By Brian Skeele, on April 21st, 2011
Super Bugs-Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
I’ve been hearing, for years, the warnings about our overuse of antibiotics. Super Bugs are on the list of Impending Bummers. A report published on Friday by the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases demonstrates the day our antibiotics become ineffective is growing nearer!! In fact, the day has come.
Industrial Farms + Pharma=Dumb and Dumber
It amazes me our capacity to turn a blind eye to self-generated threats. We can be Dumb and Dumber. But it’s good for the shareholders! And anyway the flavor Staphylococcus aureus gives to a steak is this side of heaven! (I made that last part up)
Drug-resistant Staph is largely the result of overexposure.
According to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, nearly 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the year 2009 were reserved for livestock and poultry, and in the case of Staph aureus, the chickens are coming home to roost.
The study tested 80 brands in 26 retail grocery stores in five cities across the country: Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Flagstaff.
They found strains of Staph bacteria in a whopping 47% of the meat they tested.
What’s more, more than half of those contaminated samples were resistant to at least three different types of antibiotics, including methicillin and more common antibiotics like amoxicillin and penicillin….
“For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial,” said Lance B. Price, Ph.D., senior author of the study and Director of TGen’s Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health.
So on top of E. coli and salmonella, carnivores can now add staph bacteria to the list of potential dangers that come with consuming meat from industrial animal farming.
Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, made the comment, “Our problems are outrunning our solutions.” It’s time to systemically rethink our way of life, from soup to nuts. It’s time to work together and make sustainable real!
Image courtesy of GreenChipStocks