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MRSA superbug on pork and chicken raises health fears

PORKER

Well-known member
MRSA superbug on pork and chicken raises health fears
25/06/2007 11:30:00
FWi
The emergence of a new strain of the MRSA superbug in pig and chicken units on the continent represents a “serious human health threat” that could spread to the UK, according to the Soil Association. ( ITS already in the US. MEXICO And Canada)


On Monday (25 June) the Soil Association published research suggesting that the superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), has already transferred from farm animals to farm workers and their families in the Netherlands.

The organic body reckons “40% of Dutch pigs, 13% of calves, a high proportion of chickens and 50% of pig farmers have been found to carry farm-animal MRSA”.

The SA has quoted a letter from Dr C. P. Veerman, the Dutch minister for agriculture, to the Dutch parliament that said that in the Netherlands, farm-animal MRSA has been found in 20% of pork, 21% of chicken and 3% of beef on sale to the public.

Mr Veerman adds: “It is very unlikely that ‘animal-farming-related MRSA’ only exists in the Netherlands, considering the animal types where MRSA is found and the many animal movements and comparable livestock farming methods in other EU member states. So far, there are no hard facts about this. It is important, for these reasons, that all Member States examine their animals.”

Although the new strain of MRSA has yet to be found in the UK the SA is lobbying government to step-up its surveillance efforts.

“It has not yet been found in UK livestock or meat products, but neither the government nor the Food Standards Agency are carrying out any surveys of the most likely carriers, live pigs, chickens and imported meat,” said the Soil Association.

In a response to a parliamentary question on the issue junior DEFRA minister Ben Bradshaw dismissed the Soil Association’s concerns, “…there is no current evidence that food-producing animals form a reservoir of MRSA infection in the UK…” he said.

According to the SA Dutch scientists and government officials blame this new strain of MRSA in farm animals on the “high levels of antibiotics used in intensive livestock farming”. This led it to question the worth of an recent EU directive requiring all member states to reduce the level of antibiotics included as routine in animal rations.

“EU Directive 2004/28/EC, required member states to ban the advertising of prescription-only medicines to ‘members of the general public’, bringing veterinary medicines into line with human medicines.

“Advertising to farmers could no longer be permitted and the Directive only made exceptions to the prohibition for veterinary surgeons and pharmacists. The National Office of Animal Health (NOAH), the body which represents the pharmaceutical industry, strongly lobbied against this and succeeded in getting these advertising restrictions dropped,” a SA statement reads.

Richard Young, Soil Association policy adviser said: “This new type of MRSA is spreading like wildfire across Europe, and we know it is transferring from farm animals to humans – with serious health impacts. Concerned scientists have referred to this as ‘a new monster’. Fortunately, it has not yet been found in UK livestock or imported meat, but then neither the government nor the Food Standards Agency are looking for it in live animals or meat.”
The Soil Association is calling on the government to:

Urgently instigate a testing programme to establish the MRSA status of UK livestock and meat on sale
Fully implement its claimed commitment to reducing use of veterinary antibiotics – including banning advertising of all antibiotics to farmers
Immediately prohibit the prophylactic and off-label use of all antibiotics on farms that are defined as ‘critically important’ in human medicine by the World Health Organisation
Screen all farm workers and vets coming into the UK from countries where farm-animal MRSA has been found
 

PORKER

Well-known member
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The death of a 12-year-old student in Brooklyn from the staph infection MRSA has prompted fear among parents and students throughout the New York City school system, forcing officials to respond.


Omar Rivera, 12, a New York seventh-grader, died of drug-resistant staph on October 14.

Omar Rivera, a seventh-grader at Intermediate School 211, died October 14 from the infection, according to the New York City school superintendent, but investigators were unable to confirm where he contracted the infection.

MRSA is short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and is responsible for more deaths in the United States each year than AIDS, according to new data.

Another Story
The infections are commonly called MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and do not respond to treatment with common antibiotics. Typically, the more severe form is contracted by people who stayed in hospitals, long-term-care homes and other medical facilities.

In Arizona, 3,802 people have contracted the severe form of MRSA since 2005. State and federal health officials don't track MRSA-related deaths by region.

MRSA is not yet considered a major public-health crisis, but the first reliable research of the bacterium shows how prevalent it is becoming. The research was done by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and released this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Nationally, drug-resistant staph infections have prompted a bipartisan federal measure that would provide $5 million in emergency funding to combat the milder MRSA form. Sen. Charles Schumer , D-N.Y., on Wednesday called on President Bush to remove his threat of a veto from a bill that provides money for public-education campaigns aimed at preventing the spread of MRSA.


