Having problems with message search?
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (usually pronounced in short as "Mursa" in American English, spelled out as M-R-S-A in British English) is a very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS - 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. (Note: I believe MRSA is not air-borne and can still be safely and effectively controlled on surfaces with simple soap and water. Turn off the lights and use a black light to see where your cleaning people have missed cleaning up bacteria.)
For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics always has created ands alwys will create resistant strains of bacteria. It's Evolution 101: the synthetic drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by an enzyme or a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superbug. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a health threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain - called "community-acquired MRSA" - is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are prophlactorly fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics also speed up the animals' growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these antibiotic drugs, meat and egg production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.
Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics - in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we're sick - would lead to the evolution of resistant bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that "sooner or later" may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of "MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands." Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to NAFTA, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven't bothered to look yet.
Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.
As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can't study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is a resulting epidemic of drug-resistant infections and deaths among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory "watchdogs" - the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. - are in any rush to see happen.
Rather than using more synthetic, antibiotic cleaning "solutions" on this resistant and very dangerous pest - simply clean with soap and water.
............................................................................................................................
Respectfully, Stephen L. Tvedten - Marne, MI - 43.04N -85.81W (Elev. 696 ft)
MCS International Country Coordinator for the USA - http://www.mcs-international.org/meet_team_steve.html and:
http://www.mcs-international.org/articles/article_steve_tvedten1.html
Websites: http://www.thebestcontrol.com , http://www.getipm.com , http://www.learnipm.com , http://www.licergone.com , http://www.safesolutionsinc.com - http://www.stephentvedten.com/
http://www.mcs-international.org/articles/article_steve_tvedten1.html
Websites: http://www.thebestcontrol.com , http://www.getipm.com , http://www.learnipm.com , http://www.licergone.com , http://www.safesolutionsinc.com - http://www.stephentvedten.com/
To learn more about the Bug Stops Here Yahoo group group, please visit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thebugstopshere
To learn how to kill pests without killing yourself, please visit: http://www.thebestcontrol2.com
You see things and you say, 'why?' but I dream things that never were; and I say 'why not?'" Thomas Edison
Offline 
Send Email