Multi-drug resistant staph in 1 of 4 supermarket meat samples | Hacker News Reader

Multi-drug resistant staph in 1 of 4 supermarket meat samples

arstechnica.com

46 pointsshawndumas48 comments

I think the bigger concern here isn't the risk of food poisoning from the meat, it's that we're literally forcing billions of animals to take antibiotics daily. If that doesn't encourage the evolution of anti-biotic resistant strains of bacteria, I don't know what would. It's not just bad in an ethical sense, it's bad in a pragmatic sense, too.

I totally agree, but the problem is that not giving animals those anti-biotics is bad in a pragmatic sense as well.

For example, let's say you don't give cattle antibiotics anymore. Cattle destined for production are generally tightly packed, and while nature abhors a vacuum, nature also punishes high populations with disease. Hence the anti-biotics.

The next logical step would be to stop packing cattle so tightly. But, you'd be surprised how much room cattle in a natural setting need (think orders of magnitude more room).

One of the great triumphs of humanity is how incredibly accessible (good) food has become. This all goes hand in hand with price reductions. Nowadays, American's spend about 1/20 of their disposable income on food, back in the "good old days" (the 20's & 30's) they were spending more like 1/5. [1]

You no doubt raise a valid point, but as usual, the reality is much more complicated. What is worse, an uptick in deaths by food poisoning or an increase of 4x in the cost of food cost? Such a decision is beyond me.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data...

From an environmental perspective, a sharp increase in the cost of meat would be a very, very good thing.

The current system is essentially externalizing majority of the costs to the ecosystem, allowing consumers to pay far less than the true cost. It's similar to a power plant that saves money by pumping all of its waste untreated into a nearby river. The power bill is cheap, but only if one fails to consider the costs to the community and anyone/anything else using the river.

http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html

http://www.emagazine.com/archive/142

http://inthefray.org/content/view/2407/209/

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8967601...

Why not just sterilize it with gamma radiation?

A WHO link I found claims that high-dose irradiation (>10,000 grays) is substantially safe and will sterilize food, but Wikipedia says this is banned in the US except for hospitals and NASA:

http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/fs_management/irr...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation#High_dose_appl...

Probably not enough cobalt-60 to do that on the necessary scale and accelerators probably can't give you the dose rates necessary for 10kGy x-ray irradiation.

Or just abandon factory farming and stop animals from being treated as production units.

Sorry, but I have a bone to pick with people spouting this type of blanket rhetoric.

Animals are treated as units of production in developed countries because this is what is required to provide sustenance at a scale that makes it economically feasible for hundreds of millions of people to eat better than ever before in the history of humanity. [1]

Seriously, how many times must we start over every time someone watches Food Inc.?

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data...

The average American would probably eat a lot better if (s)he ate half as much meat. And cutting meat consumption would allow even more people in the world to eat well.

And your link is only moderately related. Yes, we're spending less on food. Yes, we'd have to spend more on food to eat the same exact diet without factory farming animals. But it doesn't make any claim that we are eating better than ever before in the history of humanity.

Required?

http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_w...

Treating the animals better would still be better than irradiation.

No one but you is comparing the two.

* One is a moral judgement: Should we subjectively mistreat animals in order for humans to be healthy and prosper?

* The other is a scientific question: Is irradiation a safe and effective food sanitizing method?

Guess which one has dozens and dozens of studies to back it up? OP posted a few links, but try the CDC's take on it: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no3_supp/tauxe.htm

> Why not just sterilize it with gamma radiation?

Look at all the unrestrained horror and apocalyptic glee surrounding Fukushima and answer that question for yourself.

I know it isn't the same thing, or even the same kind of thing. You know that as well. However, convincing the masses of that will be the work of at least a generation, and, even if it is widely accepted, there will always be people who will be opposed to it for the simple reason "NUCLEAR SCARY!" and nothing else.

Staphylococcus aureus colonizes the upper respiratory tract in one third of individuals. It's frequently found as part of the normal flora, and some of you are more concerned than you really should be.

Yes, many times more antibiotics are used in agriculture than in the health sector, and this offers further evidence that maybe they shouldn't be. However, I'm certainly not going to be altering any of my eating habits after reading this.

One thing the article left me wondering... what should I do? My bias makes me think that the cheap supermarket meats have more of this resistant staph than farmers market or whole foods meat. Is that a fallacy?

The main takeaway from the article is to be more careful when it comes to handling and preparing meat. Always wash your hands with soap and hot water after handling meat and always be thinking about cross-contamination (everything you or the meat has touched).

You should do absolutely nothing (differently from what you have been doing). We haven't seen mass outbreaks of staph infections (outside of hospitals..), this article is just standard fear-mongering.

Anyone care to enlighten me as to why this isn't just fear mongering, instead of downvoting me? If there is actually cause for alarm, I'd like to know...

Because it's a legit study, and posted on a legit site.

It's not like this was written by Peta.

I'm not questioning that there are indeed elevated staph levels on cheap raw meat, I'm simply saying that without data that actually shows that this is a problem, then it is inappropriate to suggest that it is.

In other words, I am not questioning the validity of the study at all. I suggest you read my comments a second time.

I'm simply saying that without data that actually shows that this is a problem, then it is inappropriate to suggest that it is.

What data do you need?

Say you are flying an airplane. All of the engines fail. Would you say that "without more data that actually shows that this is a problem, it's inappropriate to suggest relighting the engines" and wait until you smash into the ground?

No. Because you can anticipate the consequences of the current situation and make changes to prevent something bad happening.

Specifically, we're noticing that there are a lot of MRSA strains on meat. So we should probably stop feeding animals antibiotics as frequently. A good way to do this is to raise them somewhere other than in a pool of their own feces, which tends to carry a lot of disease (necessitating the overuse of antibiotics).

