President Obama talked today about dealing with problems of safety in the food supply:
But in recent years, we’ve seen a number of problems with the food making its way to our kitchen tables. In 2006, it was contaminated spinach. In 2008, it was salmonella in peppers and possibly tomatoes. And just this year, bad peanut products led to hundreds of illnesses and cost nine people their lives – a painful reminder of how tragic the consequences can be when food producers act irresponsibly and government is unable to do its job. Worse, these incidents reflect a troubling trend that’s seen the average number of outbreaks from contaminated produce and other foods grow to nearly 350 a year – up from 100 a year in the early 1990s.
Transcript here.
All very well and good. But I hope they'll also be addressing this more systemic problem as well, the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed and the potential that practice has for introducing superbugs into communities as well as into the food supply:
MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) sometimes arouses terrifying headlines as a "superbug" or "flesh-eating bacteria." The best-known strain is found in hospitals, where it has been seen regularly since the 1990s...
One of the first clues that pigs could infect people with MRSA came in the Netherlands in 2004, when a young woman tested positive for a new strain of MRSA, called ST398. The family lived on a farm, so public health authorities swept in — and found that three family members, three co-workers and 8 of 10 pigs tested all carried MRSA.
Since then, that strain of MRSA has spread rapidly through the Netherlands — especially in swine-producing areas. A small Dutch study found pig farmers there were 760 times more likely than the general population to carry MRSA (without necessarily showing symptoms), and Scientific American reports that this strain of MRSA has turned up in 12 percent of Dutch retail pork samples.
Now this same strain of MRSA has also been found in the United States. A new study by Tara Smith, a University of Iowa epidemiologist, found that 45 percent of pig farmers she sampled carried MRSA, as did 49 percent of the hogs tested.
It's not as if the problem hasn't been known for years now:
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...
"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."...
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.
How is it even possible that this dangerous misuse of antibiotics, and the unconscionable practices of factory farming that require it, are still being permitted?