A new study by the researcher who has done the most to pin down the presence of “pig MRSA” in the United States pries open the relationship between raising animals for food and risking drug-resistant infections—while also demonstrating how frustratingly difficult it is to fill all the data gaps around that risk.
Quick version of their results: Compared to people with no current swine contact, people currently working with swine were 6 times more likely to be carrying some strain of drug-resistant staph, and 5.8 to 8.4 times more likely to be carrying strains that are specifically linked to hogs.
Those findings do not represent infections—some members of the study population did develop infections—but they represent people at risk of resistant staph infections at some future point. That’s because the single biggest risk factor for developing a staph infection is already being colonized with the germ, that is, carrying it in the nostrils or groin or on the skin.
Share this article
This is all important because of the ongoing debate, captured in several of my recent posts, regarding how much control we should exert over antibiotics used routinely in agriculture. Pig MRSA is one of the clearest illustrations of what happens when farm antibiotics are used routinely: Their use created a strain of staph that could be linked back to pigs because it was resistant, not to the drugs usually used in human medicine against staph, but to a drug given to pigs as a growth promoter.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full original post: Is Drug-Resistant Staph A Work Hazard for Farm Workers?
