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Farmers Carry Multidrug-Resistant Staph For Weeks Into Local Communities 122

Posted by Soulskill from the part-of-the-farmhand-insurrection dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Fresh research out of the UNC Gillings and JHU Bloomberg schools of public health shows industrial farm workers are carrying livestock-associated, multidrug-resistant staph into local communities for weeks at a time. "Among the [22 people tested], 10 workers carried antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria in their noses for up to four days. Another six workers were intermittent carriers of the bacteria. The 10 workers found to carry the bacteria persistently had strains associated with livestock that were resistant to multiple drugs, and one also carried MRSA. Three more of the workers tested positive for strains of S. aureus that were not resistant to antibiotics. So in total, 86 percent of the workers in the study carried the S. aureus bacteria, compared with about one-third of the population at large, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." This problem has grown since its last mention on Slashdot. Unfortunately, massive industrial lobbying continues to neuter government action.
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Farmers Carry Multidrug-Resistant Staph For Weeks Into Local Communities More

Farmers Carry Multidrug-Resistant Staph For Weeks Into Local Communities

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  • Natural immunity (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BitZtream ( 692029 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:17PM (#47924035)

    Good, this indicates that doctors and people who think they should take antibiotics like vitamins haven't completely screwed up our natural immunities and that most of the world still fights off this infections even though drugs no longer work on them.

    Can we please get back to the point where we take antibiotics when we're in need of them, not just because we might have an infection or have a mild infection?

    I'm all for taking them in the cases where it will be life threatening not to, but FFS not just because we're sick. We're making all of these things capable of fighting off the drugs and getting ourselves to the point where first world countries with antibiotics are going to be less safe than 3rd world shit holes where the people at least have functional immune systems that can fight off what they see in their environment.

    We have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without taking daily antibiotic doses, why do some people and worse still some doctors think we should take them like candy now when someone gets the sniffles.

    • I believe the answer to your question is "No", because Pez dispensers need something to dispense, and doctors have chosen antibiotics as the pez of choice.

      • They used to issue sugar pills instead, which might actually be tastier than the Pez, and more effective the way antibiotics are going.

        As for the farmers - it's because giving animals antibiotics during specific periods of their growth cycle increases their growth significantly. I remember reading an article that they don't even use more antibiotics - the courses prevent enough sickness that farmers that ONLY give antibiotics to sick animals, at much higher doses, actually use just as many antibiotics.

        Anti [wikipedia.org]

        • Re:Natural immunity (Score:5, Informative)

          by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:15AM (#47924361) Journal

          the courses prevent enough sickness that farmers that ONLY give antibiotics to sick animals, at much higher doses, actually use just as many antibiotics.

          You seem to be under the same misapprehnsion as much of the farming community -- that high doses of antibiotics are dangerous, whereas the reverse is true. Low doses are far more likely to cause resistance than high doses given for the proper lenght of time.

          • You seem to be under the same misapprehnsion as much of the farming community -- that high doses of antibiotics are dangerous, whereas the reverse is true.

            'Seem' would be right, because your belief in my belief is false. ;)

            When using antibiotics allows animals to grow faster or eat less food and you'd end up using them anyways when animals get REALLY sick, on the first order the low doses make sense.

            Resistance is more problematic.

          • Re:Natural immunity (Score:5, Informative)

            by philip.paradis ( 2580427 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @04:13AM (#47924973)

            Given that you bothered to reference "lenght (sic) of time," I find it disheartening that you have also demonstrated apparent failure to comprehend or intelligently consider bounding problems [wikipedia.org], population density [wikipedia.org], transmission risks and rates [wikipedia.org], practical effects of seemingly low mutation rates [nature.com], microbiology [wikipedia.org], and systems thinking [wikipedia.org]. In short, all activities involving large scale administration of antibiotics to livestock at dosages resulting in appreciable treatment/prevention efficacy are practices which drive substantial and increasing risks to public health.

            The math doesn't lie, and the trending curves of probabilities associated with widespread epidemics aren't exactly uplifting. I'll make a preemptive recommendation that you suppress the urge to post anything resembling a cliché "citation needed" response here. Given the circumstances at hand, devotion of your time to even a cursory review of the aforementioned subject matter would likely be a more productive activity. Such study will necessarily involve your review of all citations referenced in said materials, review of nested citations, etc. You wouldn't want to compound foolishness with yet more foolishness, would you?