My thought is this super bug will be worst than Ben LADEN AS NOW ITS EVERYWHERE IN THE US. and Canada ,Mexico.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
katrina, you right ,where did it go??? by the way

The Virginia Department of Health discusses MRSA

Oct 26, 2007 04:19 PM EDT

The Virginia Department of Health held a News Conference on MRSA this morning. MRSA is a common infection which can be deadly. Because it is so common, reporting every confirmed case to the Health Department is unrealistic.

So, the compromise is laboratories will notify the VDH of any clusters or severe cases. A cluster is three or more cases that share something in common. For instance, people on the same athletic team, or who use the same gym. A severe case is defined as MRSA found in any part of the body where you do not normally find bacteria, such as the blood, heart, lungs and bones.

All schools in Bedford County, Virginia closed for cleaning after a 17 year-old died from MRSA earlier this month.


No schools in Hampton Roads have closed, but several have done extensive cleaning, especially in locker and weight rooms, after learning of confirmed MRSA cases among students.

Health Department officials say that kind of response is not necessary but they will not shun schools who decide to react that way.

MRSA is mostly transmitted through direct physical contact.

So washing your hands is the best way to fight it.

Officials say another myth is that severe cases are more contagious. Actually, a small boil is just as contagious as the bacteria that killed the Virginia teen.

Individuals just react differently to the bacteria.

People who are sick or who have a weakened immune system are most susceptible to the infection.

It can also get into the body when there's a break in the skin, like a cut or scrape.
 

katrina

Well-known member
katrina, you right ,where did it go??? by the way

Don't know....... But I will never forget you talking about making sausage.......... I about fell off the chair laughing..... It was priceless......
Don't mean to highjack the thread......(sorry)... But when I see your posts I always think of that.....


Good posts by the way..... informative............
 

flounder

Well-known member
New Study Sheds New Light On Pig Farms And MRSA Bacteria Transmission
November 6, 2007 1:34 p.m. EST



Ayinde O. Chase - AHN Staff
Washington, D.C. (AHN) - A new study published in Veterinary Microbiology found methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is widely common in Canadian pig farms and pig farmers, signaling to some that animal agriculture as a source of the deadly bacteria. The Veterinary Microbiology study (Khanna et al. 2007) is the first to show that North American pig farms and farmers commonly carry MRSA.

Researchers looked for MRSA in 285 pigs in 20 Ontario farms and found MRSA at 45 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 last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (Klevens et al. 2007) 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.

With the recent outbreak of the deadly disease researchers generally believed MRSA as 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.

Now some experts in the in the medical, agriculture, and environmental industries are calling for Congress to compel the U.S. 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 first 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 U.S. government is not systematically testing U.S. livestock for MRSA."

"Last summer, when we raised the MRSA issue, the FDA told us that it had no plans to sample U.S. livestock to see if they carry MRSA," said David Wallinga, MD, Director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's Food and Health Program. "Given the latest science that hog farms may generate MRSA, we need Congress to give FDA and other relevant agencies the necessary funding and a sense of urgency. Sampling needs to be done as soon as possible."

In Europe, MRSA has been shown to be transmitted from pigs to farmers, their families, veterinarians, and hospital staff treating farm-infected patients. The same pig strain that was detected in Canada has been associated in Europe with serious human illness including skin, wound, breast, and heart infections, as well as pneumonia.se.

Proposed federal legislation, The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, sponsored by Senate Health Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jack Reed (D-RI) in the Senate (S. 549) and Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the only microbiologist in Congress, and 34 other House members in the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 962), would phase out the use of antibiotics that are important in human medicine as animal feed additives within two years.


http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7009072481


ya think.........daa


MRSA

http://staphmrsa.blogspot.com/



tss
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Researchers looked for MRSA in 285 pigs in 20 Ontario farms and found MRSA at 45 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 that killed a bunch of Quebec hospital patients.

This is also the reason for meat inspection at the border .TOPPS started it all. A severe case is defined as MRSA found in any part of the body where you do not normally find bacteria, such as the blood, heart, lungs and bones.
Richard Young, Soil Association policy adviser said: “This new type of MRSA is spreading like wildfire across Europe, and we know it is transferring from farm animals to humans – with serious health impacts. Concerned scientists have referred to this as ‘a new monster’.

A store food handler story.

The barbequed pork and coleslaw were prepared at the store where they were purchased. An environmental inspection of the facility performed after the outbreak revealed no apparent lapses in technique or procedure that would have contributed to the outbreak. No additional cases of illness related to this outbreak were reported to the local health department.

The Food handler , who was carrying the outbreak strain of MRSA, performed various tasks at the store, including preparing foods and handling barbecued pork and coleslaw. She reported no recent gastrointestinal illness nor chronic health problems, history of admission to a hospital, or use of antibiotics in the previous 6 months. She also denied close contact with persons who lived or worked in health-care facilities or other group settings. She did, however, visit an elderly relative, who resided in a nursing home, approximately 2 to 3 times each month before the outbreak. She reported that this person had a staphylococcal infection and had then subsequently died. The employee refused to identify her relative, and further medical information or isolates from that person were not available.

