In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.
The good news is that people are earnestly trying to figure out if a deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria strain is infecting our nation's vast supply of pork.
The bad news is, they don't work for a government regulator with the power to do something about it. Rather, they're university researchers and journalists, whose only real power is the public outrage they can generate through their work.
Prepare to be outraged by the work of University of Iowa professor Tara Smith and veteran Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Andrew Schneider. Prepare also to give up industrially produced pork, if you're still eating (or, even worse, cooking with) the stuff.
First, some background. No one disputes that a bacteria called MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus -- has become a major public-health menace.
According to a recent post on Schneider's Secret Ingredients blog, the Center for Disease Control reported 94,360 "invasive MRSA infections" in the United States in 2005 -- of which 18,650 resulted in death. More people now die of MRSA than of AIDs.
If MRSA's prevalence is a settled fact, its provenance remains cloudy. Until the 1980s, infections were mainly limited to people who spent time in hospitals and nursing homes. That led scientists to conjecture that it originated from the medical establishment's heavy reliance on antibiotics. When you concentrate a bunch of sick people and dose them liberally with antibiotics, it turns out, bacteria strains mutate and develop resistance. Who would have thought?
Then, sometime in the 1990s, MSRA cases began to pop up among folks who had never gone near a hospital. Around the same time, the pork industry was undergoing a massive wave of consolidation -- more and more hogs crammed into tighter and tighter spaces. And since hogs raised under such conditions essentially cede their immune systems, the only way to keep them alive was , you guessed it, by dosing them liberally with antibiotics.
Can anyone guess what happened next?
Evidently, FDA and USDA regulators couldn't. As MRSA cases -- and deaths -- piled up, these folks looked the other way, Schneider reports. And they remain slack-jawed and flummoxed, even as evidence mounts of a link between the deadly bacteria and industrial pork production.
Earlier this year, Schneider reports, a Canadian researcher found MRSA in "10 percent of 212 samples of pork chops and ground pork bought in four Canadian provinces." The Canadian pork industry, which exports some 762 million pounds of pork into the U.S. annually, has also embraced the concentrated-animal feedlot operation (CAFO) model, with its heavy reliance on antibiotics.
The Canadian researcher even delivered his findings at a Center for Disease Control confab. The response from U.S. authorities? Awkward silence. The USDA, which is responsible for the safety of imported food, doesn't test for MRSA, Schneider reports.
The FDA, responsible for monitoring the safety of U.S.-grown foods, might have been expected to start testing our homegrown pork in light of the Canadian findings. But it didn't, according to Schneider.
Recently, though, a researcher at the University of Iowa decided to do what U.S. authorities have avoided: test U.S. CAFO-grown pigs for MRSA. Evidently, it wasn't t that hard. Schneider reports that assistant professor of epidemiology Tara Smith and her team of graduate students merely "swabbed the noses of 209 pigs from 10 farms in Iowa and Illinois."
The results were unsettling: they "found MRSA in 70 percent of the porkers." Stunningly, this apparently marked the first-ever publicly released test of U.S. hogs for MRSA.
Now, the pork industry, no doubt fretting about how those 18,650 MRSA-related deaths might affect its bottom line, already has an answer: If you cook pork to the well-done phase, MRSA dies. So, if you catch it., it's your fault -- you didn't follow proper cooking procedure.
That's absurd, though. First, cooking pork chops to the cardboard phase won't protect people who work with live animals or raw pork: those who toil on hog farms or in slaughterhouses. Indeed, Smith and her researchers also tested 20 workers on Iowa hog farms. Nine of them carried the same MRSA strain as the pigs. And MRSA is contagious, meaning it can move from workers to their families and broader communities.
Second, home cooks who handle raw MRSA-tainted pork are subject to risks that proper cooking can't protect them from. "The main possible concern is that people could get MRSA on their hands from raw pork, then touch their nose. The nose is the prime site for MRSA to live," one researcher told Schneider.
Another possible path to infection is through cuts on the hands.
