On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:30:25 -0000, "Pat Gardiner"
 wrote:

>The Way We Live Now
>Our Decrepit Food Factories
>
>By MICHAEL POLLAN
>Published: December 16, 2007
>
>...The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain 
>of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than 
>AIDS - 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to 
>estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, 
>drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the 
>heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It's 
>Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, 
>by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the 
>onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant 
>superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals 
>as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new 
>and even more virulent strain - called "community-acquired MRSA" - is now 
>killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a 
>hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is 
>sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some 
>researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where 
>the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new 
>microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
>
>The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the 
>antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. 
>Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy 
>confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of 
>antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the 
>antibiotics speed up the animals' growth also commends their use to 
>industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these 
>pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the 
>intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone 
>decades.
>Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is 
>a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate 
>use of these antibiotics - in many cases the very same ones we depend on 
>when we're sick - would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake 
>them off like a spring shower. It appears that "sooner or later" may be now. 
>Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations 
>have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of 
>pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared 
>with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the 
>Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a 
>strain of "MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human 
>population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in 
>the Netherlands." Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. 
>According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 
>percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig 
>farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) 
>Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So 
>MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven't looked yet.
>
>Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently 
>killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public 
>alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the 
>class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you 
>would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently 
>not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food 
>and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA 
>in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the 
>F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.
>
>As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can't study the 
>problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not 
>surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should 
>find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of 
>drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to 
>revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something 
>that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective 
>regulatory "watchdogs" - the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. - are in 
>any rush to see happen. ....