            I'm willing to admit that I may be entirely wrong in my assessment of your level of knowledge, with the corollary that you are simply betting that your benefits will outweigh your risk in this area for the duration of your lifespan. However, given that I know nothing of your mode of living or the measures of your personal resource reserves on hand for reaction/relocation/adaptation/insulation in response a large scale communicable disease crisis, I must hazard a guess that you're either (A) dangerously ignorant of reality or (B) very well prepared to deal with things turning shitty in a hurry. It is my measured estimation that the odds of your membership in the intersecting set [caedea.com] are quite low, given your mid-range UID and the generally incongruous nature of the respective attributes of the A and B sets.

            • That was an extensive answer. Honest (non-trolling) question: What field do you work in? Anything to do with epidemiology?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rakarra ( 112805 )

              You know, you can impart knowledge without being an asshole who belittles the person you're responding to every other sentence. Please try it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pnutjam ( 523990 )
          Sugar pills?! How insensitive, there is a diabetes problem in this nation. You slip those to someone with type 1 and it could cause some serious issues.

    • Re:Natural immunity (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:25PM (#47924067)

      The widespread use of antibiotics for every little thing has largely been eliminated in the medical community. The problem these days is farmers overusing them on animals. And by overuse I mean "routinely give whether it is necessary or not." THIS is what is producing antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, and THIS is what will create the next pandemic.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm sure a billion other people will reply with the same comment as me - the problem isn't doctors over proscribing antibiotics. Its the widespread abuse of antibiotics by livestock farmers. Its cheaper to toss antibiotics in the food for all the cattle, pigs, etc than it is to deal with problems caused by infections. These are the fertile breading grounds for resistance.

      Don't get me wrong, we overuse antibiotics in the treatment of humans, and for some reason think that soap and other products need ant

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Firethorn ( 177587 )

        Its cheaper to toss antibiotics in the food for all the cattle, pigs, etc than it is to deal with problems caused by infections. These are the fertile breading grounds for resistance.

        It not only prevents infections, it also increases growth. However it's far from the only source of antibiotic resistant bacteria because there's plenty of bacterias out there that are resistant to antibiotics that have NEVER been fed to animals.

        We're willing to give expensive antibiotics to humans, if I remember right, there's only 3 major antibiotics given to cattle. If you're infected with a disease resistant to something not on that list, it probably didn't get that resistance from cattle.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ruir ( 2709173 )
          It increases growth because it kills the gut bacteria and then food is not processed optimally.

          • Three wrongs in one so short sentence :)
            It increases growth because: we don't know why, we only observed this 'empirically'
            it kills the gut bacteria : unlikely, the dose is to low for that, and it would contradict the third point:
            and then food is not processed optimally. if the food is not processed optimal, the animal would have _less_ energy and nutrition to grow; so that can't be the reason!

            • Ruir is correct. Antibiotics do kill gut bacteria, resulting in food not getting processed, rotten food remaining in the system, building up and making the animal fat and heavy. This makes the animal tired all of the time, resulting in the animal doing less, and getting, well, fatter (same thing happens in humans - ever seen anyone with a big bloated belly, skinny legs, lazy, unhappy...). There is no such thing as a "low dose of antibiotics" for animals, because antibiotics are meant to kill bacteria. A

              • Perhaps you should read the rest of this /. thread.
                Your claims are nonsense on all levels ...
                But if you believe that bullshit I don't really want to know how fat you are.

                I wonder how you can start with a complete wrong first paragraph and then write a semi insightful second one ;)

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by ruir ( 2709173 )
                  Are you an asshat or like to pretend you are one? If you do not want to know and learn, do not claim hard facts are nonsense.

                  • Re:Natural immunity (Score:4, Insightful)

                    by angel'o'sphere ( 80593 ) <angelo.schneider ... e ['oom' in gap]> on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @07:27AM (#47925691) Journal

                    No the asshat is you and our parent.
                    If gut bacterias are killed, and the food is not "processed" you can not become fat. Nor does a cow. Super simple. You can only become fat from food that _actually is processed_
                    Hence the claim low level antibiotics would kill gut bacterias in a way that you end up fat is scientific utter nonsense.

                    • Well there's "good" bacteria and "bad" bacteria in our guts. Once an imbalance occurs, it's hard to manage. If you have no bacteria at all in your gut, and you eat certain food(s), you can die.

