Superbugs in Our Meat

Often folks who advocate for healthier eating via organic produce and free range/antibiotic free meat are looked at sideways and viewed as elitist. Elitism has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's simply a matter of your health.

The difficult hurdle to overcome is in accepting that a large chunk of what we have been buying in Safeway, Albertson's, Lucky's and Giant over the past umpteen years is bad for us.

Below is a portion of a recent article that discusses the worst and most unbelievable example I've seen so far. The virus that contributed greatly to my mother's death is now in our food system.

From MSNBC...

"They hurt real bad," says Joyce Long, 48, a 32-year veteran of the hatchery, where until recently, workers handled eggs and chicks with bare hands. "When we went and got cultured, doctors told us we had a superbug."

Its name, she learned, was MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This form of staph bacteria developed a mutation that resists antibiotics, making it hard to treat, even lethal. According to the CDC, certain types of MRSA infections kill 18,000 Americans a year — more than die from AIDS.

Did any food safety agency test for MRSA in this plant's chickens, which were then sold to the public and served on American dinner tables? Did any government organization determine the source of the outbreak? Calls to the USDA, CDC, and Arkansas Department of Health yielded a no to both questions. In recent years, studies have found MRSA in retail cuts of pork, chicken, beef, and other meats in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

"Now we're looking at the relationship between antibiotic use on farms and MRSA," he says. It's an important mission, as industrial agriculture is the country's largest antibiotic user: Animals consume nearly 70 percent of these meds, perhaps more than 24 million pounds a year, says the Union of Concerned Scientists. The drugs compensate for the often unsanitary conditions in the country's 19,000 factory farms — also called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs — where about half our meat is produced.

Long gone are many family farms with animals grazing on pastureland, says Bob Martin, senior officer of the Pew Environment Group. "Instead, they're packed into cramped quarters, never going outdoors, living in their waste." A swine CAFO may house thousands of hogs; a poultry operation, hundreds of thousands of chickens. "As a result, you need to suppress infection," he says. The large amounts of antibiotics used in CAFOs include drugs critical to curing human illnesses, he says.

If you've never clicked through to an article on this blog, please do so now because this is one article that you must read for your health and the health of those you love, unless you're vegetarian!