New Avenue For MRSA 'Superbug': Pigs 135
smitty777 writes with news that researchers have discovered another way methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics. According to the study (abstract), the bacteria made the jump to pigs on livestock farms, developed greater resistance through the rounds of antibiotics commonly used to keep the pigs healthy, and then jumped back to humans.
"The important development in the story of ST398 is its move back off the farm into humans, causing first asymptomatic carriage in that original family, and then illnesses in other Dutch residents, and then outbreaks in healthcare settings, and then movement across oceans, and then appearance in retail meat, and then infections in people who had no connection whatsoever to farming—all from an organism with a distinctive agricultural signature. That’s an important evolution, and an illustration once again that, as soon as resistance factors emerge, we really have no idea where they will spread. So it would be a good idea to take actions to keep them from emerging, or at the very least to implement surveillance that would allow us to identify them when they do."
Re:thanks meat eaters! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who was the idiot who just let this happen? (Score:4, Interesting)
Farmers just don't understand the issue. I heard an interview with a representative of some group of farmers discussing this issue last year. He was defending the use of antibiotics for "growth promotin" (sic) because they only used a low dose! Of course high doses may have their problems also (if it would allow some to get to the human food supply), but he did not seem to understand that using low doses (presumably somewhat inconsistently administered through the animal feed) could lead to resistence in bacteria.
Re:thanks meat eaters! (Score:5, Interesting)
pesticides, GMOs and processed foods
Processed foods I'll give you. People really should move back to whole foods, preferably vegetables, in place of highly processed grains and sugars. Pesticides have their place. There's a lot to be said for moving more toward IPM strategies than we currently have, sure, but they are a necessary evil. Heck, even plants produce their own pesticides. They don't make those secondary metabolites for the fun of it. And it's funny that you mention GE crops as a problem in the same sentence as pesticides, considering the effects [nature.com] they've had on pesticide usage. There's plenty of criticisms to make about how people eat and how food is grown. Processed foods are one. Monoculture & lack of biodiversity, over-fertilization & run-off, water scarcity & depleting aquifers, ect. would be much better practices to gripe about, and issues like peak phosphorus, declining agricultural research, and agriculture in the face of climatic issues are also worth considering. Pesticides and especially biotechnology (in and of themselves anyway) are not...not that pesticide use shouldn't be reduced where possible.
Re:thanks meat eaters! (Score:5, Interesting)
You can actually be a perfectly healthy vegetarian; but you need to be smart and knowledgable about your diet.
Jack la Lane was a vegetarian, and who could probably kick most people ass, and rarely got sick.
He was intelligent about how he ate, and he exercised every day.
Most vegetarians just eat anything as long as it's not meat,and don'r exercise.
Oh, he did start eating meat when he was around 65, or so. There wasn't any other way to get certain fats an elderly person needs. Once again, he was smart about his diet.
I am not a vegetarian, but I would like to see people pull back on meat portions. Cause there is a difference between eating meat, and eating a pound or more of meat a day.
Re:thanks meat eaters! (Score:4, Interesting)
You're fail to understand what drives some scientists to adhere to the principal of least harm.
If there are possible adverse, irreversible effects of human activity on our ecosystem, and the state of our knowledge is such that we can as a species initiate such effects without understanding how they manifest, then one school of thought is to halt human intervention/activity in those potentially sensitive shared domains.
Your shouting at length to "explain how this harm may come about" when we do not have the technical understanding about how such harms may come about is, despite your education and rational abilities, stupidity in action.
The moral of the story here is there are things we don't know that can cause great irreversible harm and that regulating/preventing activity in certain circumstances can avoid these harms.
Re:thanks meat eaters! (Score:4, Interesting)
Darnedest thing is though, what hasn't been done is for someone to propose a plausible mechanism as to why GE crops would be dangerous. We know the genes inserted (cry genes, epsps, bar, nptII, PRSV/CMV coat protein genes) are safe, but for all the cries of 'what might happen' no one has explained what in GE crops allegedly hurts you, how it is produced, its mode of action, ect.
Actually there is a mechanism. One of the big companies tried to insert a gene into brazil nuts (either BT or herbicide resistance) and found out that it produced an unexpected immune response because of the way the protein was folded. They abandoned the project, and wrote an article about it in the New England Journal of Medicine, which I read. That's the poster child of the anti-GM movement.
I'm not particularly worried about GM food. I eat GM cornflakes every day (as I found out afterwards). I couldn't avoid GM food if I wanted to. And I do get annoyed when I see the truly stupid arguments against GM food by political science majors who never took a biology course.
But give the critics their due. We in the US turned our entire corn and soybean production into GM crops without notifying consumers about it, and without letting them make their own decisions as consumers who supposedly rule this wonderful free market. There was no labeling and food processors weren't even allowed to sell their food as GM-free for years. Monsanto may believe in a lot of things but they certainly don't believe in a free market.
You can't even get GM-free food in this country any more because the GM strains have contaminated everything else, and when the food companies try to sell grains to Europe, where there are restrictive laws, they're forced to go to the international trade commission and ask (or rather demand) that they be allowed to define food with no more than 1%, or 0.1% (or whatever) GM food as GM-free.
You believe in science? The scientific method says that you have to take your hypotheses and beliefs, and subject them to confirmation in the real world. If you believe that GM food is safe, you have to prove it with data. That's not as easy as you make it out to be. It's not enough to feed a hundred mice for 6 months and see if any of them keels over. It's not even enough to feed 300 million Americans GM corn and soybeans for 20 years and see if any of them keels over, as we did. It is actually impossible to prove generically that GM food is safe. You have to take each specific food.
Let's suppose you're really, really smart and you thought really, really hard, and you couldn't think of a plausible mechanism by which GM food can do harm. That doesn't mean there isn't one. Nobody would have thought that inserting a BT gene into brazil nuts would produce an immune reaction, but it happened.
I don't care how smart you are -- you don't understand the human immune system well enough to predict what can go wrong, because nobody understands the human immune system well enough to predict what can go wrong. That's why that contract lab in England injected a half dozen test subjects with a new drug that caused an unexpected autoimmune reaction and caused one kid to lose his fingers a few years ago. I was taught that proteins were all destroyed in the digestive system, but then I saw in the New Scientist that some of them do survive. What can they do?
I went to a meeting where a scientist from the Natural Resourced Defense Fund made the case that GM foods might cause unexpected immune reactions. I thought it was bullshit. Then I found out about the brazil nuts. What other totally unexpected problems could we have? You don't know. They've got a point.
I will stipulate that Jeremy Rifkin is an idiot, and if we listened to him in 1984 we wouldn't have been able to develop T cell growth factor, we wouldn't have developed a test for AIDS, and we wouldn't have developed treatments for AIDS. We wouldn't have sequenced the human genome, we wouldn't have developed imatinib and CML would st