A follow-up nasopharyngeal culture was collected from family members approximately 8 months after her acute illness. This culture was positive for two different strains of MSSA, but not MRSA. One isolate was indistinguishable by PFGE from that of the MRSA strain isolated from the same patient during the outbreak. This isolate produced enterotoxin C, as did the strain of MRSA she was previously carrying. Polymerase chain reaction testing of this isolate confirmed that it carried the mecA gene, suggesting that the original MRSA strain had reverted to MSSA by loss of a regulatory region. The other isolate, which produced enterotoxin D, was determined by PFGE to be unrelated to any of the other strains previously seen in this investigation.


Section 4 of 5


Emerg Infect Dis 8(1), 2002. © 2002 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
 

Kato

Well-known member
My Dad had it last year, and he got it in the hospital. :!: :!: :!:

There were a bunch of people on the same ward as him that had it. No one was ill from it, but since they test everyone routinely, they found it. That meant quarantine precautions even for those who felt fine.

It's a lot more common than people realize, because you can carry it and never have a symptom.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Study shows pig farms a source of MRSA// 08 Nov 2007


Study shows animal agriculture as a source of Methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA). The deadly bacteria once thought only to occur in hospitals and has caused up to 19,000 deaths in 2005 in the US - nearly 2,000 more victims than HIV/AIDS killed that year.


The new study (Khanna et al. 2007), published in Veterinary Microbiology, identified MRSA on 45% of 20 Ontario farms in nearly one in four pigs and one in five farmers. A strain of bacteria common to human MRSA infections in Canada was found in the Ontario pigs and pig farmers studied.

Possible source
Previous studies pointed to MRSA occurring mainly in hospitals, however, the new Veterinary Microbiology study indicates that pig farms may be a possible source of this infection.

Activists are calling on Congress to order the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate whether the surge in MRSA infections (100,000 in 2005) is caused by the use of human antibiotics in animal agriculture.

David Wallinga, MD, Director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Food and Health Programme, stated that in view of the latest findings that pig farms may be a source of MRSA, the FDA and other agencies should receive funding quickly to carry out sampling.

Veterinarians
US veterinarians are recognised carriers of MRSA. 27 attendees at a 2005 international veterinary convention in Baltimore tested positive for the bacteria. Of the 27, 23 were from the US.

A study in Europe already indicated that the use of antibiotics on pig farms on a routine basis, increased the possibility of MRSA.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Is The Way We Raise Our Food Giving Us MRSA?
The antibiotics fed to the farm animals we eat may have helped to create superbugs like the drug-resistant staph bacteria known as MRSA.

Salon.com
By Alex Koppelman

You may want to put down your BLT before reading this, because there’s a chance that the most delicious part of your sandwich — the bacon, of course — may be playing a role in the latest national health scare.

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.

Bacteria typically become resistant to antibiotics through exposure to them. The finger of blame for the emergence and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — a spread that apparently began in the early 1990s — is generally pointed at human overuse of the drugs, especially in hospitals, where until recently MRSA was most often seen and transmitted. But while MRSA may be most easily transmitted in a hospital, that doesn’t mean the bug developed its resistance there. When it comes to the overuse of antibiotics, even the most profligate of hospitals can’t touch the sheer amount thrown around down on the farm.

Today, by most estimates, farming consumes many more antibiotics than human medicine does. No one, including government agencies, has definitive numbers, but in 2001, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a now widely accepted estimate suggesting that up to 84 percent of all antimicrobials (a slightly broader category that includes antibiotics) were being used in agriculture. Studies conducted in Europe — and one just released in Canada, the leading exporter of pork to the United States — suggest that farm animals are at the very least reservoirs for heretofore-unseen strains and that the animals are passing those strains on to their human caretakers.

Here in the United States, however, scientists have yet to study the possibility that agriculture may be playing a role in the changing nature of MRSA — even though the way we raise the food we eat may be making us sick.

“If you really step back from the whole problem in a realistic kind of a fashion and say, Where is this coming from? Where is this being generated?” says Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins and editor in chief of the journal Environmental Research, “then your mind really has to turn to agriculture because of the overwhelming amount of antimicrobials that are used in agriculture as opposed to clinical use.”

Antibiotics aren’t aspirin. The same dose of aspirin you take today for a headache will probably work on the headache you get tomorrow. Antibiotics, by contrast, are meant to attack bacteria, living things that can adapt and evolve to become resistant to the drugs meant to wipe them out. As far back as 1945, in the lecture he gave on the occasion of his Nobel Prize, Alexander Fleming, the man generally credited with discovering penicillin, warned of the potential for bacterial resistance to his discovery. Within years, he was proved right — Staphylococcus aureus, in fact, was the first known bacteria to develop penicillin resistance.

