Pat's Note: This is from the blog of Mike the Mad Biologist. I don't
think he is as mad as he makes out.

If fact, he seems to be right on the ball, even if he English is a
touch colourful.

Given the near decade since Britain first started pumping its pigs
full of antibiotic to deal with the mutated PMWS epidemic, all kinds
of nasties can creep out of the pigs and pork.

It is the secrecy in the UK and the frantic efforts to cover
everything up that gives the game away.

http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2008/08/communityacquired_st398_mrsa_f.php

Community-Acquired ST398 MRSA Found in Sweden


 • We're Really Fucked
Posted on: August 18, 2008 11:08 AM, by Mike 

This is not good. A recent article in Emerging Infectious Diseases
describes two separate cases of community-acquired ST398 MRSA--and
neither case was associated with agriculture. Let me explain what this
means and why this is really bad news.

MRSA--methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus--is a serious
problem: in the U.S., it kills more people annually than AIDS.
Typically, the therapy used to treat MRSA is vancomycin, and strains
resistant to vancomycin can't be treated on-label with any commercial
antibiotics*. ST398 is a new clone of MRSA that is thought to be
associated with agriculture--pigs in particular (hence, my designation
of this as the 'piggy MRSA'). In the Netherlands, in the course of a
few years, it swept through pigs, and then colonized farmers, and
recently has entered hospitals. In the U.S., it's started to increase
in pigs.

According to the article, two separate cases of community-acquired
(i.e., they didn't pick it up at a hospital) ST398 were observed, and
they were very persistent. Neither patient had any animal contact,
which means that this strain has jumped from the agricultural setting
into the broader human community. 

These strains also had PVL, which is a toxin that may increase the
severity of disease**. What is very disturbing is that the strains
were resistant to antibiotics other than methicillin (one was
resistant to deoxycycline; the other was resistant to ciprofloxacin,
erythromycin, and clindamycin). Not only are these strains multi-drug
resistant, but the different resistance profiles suggests that ST398
is prevalent at a high enough frequency to have evolved divergent
phenotypes (no mention is made if any of these resistances are
plasmid-encoded).

*Skin infections can be treated with linezolid, but this therapy is
not very effective against sepsis (bloodstream infections).

**The epidemiological evidence suggests PVL is nasty, but experimental
studies in laboratory animals and cell culture yield mixed results.


-- 
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/