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[vgnwtch]

Is the way we raise our food giving us MRSA?

The antibiotics fed to the farm animals we eat may have helped to create superbugs like the drug-resistant staph bacteria known as MRSA.

By Alex Koppelman

News

Nov. 7, 2007 | You may want to put down your BLT before reading this, because there's a chance that the most delicious part of your sandwich -- the

Comments

[angie_gurl]

Thank you for this post! I had this strain of staff infection and it was hell to deal with.

[beerdrinkinlass]

I hate the Pharmaceutical industry for reasons like this.

[hannafrica]

Ever since learning about MRSA and antibiotic/grain diet use in farm animals, this has been one of my biggest worries.

[hannafrica]

Eck, I've been up all night studying--I meant to say thank you for posting about it. I think it's a very important topic and one that clearly highlights the link between animal and human welfare/rights.

[we_brought_pie]

Thanks for the inline text. Would you be willing to remove the italics? It is hard for some people to read large blocks of text in italics.

[vgnwtch]

Not something that had really occurred to me - all done.

[we_brought_pie]

Thanks!

[evilekeeper]

We've been talking about MRSA and antibiotics in my microbiology class. Bacteria like to share with other bacteria their resistancies to whatever. With all these antibiotics around, only the strongest bacteria survive to reproduce more strong bacteria. They can go off and share with others and soon enough, we've got problems.

Seriouisly, antibiotics scare me.

[vgnwtch]

Wonderful things, much abused.

My aunt used to be head of health and safety (she'd been a nurse for decades) at a major pharmaceutical company in the 1970s. She made official complaints about the company medical staff "handing out antibiotics like they were sweets", often not complete courses, and often not for things that actually needed them. This was apparently common practice. She was furious precisely because of breeding drug-resistant strains. As she said, if medical staff at a pharmaceutical company didn't think anything of it, what were others doing?