But Fleming talked about resistance developing because of improper use by humans; what he didn’t foresee was the use of antibiotics in farming, which became popular in the 1950s. Farmers put antibiotics in livestock feed because modern farming practices, with their cramped, dirty spaces and unnatural food, make animals sick. But an unexpected benefit of antibiotic use was also discovered: For some still unknown reason, they seem to make animals grow faster.

Bacteria can mutate and develop resistant strains in animals just as they do in humans. That question was settled in the 1990s, when studies showed that a farm’s prior use of an antibiotic called avoparcin, which was once used for growth promotion in animals in Europe, was strongly associated with the presence on those same farms of bacteria resistant to avoparcin and related antibiotics.

There has been continuing debate over the question of whether resistant bacteria can make the jump from animals to humans. But that argument, too, is all but over. In the United States, where avoparcin was never approved for use in animals, people in the community generally do not carry the resulting resistant bacteria; they pick it up instead in hospitals, where the human variant of avoparcin is used. But in Europe, where avoparcin was used on farms, the resistant bacteria was caught in the community and rarely in hospitals. This was but one of the factors that made the European Union decide to ban the practice of feeding antibiotics to animals for the purpose of growth promotion.

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.

Recently, though, Dutch researchers have proposed the addition of two new groups to those being screened as risks — pig farmers and veterinarians. One group of researchers found that pig farmers in one area of the country were more than 760 times as likely as the general population to be carrying MRSA. They concluded that if their observation held true elsewhere, then “pig farming poses a significant risk factor for MRSA carriage in humans that warrants screening wherever pig farmers or their family members are admitted to a hospital.”

Other studies have recommended isolating the farmers until tests come back negative — guilty until proven innocent. A separate study found that veterinary professionals students were carrying MRSA at a rate similar to that of another risky group, people who’d been hospitalized in a foreign country.

Dutch scientists have also traced the spread of one relatively new strain of MRSA from pig farms out into the community, specifically to a nurse who had treated one infected patient, the son of a veterinarian who worked mostly with pigs.

The newest study, the first evidence of MRSA in food animals in North America, concerns the discovery of pigs in Canada, the single largest exporter of pork to the United States and the sole country from which the U.S. imported live pigs last year. “Unfortunately there aren’t good surveys for resistance in food animals in the United States,” Marcus Zervos, head of infectious diseases at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, told Salon. “But it’s thought that since the MRSA strain is in pigs in Canada, it is likely in pigs in the United States also, because there’s international movement of pigs from Canada to the United States.”

The study’s authors surveyed 285 pigs of three different age groups from 20 pig farms in southwest Ontario. Twenty-five percent of the pigs, they found, were colonized — that is, carrying the bacteria, but not necessarily infected by it — with MRSA. In all, 45 percent of the farms had at least one colonized pig, and 20 percent of the farmers themselves were colonized. There was no non-pig-farmer control group in this study, but that’s much higher than previously reported colonization rates for the general population, and there was a significant association between the presence of MRSA-colonized pigs on a given farm and MRSA colonization in the farmers who worked there.

“The role of antibiotics in agriculture on the emergence of MRSA is completely unknown at this point. It will be hard to objectively evaluate as well,” Scott Weese, one of the study’s coauthors, told Salon via e-mail. “It is clear that antibiotic use is an important factor in the epidemiology of MRSA in humans and some animal species, and it is reasonable to assume the same in pigs, but we don’t have enough information yet to say anything definitive.”

MRSA has also been found in pigs in Denmark, the second-largest exporter of pork to the United States. And MRSA has been found not just in living animals but in small concentrations in the food chain as well: in pig meat in the Netherlands as well as in milk in South Korea, mozzarella in Italy, and chicken in Japan.

There is as yet no smoking gun to link animals to the strains implicated in the current MRSA scare, which are different from the antibiotic-resistant MRSA strains attributed to pigs so far. To be fair, any number of factors could have triggered the changes in MRSA’s epidemiology, especially because MRSA (like the normal Staph aureus) is very easily spread, most often without ever making its hosts sick.

Dr. Fred Angulo, chief medical epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control’s Foodborne Disease Active Surveillance Network, says it could be that livestock are not the source of the so-called super staph. But it’s also possible, he says, that they are. “It’s possible that MRSA could be present in pigs and then occasionally be transmitted to humans and then occasionally get into a hospital and create these new strains.” Angulo says the matter needs to be explored. The failure thus far to find a smoking gun could also simply be because there is currently so little data on the subject.

Scientists in the United States are just beginning to consider studying the relationship between MRSA and agriculture. Observers with whom Salon spoke — even those who tend toward activism — largely blamed this on institutional problems within the United States’ food-safety structure, not on Bush administration policy. Simply put, there isn’t money available to study MRSA, and if money were to be put aside for that purpose, it would have to be taken away from some other important area of interest.