                      Here's some relevant info regarding gut bacteria:
                      gut bacteria that helps prevent allergies [sciencedaily.com]
                      How gut bacteria can make you fat (or thin) [scientificamerican.com]

                      Hence the claim low level antibiotics would kill gut bacterias in a way that you end up fat is scientific utter nonsense.

                      Maybe we're talking about two different things. Low-levels of antibiotics will probably not "kill all the gut bacteria and make you fat", but the way doctors are prescribing th

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by ruir ( 2709173 )
                      It would help to further your reading skills too. "not processed optimally" is not the same as not being processed last time I checked. Idiot.
                    • I'm afraid you are mistaken. Antibiotics have long been linked to weight gain. This is something that has been common knowledge in the livestock industry since the mid 20th century. As farmers it's something my people are quite familar with. If you want something more recent my first google search pulled up: http://www.nature.com/nature/j... [nature.com] I'm sure there are other studies.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by ruir ( 2709173 )
                      It is not only experience, there are bucket loads of scientific studies about this, we are not making this up.

                    • Sorry for the delay, but I find angel to have a compelling argument - in order to grow cows need nutrients. It's not just 'grow fat' or 'heavier', if they simply weighed more because they had 100 pounds of feed stopped up in them, the meat packing industry would be pissed and start buying on the basis of gutted carcass weight or something. In order to get said nutrients they need their gut bacteria to break down their food, otherwise it'd inedible to them. In a sense Cows digest the bacteria, not the pla

                    • Any google search will provide any info that you'd be interested in reading. Here are some pages that you may want to read:
                      gut-and-weight-loss-connection [prevention.com]
                      A Hidden Trigger of Obesity: Intestinal Bugs [time.com]
                      New Study Reveals Bacteria Could Prevent Obesity and Weight Gain [scienceworldreport.com]

                      There is loads of information regarding this. Don't trust me, go find the info yourself. But my point (and I'm assuming that ruir has the same point) is not that the food sits in the gut and causes the weight gain, but that improper digesti

                    • I did not say they are not linked to weight gain: I said, we don't know what the mechanism is!
                      And I emphasized that they are given in low doses (and it is not 'antibiotics' it is only a certain subbranch if them, I really doubt you find penicillin causing weight gains).

                    • Let's see: All three studies you listed are irrelevant to what I was pointing out, which would be increased growth rates in farm animals with low dosage antibiotics. Posting studies about gut bacteria in healthy and fat people isn't close enough, sorry.

                    • Ok, sorry for the confusion, we may be talking about two different things. Maybe you can post some articles supporting your theory of why low dosage antibiotics increase growth rates in farm animals. I'm only pointing out that there is research-a-plenty that supports what I'm talking about - those three (although I provided 6 links total) are there because I'm lazy and didn't want to spend more time gathering others. Like you pointed out, there is a very limited number of antibiotics that are given to an

                    • I kinda already [slashdot.org] did? [slashdot.org]

                      As for the 'Ted Talks' I kind of ignored them for a number of reasons:
                      1. No reason to believe that they're peer reviewed.
                      2. Audio would be incredibly rude where I was at the time.
                      3. I'm a visual learner - listening to youtube lectures is painful for me.
                      4. My conclusion from the earlier 3 was that the latter 3 would be more the same. On reaching home, I confirmed this.

                      Anyways, some more articles on antibiotic growth promotion:
                      It improves growth, but not enough to justify the cost in [nih.gov]

                    • Right, so we agree that antibiotics obviously cause weight gain in animals and humans. It's the reason why that was our subject, right? So the ted talks that I posted are not about "antibiotics make people/animals fat", but rather they are people that have done the science to conclude that the microbial life in our guts holds key developmental architecture for the rest of the body and mind. And if the wrong kind of bacteria become over populated in the guts, a variety of effects can be observed. One of

      • Re:Natural immunity (Score:4, Informative)

        by drdread66 ( 1063396 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @09:52AM (#47926987)

        This. For the love of god, people need to mod the parent up. In classic Slashdot fashion, the entire conversation on this thread has missed the point, which is that the farm workers are carrying these antibiotic-resistant bacteria BECAUSE THEY CAME IN CONACT WITH LIVESTOCK THAT CARRY THE BACTERIA.

        Why do the livestock carry these bacteria? Because they were fed low doses of antibiotics for long times. Antibiotics work great when you use a nice high dose for a specified period of time, and kill all the targeted bacteria. If you use low doses that don't kill all the bacteria, then some survive and eventually the survivors evolve a resistance to the antibiotics.

