Don't
Eat Me
The following is the top half of of an opinion column written
by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. The entire article
can be found here.
This story spells out nicely why we all need to reconsider
our meat-eating habits. =mike=)
 We
don’t add antibiotics to baby food
and Cocoa Puffs so that children get
fewer ear infections. That’s because
we understand that the overuse of antibiotics
is already creating “superbugs” resistant
to medication.
Yet we continue to allow agribusiness
companies to add antibiotics to animal
feed so that piglets stay healthy and
don’t get ear infections. Seventy
percent of all antibiotics in the United
States go to healthy livestock, according
to a careful study by the Union of Concerned
Scientists — and that’s one
reason we’re seeing the rise of
pathogens that defy antibiotics.
These dangerous pathogens are now even
in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples
of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive
for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant
staph infection — according to
a peer-reviewed study published in Applied
and Environmental Microbiology last year.
And a recent study of retail meats in
the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA
in one pork sample, out of 300, according
to Jianghong Meng, the University of
Maryland scholar who conducted the study.
Regardless of whether the bacteria came
from the pigs or from humans who handled
the meat, the results should sound an
alarm bell, for MRSA already kills more
than 18,000 Americans annually, more
than AIDS does.
MRSA (pronounced “mersa”)
stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus
aureus. People often get it from hospitals,
but as I wrote in my last column, a new
strain called ST398 is emerging and seems
to find a reservoir in modern hog farms.
Research by Peter Davies of the University
of Minnesota suggests that 25 percent
to 39 percent of American hogs carry
MRSA.
Public health experts worry that pigs
could pass on the infection by direct
contact with their handlers, through
their wastes leaking into ground water
(one study has already found antibiotic-resistant
bacteria entering ground water from hog
farms), or through their meat, though
there has been no proven case of someone
getting it from eating pork. Thorough
cooking will kill the bacteria, but people
often use the same knife to cut raw meat
and then to chop vegetables. Or they
plop a pork chop on a plate, cook it
and then contaminate it by putting it
back on the original plate.
Yet the central problem here isn’t
pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe
and even South Korea, the United States
still bows to agribusiness interests
by permitting the nontherapeutic use
of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s
unconscionable.
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Continue reading the entire article here.
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