“There are billions of dollars at stake here, and there’s an entrenched way of growing animals that ensures that they will get sick and therefore need to be treated, so it’s not at all hard to imagine why folks who want to pursue the public interest are going to run into resistance,” says Margaret Mellon, a molecular biologist who specializes in agriculture issues for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The public health infrastructure in this country, regardless of this issue, is really quite badly off … They don’t have much political clout, whereas something like the NIH, which leads directly to the production of drugs, which leads directly to billions of dollars for the private sector, could not be better funded.”

Beyond a lack of resources to study the problem, there’s the problem of cooperation. If you’re a scientist who wants to determine whether farms in the United States could be reservoirs of MRSA, the farm has to let you collect the proof. As Peter Thorne, the director of the Environmental Health Sciences Research Center at the University of Iowa, points out, that’s sometimes easier said than done. “One of the problems has been, in the U.S. anyway, that many of the studies we would like to do to look at the role of industrialized livestock production on people’s health require the cooperation of the industry. And that’s been a challenge for academicians,” says Thorne, who has done research on MRSA in the Netherlands. “We can still go to family farms — those that remain — although very few now are raising livestock, because they can’t compete.”

The scientific method has, in effect, been turned against itself. Scientists are loath to make definitive pronouncements on anything until every possible controlled study has been conducted. In the vacuum left by that failure to truly know, scientists’ hedging can be exploited by anyone with a desire to do so. In this case, both big agriculture and big pharma have a profound interest in doing just that.

“Unfortunately, it remains one of the most controversial areas in medicine,” Henry Ford’s Zervos says. “There are many of us who believe that the scientific evidence is very clear, that it shows the risk of giving the antibiotic to the animal, and the resulting resistance that can make its way into people … But many people, to be completely open about it, have self-motivating interest in this. It’s a big business for the pharmaceutical industry. People don’t want to change. Scientists, even, don’t want to influence grants that they have from pharmaceutical industry sponsors.”
 

Tex

Well-known member
There you go, mrj.

Hide your head in the sand if you want, all the while the damage is being done.

All for cheap food.

Sometimes the costs are hidden.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Montanans unlock one secret of super bug
By JENNIFER McKEE
Gazette State Bureau

HELENA - A team of Montana scientists has unlocked a secret behind the unusual potency of an aggressive and hard-to-treat kind of staph infection that kills more Americans than AIDS.

Michael Otto and his colleagues at the federal Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton have shown that the bug, known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, secretes a protein that pokes holes in one of the human body's main disease-killing cells, destroying them.

What's more, individual MRSA bacteria are able to sense their fellow superbugs and only release their deadly protein when enough bacteria are present to deliver maximum damage to the body's immune system cells.

Their findings were published Sunday afternoon in the online edition of Nature Medicine. "It's an elegant bit of science and a very important paper," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the arm of the National Institutes of Health that oversees Rocky Mountain Labs.

Staph bacteria are common and, normally, don't cause anything more severe than a boil, according to information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Up to 30 percent of the healthy human population has active staph bacteria on their skin or in their noses, and they never experience an infection.

Staph was also one of the first bacteria to become resistant to antibiotic medication. By the 1950s, staph had outsmarted penicillin and, by the 1960s, the bug had begun to evade a second-generation antibiotic called methicillin, as well.

The term MRSA refers to strains of staph that cannot be treated with methicillin, Otto said. But MRSA also works differently in the body, causing more serious infections and, at times, and destroying some of the body's own efforts to control it.

For a long time, MRSA was a problem mostly in hospitals, where antibiotic use is highest. But in the 1990s, it started showing up in the general population.

In 2005, MRSA caught headlines when it sidelined and hospitalized many previously healthy high school football players in a small Texas town. Last month, the CDC announced that in 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available, there were almost 100,000 cases of MRSA in the United States and more than 18,000 deaths - more than the number of AIDS deaths for the same year.

But this strain of MRSA is different than the superbugs of hospitals. It's more aggressive, Otto said, and occasionally causes complications with awful-sounding names like "flesh-eating syndrome."

Otto and his Montana colleagues wanted to find out what made this community associated MRSA or CA-MRSA more dangerous than its hospital cousins. Until about a year ago, the best minds in science thought CA-MRSA got its strength from a toxin certain strains created known as PVL.

Last year Otto and his colleagues at Rocky Mountain Labs published a paper that debunked that theory, showing that PVL doesn't do much in CA-MRSA infections. They began looking at certain proteins CA-MRSA produce called phenol-soluble modulin, or PSM.

In their latest paper, Otto's team shows what the bug does with the proteins that make it so lethal. Community MRSA wields the proteins with an effective, one-two punch, knocking out one of the body's best lines of disease defense, the paper shows.