        By using these low doses of antibiotics in livestock, we are *helping* bacteria develop resistance to the very drugs we use to treat those same bacterial infections in humans. In other words, we are setting the stage for an epidemic of disease that we can't treat because we rendered the treatment tools ineffective.

        MRSA is the first. What this article is pointing out is that more are on the way, because they now have direct evidence that the resistant bacteria have a means of getting from the livestock to human populations.

        This article ain't a political discussion, folks. It's a canary in a coal mine.

    • What America needs is effective tort reform. As long as there is a culture of fear of being sued to the point of ridiculous, Doctors will continue to overprescribe anti-biotics, since to date I've not heard of anyone being sued due to overprescribing them, yet not taking an infection seriously enough could be enough to cost a doctor millions.

      • I've not heard of anyone being sued due to overprescribing them

        I have; potentially life-threatening allergies to various classes of antibiotics (especially tetracyclines) are not all that uncommon.

        • Re:Natural immunity (Score:4, Interesting)

          by BringsApples ( 3418089 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @07:04AM (#47925543)
          I'm no doctor, and this is off-topic, so take this as you will. But I had the same type of situation, to many antibiotics for a sinus infection, resulted in a bunch of stomach problems - getting backed up all the time, allergic to wheat suddenly, all that. It took me about 4 years to really understand what happened, because doctors weren't able to do anything but tell me "You're allergic to wheat, go on a glutten-free diet."

          What I did do eventually is go on a 5-day fast. I know it may sound crazy. But what happens is that all of the bacteria in your guts sorta goes away and you're left with a nice feeling. The most important factor in the whole fast, is breaking the fast. Introduce probiotics this way:
          Drink kefir
          eat raw fruit
          drink vegetable broths
          drink raw milk if you can find it - plain yogurt will do good too

          There are other probiotics that you can find, check out what looks good to you. It's very important that you re-introduce food into your system slowly, or you're go into shock, or worse. After I did this, I have no more stomach problems, and no more wheat allergy. Of course you may want to consult a doctor before doing this.

          • After I did this, I have no more stomach problems, and no more wheat allergy. Of course you may want to consult a doctor before doing this.

            Allergy. I don't think you know what that word means. Gut bacteria has absolutely nothing to do with your histamine immune system reaction to certain proteins. I think you may mean "it gave me the runs." That is NOT an allergy.

            • You have obviously never done any research in this area. Start here [medscape.com]. Then go here [sciencedaily.com]. Also I put a good bit of information (complete with some more links of Ted.com talks) in this post [slashdot.org]

              If you're still not convinced, go get you a good couple of doses of a strong series of antibiotics, see if you have any experience that resembles mine. After that you're on your own.

              And to any medical doctors out there, you should inform your patients when you give them strong antibiotics about the concerns of stomach f

            • Just this week I read an article describing a study that had the following results: of the mice that were given antibiotics that killed the clostridium bacterium, 99% developed an allergy to nuts.

              This year there's a rash (:P) of articles showing that the immune system and gut bacteria are much more interconnected than previously thought.

          • Your sig is pretty funny, in this context.

            This too shall pass.

          • Sounds a little more pleasant than the nuclear option [wikipedia.org].

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Rakarra ( 112805 )

            Also, pay attention to what your doctor says. If he administers a test for Coeliac Disease and you're positive, then all the probiotics and bacteria munging and anything else along those lines won't help you, and continuing to ingest gluten can cause long-term harm.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As a Doctor, I will agree. As a business man (who must run practice), I say this:

      1. Pay me when you are well.
      2. Don't expect a free diagnosis.
      3. Visit me when your healthy so I can have a baseline to go from.
      4. Don't take your medications until you feel better, and then stop.
      5. Don't ask for medications. Yes, I have heard of the ones you want. I think I can figure out when to dispense it.
      6. Get the meds I tell you to take.
      7. If you are going to get a second opinion, just tell me - and have those records sen

    • Animals with more rights than humans (Score:4, Interesting)

      by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:55PM (#47924145) Homepage Journal

      The sad thing is that nowadays if you have the sniffles you can't get antibiotics without going to a doctor, and yet if your pet guppy isn't looking so good you can get some for your aquarium. And farmers seem to think antibiotic is an essential nutrient, no problem so long as it's not for humans! But try to get some for yourself and you'll get the lecture about antibiotic resistance. Unless it's for your soap.

