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Category Archives: Netherlands

Antibiotics in animals – a warning from the poultry world

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Constant reader Pat Gardiner guided me to an enlightening post at the website of the agricultural magazine World Poultry that questions the routine use of antibiotics in food animals. It’s written by Wiebe van der Sluis, a Netherlands journalist from a farming background, founder of World Poultry and also the magazines Pig Progress and Poultry [...]

British newspaper discovers ST398, says no UK cases – incorrect

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The UK’s Sunday Express takes note today of “pig MRSA” ST398 (full post archive here) in a story that is both somewhat alarmist and oddly incomplete, since it misses a piece of news that I told you about here last June. The Express story raises the alarm over ST 398 in pigs in the Netherlands, colonizing [...]

More on "pig MRSA" and the havoc it can do

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Folks, before I get to the SHEA abstracts, one more post on ST398 in humans, and a sad and difficult story. It is the first (to my knowledge) report of ST398 spreading into a nursing home, in the January 2009 issue of Eurosurveillance Weekly. It was very thoroughly investigated, because it took place in the Netherlands, [...]

"Sick as a pig" – from ST398

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Constant readers, I am at the annual meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, where there is a lot of news about MRSA in hospitals. I hope to post on that over the next few days. In the meantime, though, I want to pass on several pieces of news about ST398, the “pig strain” [...]

More MRSA in meat, and not just pork

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In my excitement over the paper by Tara Smith and team on Friday, I failed to sufficiently emphasize an important new finding. (I included it in my story for ScientificAmerican.com, but it was toward the end.) I feel it deserves a post of its own, so here it is: The Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority [...]