When bacteria invade the body, special disease-fighting cells called neutrophils attack them. Neutrophils can sense chemicals that are only made by bacteria. These chemicals spur the neutrophil response.

Such PSM proteins are one of these chemicals, Otto said. But it has a twist: In small quantities, PSM would only spur neutrophils to the battle zone, where the bacteria killers would likely be victorious, wiping out community MRSA.

In large quantities, however, these proteins are able to poke holes in neutrophils, effectively killing them.

Community MRSA, Otto said, can "sense" when enough bacteria are present to launch a successful protein assault. The bacteria don't start making the PSM proteins until they sense there's enough CA-MRSA to defeat the neutrophils.

"The bacteria have some interest in not producing these PSMs," Otto said, until there is enough individual CA-MRSA bacterium to deliver a lethal dose.

"It's a delicate interplay," he said.

The work doesn't explain all the mysterious of CA-MRSA, Otto said, but it is an important step forward.

Otto and his team are not looking to find new treatments for CA-MRSA, only to understand it, he said. Still, the more science knows of the superbug, the more options it has in inventing new drugs and therapies to stop infections.

For now, the most effective way to stop CA-MRSA are the tried and true methods that work to stop all disease, he said: Wash your hands. MRSA may be smart, but it's not smarter than soap.

"The whole community associated with MRSA tells us that hygiene is the best you can do as a preventative measure," Otto said.


Published on Monday, November 12, 2007.
Last modified on 11/12/2007 at 1:07 am


Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (usually pronounced in short as "Mursa" or spelled out as MRSA), is a bacterium esponsible for some difficult-to-treat infection in humans. Heather Moore Heather Moore, senior writer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, wrote a concerning Op-ed “Your supper & superbugs” on MRSA and its relationship with antibiotics fed to animals. A couple of the more concerning point:


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
 

PORKER

Well-known member
http://www.cdc.gov/EID/content/13/12/1834.htm ,this link from the CDC will change everyone's idea of meat production and animal handling. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the bad bug.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
http://www.cdc.gov/EID/content/13/12/1834.htm#figure1

We maybe never will be safe again unless we eat our own beef ,pork,lamb or chicken.
 

mrj

Well-known member
A 56 year old cousin of mine recently had a bad case of MRSA and is now in remission, or MRSA free and doing fine though recovery is slow.

She worked in a nursing home and had been in several medical clinics having tests for Lymphatic cancer. Fortunately that also seems to be on hold.

mrj
 

PORKER

Well-known member
New Strains of E. Coli are a Worry
Date Published: Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Source of Article: http://www.newsinferno.com/archives/2844

Although grapes, lettuce, and tomatoes look safe and appetizing in your grocer’s shelves, a hidden E. coli toxin could be in them and shoppers would not know. Kansas State University food expert T.G. Nagaraja has spent the past decade researching E. coli bacteria and reports that a new strain of E. coli could threaten the nation’s food supply. The toxin comes from healthy plants and animals, but hurts humans. “Comes through beef, water or vegetables. The organism produces a toxin that can cause illness in humans,” Nagaraja said.

In the United States, E. coli is the leading cause of food-borne illness. About 73,000 people are infected and 61 people die from it E. coli each year. And, last year alone, over 22 million pounds of beef and vegetables were recalled due to E. coli outbreaks. “Everybody was concerned,” said grocery store owner Terry Olson. “I mean, everybody doesn’t want to feed tainted products to their kids, grandkids, parents, whatever. And so everybody was afraid of spinach when the E. coli outbreak occurred.” Nagaraja says people should be concerned and educated by thoroughly cooking their food and cleaning their vegetables.

Meanwhile, Canadian scientists are concerned that infections from an antibiotic resistant E.coli bacteria are spreading beyond hospitals into the greater population and have strongly urged global health officials to begin monitoring their spread to determine which strains are responsible for certain infections and if different antibiotics might be more effective as treatments. In the study, Dr. Johann Pitout and Dr. Kevin Laupland, both from the University of Calgary in Canada, looked at a strain of E. coli that produces extended-spectrum beta lactamases or ESBLs, enzymes that give the bacteria resistance to antibiotic drugs.

Generally, Escherichia coli is a relatively common bacteria found in the human gut—or digestive tract—and is normally harmless; however, some strains, including those linked to food poisoning, are serious and can cause fatal blood poisoning, cystitis, and deadly septicemia. The elderly are most at risk, particularly those living in nursing homes.

