Blog

Category Archives: veterinary

Antibiotics and farming — how superbugs happen

0 Comments
Constant readers: There’s an important new paper that’s been out for a week that I haven’t gotten to you. I apologize; it’s been busy. (Let’s not even talk about the important paper that’s been out for two weeks. Maybe over the weekend…) We’ve talked for ages now about the potential dangers of unrestricted antibiotic use in [...]

CBS antibiotics and farming, day 2 – and more on the Danish experience

0 Comments
Constant readers, I hope you watched the second day of CBS News’ series on antibiotic use in farming, and how it promotes the emergence of antibiotic-resistant infections in animal and humans. I found it surprisingly hard-hitting. Here’s the video and the text version. Most of the report explored the farm experience in Denmark, which in 1998 [...]

CBS antibiotics and farming package, day one

0 Comments
Constant readers, I hope you saw the CBS News package on antibiotics in farming Tuesday night. (It continues Wednesday.) MRSA played a prominent role, in an account of infections among workers at a chicken plant (the same outbreak, I think, as was described by Prevention magazine last August) and in questions about MRSA in pig [...]

Warning on ST398: Monitor this now

0 Comments
Drawing your attention: I have a story up tonight at CIDRAP on a new paper by Dr. Jan Kluytmans, a Dutch physician and microbiologist and one of the lead researchers tracking “pig MRSA,” ST398. (All past stories on ST398 here.) It’s a review paper, which is to say that it summarizes key existing findings rather [...]

H1N1 flu and swine surveillance – more relevance for MRSA

0 Comments
Constant readers, you probably know that yesterday the World Health Organization declared the first flu pandemic in 41 years. I want to point out for you a side issue in the H1N1 story that has great relevance for MRSA, especially ST398. As described in this article I wrote last night for CIDRAP, three medical journal articles [...]

Does ethanol production produce resistant bacteria too?

0 Comments
One of the challenges of disappearing down the rabbit hole of a gnarly chapter — gee, it’s dark down here — is that I get behind on my RSS feeds, and suddenly every entry in my Google Reader is at 1000+ and it’s all just too daunting. So, trying to catch up a bit, I [...]

Great op-ed in the LA Times on antibiotics in animals

0 Comments
By Paul Roberts, author of the new book The End of Food. Find it here. (H/t to indefatigable animal activist Karen Dawn, author of Thanking the Monkey, for the link!)

Antibiotic resistance in food animals all across Europe

0 Comments
Via a journal that’s new to me — the Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica, the open-access journal of the Veterinary Associations of the Nordic Countries — comes an amazing review of the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in cattle in 13 European countries. Based on 25,241 isolates collected over three years, Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and [...]

Great post elsewhere on antibiotic use in animals

0 Comments
There will be a bit of a blog break, as I’m traveling for a week. But here as a walk-off is an excellent post from the marvelous public-health blog Effect Measure about the complexities (to be kind) of food companies declaring antibiotic use in food animals. Very short version of the story: Massive chicken producer Tyson [...]

Closing the loop: meat, meat-eaters, health-care workers

0 Comments
A posting on the international disease-alert mailing list ProMED led me to a scientific abstract presented at a European meeting this spring on the ST 398 MRSA strain. It adds another, quite unnerving piece to the emerging interplay of MRSA in pigs, humans who have close contact with pigs, humans who have contact only with [...]