How common is food-borne illness? Based on recent studies, the CDC estimates "the known pathogens and unspecified agents cause approximately 47.8 million foodborne illnesses, 127,839 hospitalizations, and 3,037 deaths per year." This is down from about 10 years ago, but the criteria/methods for measuring appear to have changed substantially. (See article below) ~ Ilene
What’s Lurking in Your Meat and Poultry? Probably Staph
By ALICE PARK, courtesy of TIME
It’s a kitchen credo that you should wash your hands and utensils thoroughly, especially after they’ve touched raw meat or poultry, which may contain a host of bacteria — salmonella, listeria, E. coli — that can make you sick. Now add a new pathogen to the list.
Researchers were surprised to find that nearly half of samples of beef, pork and poultry tested from popular grocery stores were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) doesn’t even monitor in the food source, because it’s not known as a common food-borne pathogen. And of the bacteria found, nearly all were strains that were resistant to more than one antibiotic.
Staph is the same bug that caused headlines several years ago, when hospitals and communities started reporting a particularly virulent strain, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, that sickened children and led to tens of thousands of deaths. The bacteria dies when heated, but until contaminated meat is cooked, it can pose a health hazard in kitchens.
Lance Price, a professor at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, which conducted the staph study, decided to focus on this bacteria because recent reports showed that people working on farms had picked up staph infections directly from affected animals. If the bacteria had colonized the animals, Price wondered, what about their meat when they were slaughtered?
"Now we know that when the average consumer purchases meat, he has a one-in-four chance of bringing a multidrug-resistant strain of staph into the kitchen," he says. "Bacteria in meat and poultry is something we deal with every day. We try to minimize it, but it’s a normal part of slaughtering animals. But the fact that we have multidrug-resistant strains of staph is not normal."
The results of the study, he says, reflect the dangers of the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. "The multidrug-resistant strains are the direct result of antibiotic use in food animal production, [even if] they aren’t used to treat infection but instead to make the animals grow faster, make their feed more efficient and to prevent diseases from spreading in the crowded unsanitary conditions in which the animals are raised."
By analyzing the strains of staph picked up in the samples, Price and his team were able to show a diversity of strains that could come only from infected animals, including chicken, turkey, cattle and pigs — but not from human contamination, which originates from fewer strains of the bug.
The study is the first to show such widespread colonization of our favorite meats with staph, and, says Price, should give government regulators reason to consider adding staph to the list of potentially dangerous food-borne pathogens. The Food and Drug Administration and the USDA are already conducting a pilot survey of how commonly staph bacteria occur in the meat supply, and if their results mirror those of the current report, then staph could join E. coli and salmonella as potential food-borne hazards.
It’s not clear how much illness the contaminated food causes each year, but annually 12 million people visit the emergency room with potential staph infections.
The findings are a warning that those numbers will only rise, thanks to meat-production methods that aren’t entirely healthy, says Price. In particular, overuse of antibiotics will only make the problem worse. "The most effective way to reduce antibiotic resistance in the food supply is to stop using it in food production to boost yields," he says, "and only use it to treat sick animals." (my emphasis)
Until then, remember to clean knives, countertops, cutting boards and even faucets that might have come into contact with staph from meat. Handling contaminated tools could be enough to cause nausea or diarrhea, and in people who are particularly vulnerable to bacterial infections, it could even lead to more serious issues such as toxic shock or a form of sepsis.
See Also:
New CDC estimates for foodborne illnesses caused by "unspecified agents"
How safe is our food? Put another way, how much illness in the United States is caused by foodborne pathogens? It sounds like a simple question. Getting a reasonable answer, however, is far from simple. The basic problem lies in the fact that only a small fraction of foodborne disease cases get reported through official (or unofficial) reporting systems. Calculating the “real” rate of foodborne illness requires development of models that use reported cases as a starting point to estimate underlying disease rates. Given the plethora of pathogens that can be transmitted through foodborne routes, this is a complex, and somewhat daunting, process. It is, however, necessary for assessing the safety of foods and developing strategies for disease prevention.
Morris JG Jr., "How safe is our food?," Emerg Infect Dis. 2011 Jan
The CDC has again undertaken the difficult task of tallying the annual incidence of foodborne disease. Today, CDC announced two studies on the subject; one for 31 major foodborne pathogens, and another that assesses incidence, hospitalization, and deaths caused by foodborne transmission of "unspecified agents." Combined, the known pathogens and unspecified agents cause approximately 47.8 million foodborne illnesses, 127,839 hospitalizations, and 3,037 deaths per year.
Antibiotic use in food animals addressed by House committee
The New York Times reports on yesterday’s House Committee on Rules hearing on "H.R. 1549 – Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009." In today’s article, titled, “Administration Seeks to Restrict Antibiotics in Livestock,” the Times refers to testimony by FDA Deputy Commissioner, Joshua M. Sharfstein, M.D.
In his testimony, (pdf) Dr. Sharfstein explained that antimicrobial resistance has emerged as a threat to public health for multiple reasons, including:
- Physicians prescribing antimicrobials too frequently or inappropriately
- Patients failing to complete a prescribed course of antimicrobial, making it more likely that surviving microbes will develop resistance
- Antimicrobial use in animals
- Nontherapeutic use of antimicrobial drugs of human importance in food-producing animals
For more information about antibiotic-resistant Staph aureus, click here.
Feedlots, MRSA, and H.R. 1549
By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson
But there’s another source of antibiotics that you may never have thought of: the meat you eat. (No, this isn’t going to be a vegan manifesto. I’m a carnivore, I evolved from carnivores, and I’m not about to tell you to do something I wouldn’t do myself, such as give up eating meat.)
These days, however, much of the antibiotic resistance that makes strains of staphylococcus such a threat comes from the way beef cattle are raised – on crowded feedlots, fed corn and grains to fatten them up, in conditions of such filth that they often have to stand in their own excrement. That’s appetizing, isn’t it.
To keep these animals from getting sick, feedlot operators give them antibiotics, just as doctors used to do to people who didn’t need them. You know the rest of that story, only instead of taking the antibiotics yourself when you don’t need them, now you’re eating them along with the meat from beeves who didn’t need them.
