antibiotic-resistant version of one of the bacteria collectively known as staph. Staph, which can cause everything from skin infections to more life-threatening diseases, usually attacks older hospital patients who develop infections after surgery. The newer, often more virulent strains collectively known as CA-MRSA (community-acquired MRSA) have been all over the news in the past few weeks, as they affect people younger and healthier than the usual targets. A recent study suggested that MRSA infection was responsible for almost 19,000 deaths in the United States last year -- more than AIDS -- including the very public deaths of children and adolescents in Virginia, New York and elsewhere. Public health officials have tried to quiet fears, but the problem could get worse. MRSA remains treatable with a number of different antibiotics, but there are already signs that resistance to some of those drugs might be just around the corner.

Recently, something about MRSA -- and its epidemiology -- has been changing in ways that suggest that those changes could be taking place among livestock. Traditionally considered a disease picked up in hospitals, MRSA is now being seen more and more often in the community. And it doesn't appear that the hospital-acquired strains have just left the hospital and gone feral. The community-acquired strains of MRSA are genetically different. They're new. And though there is as of yet no definitive proof identifying livestock as the source of the major new MRSA strains, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests animals are, at minimum, reservoirs for other new strains now infecting humans.

Those studies done to date in Europe and Canada on MRSA give some credence to the involvement of livestock in MRSA's mutation. Hospitals in the Netherlands, for example, have had fantastic success at controlling MRSA. They employ a "search and destroy" policy, using aggressive screening, strict infection-control procedures, and severe restrictions on the quantity of antibiotics dispensed. They have managed to keep MRSA rates far below those in the rest of Europe. Dutch rates are so low, in fact, that Dutch hospitals list a previous visit to a foreign hospital as an MRSA risk factor.

Read the full article here.

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Do MRSA Illnesses have a food connection? Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus - MRSA - found in Canadian Pigs, Farms, and Farmers

Posted on October 4, 2007 by MRSA Attorney

According to  All Headline News, a new study published in Veterinary Microbiology found MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is surprisingly common in Canadian pigs, farms and pig farmers, signaling that animal agriculture may be a source of the deadly bacteria. The Veterinary Microbiology study (Khanna et al. Veterinary Medicine 2007) is the first to show that North American pig farms and farmers commonly carry MRSA.

Researchers looked for MRSA on twenty Ontario farms, in 285 pigs.  They found MRSA at forty-five percent of farms (9/20) and in nearly one in four pigs (71/285). One in five pig farmers studied (5/25) also were found to carry MRSA, a much higher rate than in the general North American population. The strains of MRSA bacteria found in Ontario pigs and pig farmers included a strain common to human MRSA infections in Canada.

A study published in the October, 2007 issue of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) (Klevens et al: Invasive methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections in the United States JAMA 2007; 298: 1753-1771) estimated almost 100,000 MRSA infections in 2005, and nearly 19,000 deaths in the United States. In comparison, HIV/AIDS killed 17.000 people that year.

Researchers generally believed MRSA was an opportunistic infection occurring mainly in hospitals. However more information is coming to light that finds even healthy people are developing MRSA infections and pig farms may be a possible culprit. Some experts in the in the agricultural, medical,  and environmental industries are calling for Congress to compel the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to study whether the use of human antibiotics in animal agriculture is contributing to the reported surge in MRSA infections and deaths in the United States.
 

"Identifying and controlling community sources of MRSA is a public health priority of the 1st order," said Richard Wood, Executive Director of Food Animal Concerns Trust and Steering Committee Chair of Keep Antibiotics Working. "Are livestock farmers and farms in the United States also sources? We don't know for sure, because the US government is not systematically testing US livestock for MRSA."

 

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