Several countries now report cases of antibiotic-resistant E.coli and health officials are particularly concerned about the drug-resistant strains reported in Spain, Israel, Italy, Greece, the UK, and Canada. In these cases, the infection was resistant to four key antibiotics. In Britain, BBC News reported blood poisoning cases caused by E. coli more than doubled in the ten-year period from 1995 to 2005; a small but growing number were drug-resistant. In a review of 54 deaths in the county of Shropshire, England all patients were sickened with the resistant strain; the toxin directly contributed to 20% of the deaths. The bacterium was also responsible for a severe outbreak of urinary tract infections between 2003 and 2004. The UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) said it has been investigating these infections for several years.

Researchers compare the E.coli threat to community-acquired MRSA, which is emerging as a public health problem in many parts of the world, including the US. MRSA—or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus—is an antibiotic-resistant staph developing resistance to the last drug of choice. In the U.S., community-acquired MRSA is spread outside medical facilities through skin-to-skin contact and accounts for 12% of MRSA cases.Pork in case ready packages have been tested in Canada and found to have MRSA in 10% of the product.
 

PORKER

Well-known member
MRSA superbug widespread in Pigs// 05 Jun 2008


The antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is widespread among both pigs and pig farmers in Canada, Natural news has reported.


A study published in the journal "Veterinary Microbiology," suggests that the livestock industry is a possible source of the disease.

Tests
Researchers examined 258 pigs on 20 farms in Ontario, and also tested the workers on those farms. They found that 45 percent of farms, 25 percent of pigs and 20 percent of farmers were infected with MRSA, which is substantially higher than the rate of infection in the general North American population.

Among the MRSA strains found on the pig farms was one that has commonly infected humans in Canada and one that has been associated with serious skin, breast and heart infections in Europe.


Antibiotic resistance
The study has added weight to claims that antibiotic use in livestock farming may have led to the development of antibiotic resistance in human diseases. Consumer health advocate Mike Adams said that commercial raising of livestock for food is fraught with the potential for microbiological disaster.

"When we raise pigs, cows, chickens or other animals in artificial, enclosed, indoor environments, we are practically begging to be threatened by out-of-control superbugs that breed in such conditions," Adams said.
 

flounder

Well-known member
STAPHYLOCOCCUS AUREUS (METHICILLIN-RESISTANT), HUMAN, LIVESTOCK - UK:
(SCOTLAND)
*********************************************************************
A ProMED-mail post
<http://www.promedmail.org>
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
<http://www.isid.org>

Date: Mon 2 Jun 2008
Source: Soil Association Press Release [edited]
<http://www.soilassociation.org/Web/SA/saweb.nsf/848d689047cb466780256a6b00298980/7701c17b6a58e6a68025745c0035944a%21OpenDocument>


Following the publication in a Sunday paper of information concerning
the 1st 3 identified cases of farm-animal MRSA [methicillin-resistant
_Staphylococcus aureus_] in humans in the UK, the Soil Association is
calling on the Government to publish interim results of its testing
for MRSA in pigs, which has been ongoing since the beginning of the
year [2008] (1), and introduce a comprehensive testing programme for
MRSA in other farm-animal species.

As reported in The Sunday Post [1 Jun 2008] (2), the Scottish MRSA
Reference Laboratory has identified 3 patients in Scotland suffering
from a new type of MRSA infection, not previously identified in the
UK. The MRSA is a strain known as [multilocus sequence type or MLST]
ST398 or NT-MRSA [non-typeable by PFGE (pulsed field gel
electrophoresis) using Sma-1], which has been spreading rapidly
across continental Europe and some other countries, affecting both
farm animals and humans.

The problem came to light after the Soil Association asked the
Scottish reference laboratory to recheck one suspicious sample, which
was mentioned in a scientific paper, but which had not been fully
tested. Professor Giles Edwards, head of the laboratory, agreed to
this request. He subsequently told the Soil Association about 2
further patients who had also been found to be infected by the same
strain of MRSA.

In the Netherlands and some other countries, a high proportion of
pigs and other farm animals are already carriers of MRSA ST398, and
there have been many cases of humans becoming colonised due to
contact with animals, and then developing serious MRSA infections
(3). Although MRSA ST398 was only first detected in humans in the
Netherlands as recently as 2003, by 2007 approximately 30 percent of
all cases of human MRSA in the Netherlands were ST398 (4).

In a report published in June 2007 (3), the Soil Association warned
that unless urgent action was taken, farm-animal MRSA would spread to
Britain and threaten to complicate and worsen the already serious
MRSA problem in British hospitals. Many other countries have
responded to the Dutch outbreak by testing their own pigs and
publishing the results as rapidly as possible: Belgium, Denmark,
Germany, Spain, and Canada have all confirmed that some of their pigs
are MRSA carriers (5). However, the [UK] Government rejected the Soil
Association's call for British pigs to be tested, indicating that it
would not do this until ST398 was found in humans (6). Testing only
began earlier this year [2008] because of an EU requirement for all
member states to test some of their pigs for MRSA. If interim results
are not published by the Government, no results will be available
before mid-2009 (7).