That's where the article is going. Should we wait for a problem in case there isn't one, or should we try and prevent the problem from occurring in the first place?

If eating such meat were the equivalent of the engines falling off a plane, then it should be trivial to show the actual harm it is causing.

Staph infections are a common bacterial skin infection, especially in athletes and among wrestlers. And even though MRSA is largely a problem in hospitals, that doesn't mean it's not a problem for all of us. Most people visit a hospital at some point. My cousin got a staph infection for going in to have a baby.

Well whatever the possible harm elevated staph levels in raw supermarket meat may cause, is it actually harm that we can statistically detect?

Can we actually show this is causing any harm?

We certainly know that multidrug-resistent bacteria cause harm. Plenty of case studies there.

I'm no biologist, so I don't know whether or not we can show, for any given strain of multidrug-resistent bacteria found in a sick patient, whether its ancestors most likely acquired its resistance genes while living in a farm animal, while living in an adult human who was taking antibiotics for some other condition, or someplace else. My guess is that such a demonstration might be possible -- cheap gene sequencing, plus extensive statistics, yields a lot of deductive power -- but I don't know if it has been done already or not, and maybe I'm wrong and it's going to be impossible to do conclusively. Bacterial genomes aren't always that big, and bacteria are quite promiscuous with genetic material, so their line of family descent gets fuzzy much faster than it does with multicellular creatures like ourselves.

One thing is certain: There will be a lot more work attempting to answer these questions.

As others have said cleaning up properly. Add to that chopping boards. Never use the same chopping board for raw meat that you use for vegies etc.

If this implications of this article are correct- antibiotic resistant bacteria are a result of feeding animals antibiotics- then yes, buying grass fed meat (or meat that did not receive antibiotics) will help.

Thoroughly Clean every surface that raw meat touches. Including your hands.

In the past few months I was admitted to the hospital on 2 separate occasions for staph infections in my leg. I am a 24 year old, active, healthy individual with no prior health issues. The doctors and infectious disease specialists are essentially clueless as to what caused such severe staph infections, twice nonetheless. This article hit close to home and is shocking.

I wanted to add that I had MSSA, not the more serious MRSA, but like the article points out, even the MSSA staph in meat is serious and can cause major health problems if it is spread to the skin.

This is just an idea, but if the b.d. in your name means bouldering climber, and you go to a climbing gym often, I'd be very careful to wash when you get home. The hand holds are NEVER washed and just think about how many people are touching them continuously.

Very close, its for black diamond. Based on the positioning of the 2 staph infections on my leg, I also thought it may have been my harness (which I disinfected now). Thanks though, it's incredible just how much bacteria is everywhere you touch.

This is very alarming. Although, if this is true and these bacteria are resistant to most antibiotics we have, and are so common, why aren't we dropping by the millions already?

Edit: Ah, so they are just a kind that don't harm humans. Thanks.

> These strains of staph are not the kind that causes food poisoning...

Cooking.

I suddenly have less of a craving for a steak all of a sudden.

My health is not nearly what it was for the 15+ years I was vegetarian.

Some of that can of course be attributed to age, but then again, I was a heavy smoker, and used plenty of drugs when I was younger (habits which I have long since quit), so you'd think it might balance out the age thing.

I don't have a good reason why I haven't gone back to my old meat-free diet - laziness? Perhaps it's time I reconsidered.

Unfortunately - and I say this as someone who doesn't eat meat - going vegetarian isn't enough to save you from bacteria. They will sometimes spray fields with contaminated animal waste which will then end up on your plate if not properly washed.

Maybe if everyone was vegetarian… The food industry is under a lot of pressure to cut any corner they can. Antibiotics give a producer an edge. Something like this really needs to be an industry-wide regulation.

Perhaps if we just went back to pre-1950s levels of meat consumption, there would be less pressure on the food industry to cut so many corners.

Good day to be a vegetarian.

Fortunately bacteria can be killed by a thorough cooking; fresh vegetables can be just as bad, if not worse, since staph doesn't cause food poisoning. My mother's on a neutropenic diet (leukemia) and she's not allowed to eat salad, but overcooked hamburger is on the menu.

Some strains can produce staphylococcal enterotoxins that stimulate the vagus nerve, inducing vomiting and abdominal pain. The article mentions that those strains weren't found as contaminants though.

Perhaps, but as far as I know, farmers don't feed antibiotics to vegetables.

Oh, and how does staph not causing food poisoning make vegetables worse?

Farmers do water vegetables with water that is not safe to drink, they spray diluted sewage onto vegetables as a cheap fertilizer, runoff from adjacent livestock operations flows into cropland, etc. The difference is that meat is generally cooked before consumption, which kills a lot of bacteria, while many vegetables are eaten raw. You are probably in more danger of getting food poisoning from alfalfa sprouts than you are from a t-bone.

(Ok, that was a bit of a cheat. Sprouts of all varieties and leafy greens are usually the worst when it comes to veggie contamination while undercooked chicken and ground beef are the worst for meats. I am picking my examples at two extreme ends of each group to make a point, but hopefully the real point you will get from this is that there are a lot of factors that go into food poisoning risk assessment...)

> Perhaps, but as far as I know, farmers don't feed antibiotics to vegetables.

Nope, just pesticides. Though some people avoid those, too.

Is it just me or is the quality of meat degrading more and more. It seems as if companies keep finding ways to increase profit margins and are able to produce horrendous meat and literally bleach it until it's "clean" to sell.

It's not just meat, it's food in general. Try for example growing your own tomatoes and compare the taste to the supermarket ones - light years of difference.

You should watch Food, Inc. It talks about that.

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