      On the other hand, at least they have a few antibiotics reserved for humans in real trouble, but on the other hand antibiotics everywhere breed antibiotic resistant bacteria, and many of the mechanisms bacteria use for antibiotic resistance give them total or partial immunity to other antibiotics.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vivian ( 156520 )

        Hopefully you can't get antibiotics even after seeing the doctor, if you only have sniffles.
        Antibiotics generally don't work on viruses, which is what usually causes sniffles.

        • Aquarium supply houses carry ampicillin in the same dosage capsules as a pharmacy (for fish use only, wink, wink). They even guarantee potency for a year. Not that I think of taking a few if I developed another abscessed tooth mind you.

    • Good, this indicates that doctors and people who think they should take antibiotics like vitamins haven't completely screwed up our natural immunities and that most of the world still fights off this infections even though drugs no longer work on them.

      The problem with Staph Aureus is that it's omnipresent in the respiratory tract and skin. It seems to have spent a long time evolving with immune systems, because it has two lines of defense (producing catalase and carrotenoids) which neutralise two of the chemicals that white blood cells use to break down foriegn bodies (superoxide and singlet oxygen). Additionally the protein A in the cell wall confuses the shit out of white blood cells, making them difficult to detect.

      Add that to producing some really

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flyneye ( 84093 )

      According to a Czech study, vegetative unripe cannabis produces an oil that kills antibiotic resistant staph and other dangerous organisms.
      Fuck the Doctors and ex-spurts. This article is just so much propaganda and horseshit.
      Eventually people will wise up or die for no good reason.

    • In this case, you might want to go after the vets before the doctors...

      It's not an accident that they were looking at agricultural workers (rather than, say, elementary school teachers, who would be seeing the worst of it from antibiotics-for-the-sniffles patients), nor is it an accident that there are 'livestock-associated' drug resistant strains.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      I don't think its as clear cut as are you going to die without antibiotics. I and I think everyone pretty much believes they are over prescribed.

      However you have to consider that most of us are not living in sparse populations with infrequent travel anymore. Its not like if you are sick you can do the minimal work to keep the farm running and for go that trip into town for a couple weeks while we convalesce.

      Most folks have jobs they have to be at with only an handful of sick days and they have to go to sh

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Wile I agree wit the basic idea that we should be more careful about when we apply antibiotics, it should be noted that while as a species we did indeed survived a long time without them, our mortality rate was a lot worse. Our natural immunity is not all that great, we simply breed fast enough that we do not die off.

    • You missed the real issue... while you still have a point. But the issue the article is about is not the prescription of antibiotics to humans but to cattle, that's actually why it talks about farmers

      Cattle is fed antibiotics as a "preventive measure" just in case and with the aim of lowering production costs by avoiding diseases. Note that I haven't used quotes around 'fed' as they are literally doing that shoveling massive amounts of antibiotica in the the cattle's fodder.

      You have clearly understood th

  • Disclaimer: I am no fan of mega-scale industrial farming but if 1/3 of us are carrying this crap around anyway and we aren't dropping in the street or fighting off the zombie apocalypse, I have to wonder how much of a problem it actually is.

    • Staph in your nose is unlikely to cause harm. Commensal infections of staph are very common. If it finds a way to get deeper inside your body, say through a cut, then you have a problem. If it's a resistant strain, then the antibiotics won't help you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by u38cg ( 607297 )
      Richy, this is the 19th century. 19th century, meet Rich. 19th century, Rich wants to hear about the good old days when a minor cut would routinely kill through infection.

      In all seriousness, better hygiene is doing most of the heavy lifting to control it. The problem comes when you're in a situation where that's not enough, like being in hospital with another health problem.

    • Imagine that some odd radiation caused all the seatbelts in cars to deteriorate and become weak. For most of us this wouldn't actually be a problem. A good percentage of us will not be in an accident that requires them.

      You can see where this is headed. The reason we aren't dropping dead in the street is because we DO have effective antibiotics for when those antibiotics will help. Prior to the discovery of antibiotics a great number of people were dying due to infections. I don't remember the exact sou

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Richy_T ( 111409 )

        OK, now let's run with that analogy, it's close enough for illustrative purposes.

        So, 1/3 of all cars are exposed to this radiation which weakens seatbelts anyway.

        Now, a small proportion of all cars, we could go by model but let's go by circumstance instead... Maybe let's say 98% cars used for off-roading are exposed to this radiation.

        So now, instead of 33%, it's what, 34%, 35%? If this is an issue, then the 33% is also an issue and we should be doing what we an to eliminate that. Sure, it's not ideal if you

        • ALL the cars need gas hauled by the offroading cars (ALL people need food produced / handled / processed by farm workers).