Soil Association policy adviser, Richard Young, said, "It is
regrettable the Government has allowed this problem to develop, when
action at an early stage could have nipped it in the bud. ST398 is no
more serious than existing strains of MRSA, but it is resistant to
different antibiotics, and where it is present it will make it harder
for doctors to select an effective drug quickly. In some cases this
could be the difference between life and death. It is also likely to
increase the overall number of MRSA cases in humans, because farm
animals are kept in such large numbers on intensive farms and
constitute a growing reservoir of this superbug worldwide. We
suspect that MRSA has now been found in British pigs. Defra (UK
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) must publish the
results of testing as these become available (8). There can now be no
excuse for not also initiating a comprehensive testing programme in
the UK to establish the full extent of MRSA in British farm animals."

Notes to editors
----------------
1. A European Commission Decision (2008/55/EC) requires all member
states to carry out an MRSA survey of pigs from herds with breeding
pigs from 1 Jan 2008 to 31 Dec 2008. Dr Kris De Smet, who is
responsible for the management of legislation on the monitoring of
zoonoses at DG SANCO (EU Directorate General for Health and Consumer
Protection) has told us that the results are the property of the
member states and that each country can decide whether to publish
intermediate results.
2. 'New strain of MRSA found in UK', Mike Duffy, The Sunday Post,
p12, 1 Jun 2008.
3. Full background on this can be found in the Soil Association
report published in June 2007: 'MRSA in farm animals and meat: a new
threat to human health', by Coilin Nunan and Richard Young.
(<http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/a71fa2b6e2b6d3e980256a6c004542b4/996281bf31f96c578025736100449157%21OpenDocument&Highlight=2,MRSA>).
Soil Association press release: 'MRSA in farm animals 'A new monster'
- coming to the UK soon?' (June 2007)
(<http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/89d058cc4dbeb16d80256a73005a2866/5cae3a9c3b4da4b880257305002daadf?OpenDocument>).
4. 'Molecular epidemiology of PFGE non-typeable methicillin-resistant
_Staphylococcus aureus_ in the Netherlands', Huijsdens XW et al,
abstract presented at the 18th European Congress Clinical
Microbiology and Infectious Disease, 19-22 Apr 2008.
(<http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/eccmid18/abstract.asp?id=69307>).
5. References for each of these countries are available from the Soil
Association.
6. Lord Rooker [Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food
and Rural Affairs], said in July 2007, "Broadening the scope of work
in this area should only be considered after analysis of the current
findings relating to humans in the UK with MRSA infections. The
particular strain of MRSA (ST398) occurring in pigs in some other
parts of Europe was not reported to have been detected so far in
humans in the UK, and this was a key consideration in reaching the
decision taken."
(<http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200607/ldhansrd/text/70709w0001.htm>)
7. The final results will be submitted to the European Commission,
which will publish them in mid-2009. See: 'Ongoing and potential
future EC activities on monitoring and control of MRSA', De Smet K.,
presentation delivered at European conference on MRSA, organized in
Brussels on 8 Apr 2008 by the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe.
(<http://www.fve.org/news/presentations/2008_mrsa_conference/mrsa_eu_activities_mrsa_kris_de_smet.pdf>).
8. When Defra was testing milk for MRSA, the interim results (all
negative) were published at regular intervals.

--
Communicated by:
ProMED-mail Rapporteur Mary Marshall

[Non-typeable (NT)-MRSA by pulse field gel electrophoresis (PFGE)
using Sma-1 and belonging to multilocus sequence type (MLST) ST 398
initially was detected in the Netherlands in pigs and pig farmers in
2003. This strain of presumably animal origin (nearly 40 percent of
pigs in the Netherlands have been found to be colonized by this
strain) is now reported to be responsible for more than 20 percent of
all MRSA infections in the Netherlands
(<http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/568512>), and has been found in
community-associated human infections in several European countries,
North America, and Asia. Nosocomial transmission of this strain has
also been reported recently among patients and health care workers in
the Netherlands
(<http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/eccmid18/abstract.asp?id=69352>).
- Mod.ML]

[see also:
2007
----
Staph. aureus (MRSA), human, porcine - Canada, USA 20071109.3640
Staph. aureus (MRSA), comm. acq., human, equine - Canada 20070108.0076
2001
----
MRSA: reverse zoonosis - USA, Canada (02) 20011225.3111
MRSA: reverse zoonosis - USA, Canada 20011223.3103
2000
----
Methicillin-resistant Staph. aureus, dogs - Canada (02) 20000803.1300
Methicillin-resistant Staph. aureus, dogs - Canada 20000802.1286
1997
----
Methicillin-resistant _Staphylococcus aureus_ - Canada 19970320.0586]
........................................ml/mj/jw
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