So why aren't public-safety officials actively rooting out the causes of a menace that's costing more lives than AIDs? My guess is that they realize that without heavy use of antibiotics, the meat industry -- a multi-billion-dollar behemoth with friends in high places -- would wither.
And the problem might not be limited to pork. A Canadian researcher told Schneider that "MRSA could also be in beef, chicken and lamb, but no one is checking."
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Comments
View as Flat
sindark Posted 6:28 am
10 Jun 2008
a sibilant intake of breath
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javaearth Posted 6:36 am
10 Jun 2008
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PermieWriter Posted 7:42 am
10 Jun 2008
It was only ever a matter of time for this kind of outbreak given the horrendous conditions in CAFOs and battery egg factories. I'm terrified of what will happen if we don't shut them all down as soon as possible.
Eat what you grow, grow what you eat
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caniscandida Posted 3:11 pm
10 Jun 2008
that so many CAFO-raised pigs have MRSA;
that the piggy bigwigs either deny or minimize the health risk (we should expect an ethical businessperson to shut down business voluntarily, if there were an indication that the business's product endangered anyone's health);
that the counterpart bigwigs in CAFOs of cattle, sheep and poultry are holding off examining the healthfulness of their own products (actually, they may already have done sufficient examinations in secret, got the bad news, and are keeping things under wraps while they prepare a defense that will help them escape having to change anything).
Underlying all three of them, of course, is the original evil of the CAFO system.
And the evil underlying the CAFO system is, not so much the carnivorous habits of most Americans (though that indeed contributes), but rather our habits as consumers in general, which in fact discourage us from asking for too much information about what we buy.
It seems still unlikely that very many Americans have a sense of how animals are treated in CAFOs, and how they are slaughtered. Even if that knowledge becomes more widely shared, perhaps we would be naive to expect everyone suddenly to be converted to vegetarianism; indeed many may not be affected at all. But it is reasonable to think that many others, while intending to continue to eat meat, will at least demand a radical reform of how that meat is produced -- i.e., how the animals are raised and cared for.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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MAD MAC Posted 2:47 am
12 Jun 2008
Victory in Pattani
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caniscandida Posted 3:12 am
12 Jun 2008
You are a man with a sense of military virtue; surely you understand.
And as for "most people": How do you say it in northern Maine?: Je n'en fous pas la peine, par le bon Dieu!
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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John former Marine Posted 3:35 am
12 Jun 2008
Shu pas a vende.
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MAD MAC Posted 8:15 pm
17 Jun 2008
I am just pointing out the fallacy of the idea that if people knew how the animals were raised in CAFOs, that somehow they would stop eating meat produced in same and switch to more expensive products that were raised in a more natural and humane environment. Most people could not care less.
So beating the drums is not going to do much. Not that it's not worth doing, just that it's not likely to yield much in the way of results. That has to be done through unpopular legislation, which does happen sometimes (and explains why blacks are no longer slaves).
I will tell you there is something refreshing about living in a place where there is such a close connection to your food production. One of the things I really like about living here. Of course, I HATE not being able to get any kind of international cuisine. That's the big drawback. Can't have everything.
Victory in Pattani
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caniscandida Posted 10:49 pm
17 Jun 2008
And, as I think I said before, I quite accept that "most people just don't care."
But just because you say that, and just because it is true, RIGHT NOW, that does not at all mean that the story is over.
One of the brilliant things about people is that they talk with one another, and they get new ideas in their heads, and they decide they want to change. I do not know if it is especially brilliant, on the other hand, to go about intentionally trying to get people to change. Such efforts are extraordinarily arduous, most of the time (unless perhaps you are into advertising, and into discovering the new cool brand).
Remember DR's excellent Fathers' Day lesson: If you want to be a good parent, be a good person. With the implication that the parent's personal goodness will be evident to the child.
So, to paraphrase: If you want others to learn to be kind to animals, be kind to animals -- and in such a way that now and again others know about it. That is all.
(Ooh, isn't that smell in the background your water-buffalo-burger nearing well-done?) : )
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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MAD MAC Posted 2:30 pm
19 Jun 2008
Victory in Pattani
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