          The radiation is transmitted (!!) by gas. (The bugs are transmitted by food - may not cause a problem with gut but a skin cut during cutting vegetables, or touching one's food with injured body part is not unheard of).

          So the 33% doesn't increase to 34% or 35% - but progressively, and potentially 90+% i.e. an unrelated coincidence can expose 90+% people to the bugs in farm workers' noses.

  • Keeping animal captive and housed together is literally begging for worse and worse strains of diseases. Hoof and mouth, avian flu, mad cow.. Then we get stuff like e. coli from veggies, which isn't even from the plant: it's from the manure it's covered in. Adding antibiotics only accelerates the process. Yeehaw.

    • they're literally disease farms

      And, not to mention, the single largest consumer of water and the single largest source of carbon emissions.

  • Well they feed the livestock Tetracycline by the shovel full. Of course, a person that needs the drug has to pay at least 10000% more and can't afford to go see their doctor unless they have insurance. Lucky pigs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ruir ( 2709173 )
      Or you can eat soaps and hand sanitiser to get it. (note to idiots, this is irony)

  • When self interest supersedes the common good.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by felixrising ( 1135205 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:53AM (#47924463)
    Tragedy of the commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]

  • I believe 'Sheep Looking Up' and on a minor scale 'Stand on Sanzibar', both by John Brunner, should be mandatory readings in school. And if you are into such literatur: 'Schockwaverider'.

  • In light of this, it makes perfect sense that the former Plum Island animal disease institute be moved to the center of the country within eyesight of a fucking football stadium.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bio_and_Agro-Defense_Facility [wikipedia.org]
  • 75% of the subjects had S. aureus in their sinuses, 51% had non-livestock associated penicillin resistant SA (MRSA), 46% had livestock associated MRSA. But the sample size is so small (22 people) the study doesn't prove much beyond the fact that once colonized by S. aureus you tend to stay colonized.

  • to quarantine them for weeks, like the early astronauts, before letting them come into town for supplies.

    Yup, and we are worried about ebola when a bigger danger is lurking right in our very noses.

  • There is a film [resistancethefilm.com] (Resistance) about this. I think it will be free to view sometime soon, but I saw it in NYC at a theater and it has been previewing at various places around the country.

  • Looks to me like this study was about how long bacteria live in noses of people. So they found people that would have a lot of bacteria in their noses, like farm workers, and looked for bacteria. BIG SURPRISE! They find some.

    So I wonder how much MRSA and Multi-resistant other stuff they would find in noses of healthcare workers, or noses of teachers. Both groups that are exposed to a lot of mammals, in this case people, and thus flying bacteria, and thus all kinds of bacteria, including the nasty resist

  • The real problem here is that ranchers and ranching conglomerates INSIST on using antibiotics as 'growth enhancements'.

    That is, they give it to livestock not because the livestock is sick, but because it makes the livestock larger - with more muscles.

    As a direct result, the livestock develop antibiotic resistant bacteria.

    Congress keeps letting them do this because the companies that sell it give them lots of money.

    • They get the money to buy off congress from their customers. This is as much the fault of the consumer as it is the fault of the factory farms.

      • The consumers are not aware what they are doing with their money. They know what they are doing with their money, so the responsibility is theirs.

        Now, if we passed a law that required all meet raised with antibiotics to be labelled as such, then the consumers would either stop buying it or bear the responsibility for their actions.

  • 22 people tested (Score:3)

    by jsepeta ( 412566 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @09:25AM (#47926685) Homepage

    well we can just scale that up and apply the results to millions of farm workers worldwide (not)

    this is such a small pool of tested people that the results cannot be applied beyond that specific group.

  • I have long thought that recreational drugs should be legalized, while antibiotics should be treated the way we treat controlled substances. After all, recreational drugs hurt no one, except in a minority of cases, the user, while misuse of antibiotics threaten everybody. Besides, it'll provide employment to drug cops once we've finally ended prohibition.

  • OK, first, how are the people posting about doctors over prescribing antibiotics being modded insightful? That's not really a problem any more, and it's specifically NOT what the article is about....

    This should be a test case for those people that say that the Free Market is good and Government is bad. We have a problem with industrial farmers (I hate calling them farmers. I grew up on a farm. What they do has little resemblance to farming) abusing antibiotics. This is NOT new news. We've known this for a

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