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What Would Darwin Say?

March 17, 2009 on 7:00 am | By Emily in Food Safety, The Big Picture 1 Comment

pregnantsowsincratesNew York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristoff recently published a piece on the connection between the rise of MRSA-related infections and industrial hog farming. “Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health,” documents new and frightening research on this antibiotic resistant-bacterium that kills over 18,000 Americans a year (after eating their flesh and causing agonizing lesions). While MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) has traditionally been associated with hospitals, jails and locker rooms, a new strain has been found that is apparently agricultural in origin. A recent study at the University of Iowa found this particular strain in 45 percent of hog farmers sampled, and 49 percent of the hogs. In Kristoff’s follow-up piece, “Pathogens in Our Pork,” he cites another study which found MRSA in five out of 90 retail pork samples tested in Louisiana.

So far, the disease seems to be acquired primarily in hospitals and through working with pigs – not from eating infected pork. Still this is causing some to wonder about the risks involved in handling it – as Kristoff says, “I’ll still offer my kids B.L.T.’s – but I’ll scrub my hands carefully after handling raw pork.” Others wonder about the risks we all face in allowing MRSA-friendly agriculture. The problem here is not the pigs, but the extreme overuse of antibiotics in industrial systems. This overuse sets the perfect stage for those few surviving bacteria to make an evolutionary comeback, which we are now witnessing. Regardless of how the disease is transmitted, the fact remains that we have very little left in our arsenal to fight it.


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  1. Darwin would probably have said “Bloody Yanks!”

    But he would have been wrong.

    I have spent almost decade on this disaster, day after day: there at the beginning, with pigs and in pig country when the horror story started. We decided on a self-sufficient lifestyle and walked into a nightmare.

    There is little doubt that MRSA in pigs has been leaking into the hospitals for some years.

    There was a nasty mutation to a porcine circovirus in Britain in 1999 which caused an epidemic that required huge quantities of antibiotics to handle the consequences.

    MRSA in pigs was the result, usually the ST398 strain.

    The Dutch picked up the problem about four years ago and commendably make everything they knew public.

    Both circovirus and MRSA epidemics have now travelled the world along with accompanying cover-ups. It is quite a nasty situation – now coming to light in the USA.

    MRSA st398, mutated circovirus and various other unpleasant zoonotic diseases have now reached American pig farms.

    The people exposing the scandal in the US are to be commended.

    I have extensive records available to anyone researching the link and can often answer general questions quickly and accurately.

    –
    Regards
    Pat Gardiner
    Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
    http://www.go-self-sufficient.com and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com

    Comment by Pat Gardiner — March 17, 2009 #

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