Pat's Note: I hesitate to allow the mention of garlic in connection
with serious science and if you lot want to be weird take it to
another thread and join a lot of Defra stooges flailing about to get a
grant and an excuse. 

This seems  a good readable summary demonstrating how closely all
classes, conditions and opinions of American society are watching
Britain.

I'm not quite sure the writer has the strains correctly identified in
Canada. I think both strains are present in both Canada and the US,
and indeed in the UK

There is so much official secrecy it is hard to be quite sure.

Anyway, the moral of this story is that unless  Britain gets a move
on, all the events here in the current animal and human epidemics
will be dictated from Washington and Brussels working together.

http://www.celsias.com/article/mrsa-superbug-pigs-and-squelched-cure-using-garlic/

Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA  , is a bacterial
infection that is becoming increasingly resistant to the antibiotics
designed to treat it. According to a new report   by the Centers for
Disease Control, or CDC, MRSA now kills more people in the United
States than AIDS. In 2005, the death toll from MRSA reached 16,000 in
the U.S. alone.

MRSA first showed up as a nosocomial (institution-acquired) infection
targeting older adults or people with weakened immune systems. More
recently, it has graduated to community-acquired MRSA, or CA-MRSA, and
widened its scope to attack the young and healthy. This form of MRSA
causes serious skin and soft tissue infections, sometimes known as
"flesh-eating" bacteria. It can also cause a highly virulent form of
pneumonia. Several newly discovered strains of MRSA show antibiotic
resistance even to third-generation, intravenous antibiotics like
vancomycin and teicoplanin.

The first case of MRSA in a human occurred   in 1961. The first
reported outbreak   of MRSA happened in 1968 in a Boston hospital. It
is only in the last month that scientists in the U.S. started studying
pigs, which were first identified as MRSA carriers in 2003  , when
researchers in the Netherlands identified MRSA strain number ST398 and
linked it to several human deaths from pneumonia in the region.

In June, a study conducted by the University of Iowa showed MRSA
strains in more than 70 percent   of the 209 pigs tested on 10 farms
in Iowa and Illinois. The researchers, led by Tara Smith, also found
MRSA in almost half the 20 workers employed at those locations.

According to Abby Harper, one of Smith's graduate students, there are
indications that the antibiotics routinely used in pig farming -
specifically tetracycline - may be the cause of the spread of MRSA.
Other researchers have also noted the synchronous rise of CA-MRSA in
humans in the 1990s and the simultaneous introduction of antibiotic
regimens on pig farms.

The agent (of disease) may not be tetracycline itself, but the fact
that pigs regularly treated with it develop an immunity to it, just
like humans, and this immunity can then be transferred, along with the
bacteria, to the pig's human caretakers. If so, the routine use of
antibiotics in pig farming, coupled with the indiscriminate use of
those same antibiotics in human populations, may be a recipe for a
pandemic to rival the 1918 Spanish Flu   that swept the world, killing
50 to 100 million people before it disappeared. 

So far, no one has tested MRSA patients in hospitals to see if they
carry the strain (ST398) now found in pigs. The US Department of
Agriculture (USDA) is responsible for testing imported meat for
pathogens, but doesn't have a test for MRSA. Even if it did,
processing or cooking meat kills bacteria, so the testing is likely to
provide little benefit.

The US Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, is nominally responsible
for testing meat produced locally, but so far has not taken the
initiative. An industry group, the National Pork Board, also says it
intends to start testing for the germ in the near future, but this is
the same group that formerly lobbied against testing for fear the
discoveries would lead to reduced pork sales. The American Association
of Swine Veterinarians, at its 2008 annual meeting, did collect nasal
swabs from 150 volunteers, and the results show an MRSA prevalence
of 7 percent among American veterinarians, even though this sampling
is far from the rigorous protocols essential to a scientific study.

The most interesting part of this epidemic is a second strain, USA100
, which was discovered in Ontario, Canada, in 2007 among both pigs and
their human caretakers. Since this strain is most often associated
with humans, researchers concluded that MRSA transmission goes both
ways - from pigs to humans and from humans to pigs.

The transmission isn't all that surprising. Pigs are known for their
ability to harbor bacteria and transmute them into new, and even more
dangerous, diseases. This awareness - of the uncleanness of pig flesh
- has been part of human culture for centuries and is the historic
reason behind Jewish and Muslim taboos against eating pork (the
religious tradition came later). Pigs are also very similar to humans
in anatomical terms, so the bacteria they mutate pass easily to their
caretakers, and from them to the population at large.

Smith intends to continue her research  , working with associates in
Minnesota, Ohio and North Carolina to examine more pig farms, both
free-range (organic) and conventional operations using antibiotics. In
the UK, where three people not associated with pig farming or meat
handling have come down with MRSA ST398, there is an immediate need to
discover if MRSA has entered the food chain  .

Because the 398 strain is resistant to tetracyclines, the most
commonly used antibiotic, it becomes more difficult for doctors to
isolate it as the cause and then select appropriate, affordable
remedies in a timely manner. This could make having the strain a
matter of life and death, according to the UK's Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs policy advisor Richard Young.

The bad news is, pork eaters in every nation may already be infected.
MRSA, which usually lives in nasal passages and does not always sicken
its carrier, is nonetheless one of the new "superbugs" that shows the
potential to affect large portions of the population rather quickly if
it develops additional resistance, or mutates.  

The good news is that researchers in the UK have found that plain old
garlic   is more effective against MRSA than any antibiotic currently
on the market. University of East London scientists found that the
ingredient in garlic that makes it smell so offensive (allicin) is
also a potent weapon, and a new, stable, aqueous extract has been used
to treat even the most persistent strains of MRSA.

The reason you haven't heard more about this is because the drug
companies don't want you to know. They don't have a patent on garlic,
or allicin  , so they prefer that doctors continue to prescribe
prohibitively expensive and sometimes ineffective third-generation
antibiotics that can only be delivered via intravenous solution. This
way, both the drug companies and the hospitals make money.

Nonetheless, if you can tolerate the odor and the taste, this humble
herb is apparently the newest cure for stubborn strains of deadly
MRSA. Just don't stand too close to your fellow subway riders.

Pat's Note: ST398 has indeed been found in humans, three of them, in
Scotland and the information was denied to the public for more than
six months. 

Why?

There is no evidence to suggest that eating pork is dangerous, but
there is considerable evidence that handling raw pork may be.

I picked up elsewhere that "don't over cook pork" is currently  being
considered for one of the pork promotion schemes in Britain. 

I trust wiser heads will prevail.

-- 
Regards
Pat Gardiner
Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
www.go-self-sufficient.com  and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com/