SMM
Jun 10, 2008, 03:52 PM
This is a story, which was in the Seattle PI yesterday. I am not sure if it has been widely reported. Since there have been over 94,000 infections, resulting in nearly 19,000 deaths, it is something to be taken seriously. Since the USDA is not even testing for it, makes it doubly troubling.
From The Seattle PI: (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/366301_pigmrsa09.html?source=mypi)
Federal food safety and public health agencies are being urged to begin checking meat sold across the country for the presence of MRSA, a potentially fatal bacteria. Scientists have found the infection in U.S. pigs and farmworkers.
Members of Congress and public health advocates are demanding that the government determine whether highly infectious MRSA has entered the food supply.
MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus -- can be extremely dangerous, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Monina Klevens examined the cases of the disease reported in hospitals, schools and prisons in one year and extrapolated that "94,360 invasive MRSA infections occurred in the United States in 2005; these infections were associated with death in 18,650 cases."
The infection has been reported among livestock and farmworkers in Europe, Scandinavia and Canada, but the U.S. government has yet to test animals in this country.
Last week, the Seattle P-I's "Secret Ingredients" blog disclosed that Tara Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa Department of Epidemiology, and her graduate researchers found MRSA in more than 70 percent of the pigs they tested on farms in Iowa and Illinois.
In what is apparently the first testing of swine for MRSA in the U.S., Smith and her team swabbed the noses of 209 pigs on 10 farms. They also found the bacteria among livestock workers employed by those hog operations.
On Friday, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, Abby Harper, one of Smith's graduate assistants, presented the results of the study on farmworkers. She said she and Michael Male tested 20 workers at the Iowa swine farms and found that 45 percent carried the same MRSA bacteria as the pigs.
From The Seattle PI: (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/366301_pigmrsa09.html?source=mypi)
Federal food safety and public health agencies are being urged to begin checking meat sold across the country for the presence of MRSA, a potentially fatal bacteria. Scientists have found the infection in U.S. pigs and farmworkers.
Members of Congress and public health advocates are demanding that the government determine whether highly infectious MRSA has entered the food supply.
MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus -- can be extremely dangerous, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Monina Klevens examined the cases of the disease reported in hospitals, schools and prisons in one year and extrapolated that "94,360 invasive MRSA infections occurred in the United States in 2005; these infections were associated with death in 18,650 cases."
The infection has been reported among livestock and farmworkers in Europe, Scandinavia and Canada, but the U.S. government has yet to test animals in this country.
Last week, the Seattle P-I's "Secret Ingredients" blog disclosed that Tara Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa Department of Epidemiology, and her graduate researchers found MRSA in more than 70 percent of the pigs they tested on farms in Iowa and Illinois.
In what is apparently the first testing of swine for MRSA in the U.S., Smith and her team swabbed the noses of 209 pigs on 10 farms. They also found the bacteria among livestock workers employed by those hog operations.
On Friday, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, Abby Harper, one of Smith's graduate assistants, presented the results of the study on farmworkers. She said she and Michael Male tested 20 workers at the Iowa swine farms and found that 45 percent carried the same MRSA bacteria as the pigs.
