According to Abby Harper, one of Smith’s graduate students, there are indications that the antibiotics routinely used in pig farming – specifically tetracycline – may be the cause of the spread of MRSA. Other researchers have also noted the synchronous rise of CA-MRSA in humans in the 1990s and the simultaneous introduction of antibiotic regimens on pig farms.

The agent (of disease) may not be tetracycline itself, but the fact that pigs regularly treated with it develop an immunity to it, just like humans, and this immunity can then be transferred, along with the bacteria, to the pig’s human caretakers. If so, the routine use of antibiotics in pig farming, coupled with the indiscriminate use of those same antibiotics in human populations, may be a recipe for a pandemic to rival the 1918 Spanish Flu   that swept the world, killing 50 to 100 million people before it disappeared. 

MRSA “SuperBug” in Pigs and a Squelched Cure Using Garlic | celsias°.

Evidence of resistance associated with antimicrobial growth promotants has been emerging over the past three decades. Tetracycline-resistant organisms were found in 1976 in chickens raised on feed supplemented with tetracycline, a human-use antibiotic. In a prospective study of 11 poultry farm members and 24 neighbors, Levy and co-workers (1976a) found that before the use of tetracycline on the farm neither the farmers nor the animals were positive for tetracyclineresistant intestinal flora. Within 5 months of the introduction of tetracycline in the poultry feed, 31.3% of fecal samples from farm members harbored intestinal flora that were resistant to tetracycline even though none had been treated clinically with tetracycline. Tetracycline-resistant bacteria were found in only 6.8% of the samples from neighbors

8837.pdf application/pdf Object.

The main objective of the present study was to investigate if different kinds of pig farms, like farrowing farms and rearing farms, play a role in the transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) to Dutch finishing farms. Twelve farrowing farms, 11 finishing farms, 6 farrow-to finish farms, 1 rearing farm and 1 centre for artificial insemination were included. Screening of 310 pigs from these 31 farms showed 35 pigs (11%) to carry MRSA in their nares. On 7 of the 31 (23%) investigated farms colonized pigs were found, including 3 finishing farms, 3 farrowing farms and 1 farrow-to-finish farm. The use of standard antimicrobial medication of the pigs seemed to be a risk factor for MRSA carriage. Screening of the pigs on six farms supplying pigs for the MRSA positive farms revealed that the pigs on all but one farm were MRSA positive. Genotyping revealed that all MRSA strains were non-typeable by PFGE using the SmaI restriction enzyme and had multilocus sequence type (MLST) ST398. Different spa-types were found including t011, t108, t567, t899 and t1939, but the spa-types on epidemiologically related farms were identical indicating that MRSA are transmitted between farms through the purchase of colonized pigs.

Transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococc…[Vet Microbiol. 2008] – PubMed Result.

The Dutch food safety authority, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, conducted a risk assessment in the Netherlands and concluded that the MRSA present in food animals such as pigs is not a food-safety threat. And a recent Institute of Food Technologists report stated that correlating the risk of antibiotic use in animals and antibiotic resistance in humans is not possible.

There is reason to believe that antibiotics in the food chain promote resistance. Who you going to listen to. Many governments who are legislating against antibiotics or an industry body

The CDC pointed out that 80 percent of life-threatening MRSA infections appear to be the result of patient-to-patient transmission in inpatient health-care facilities. Additionally, the “vast majority” of community-associated infections result from person-to-person transmission, it said. The agency also pointed out that it has conducted numerous investigations of community-associated MRSA outbreaks, and “in none of these investigations has animal exposure been identified as a risk factor for infection.”

CDC are clearly not reading the relevant research or the growing body of evidence from the vets world

National Pork Producers Council.

Members of the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition (KAW), including medical, agriculture, and environmental experts, are repeating their call for Congress to compel the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to determine whether swine, cattle and poultry harbor MRSA in the US and could be reservoirs from which infections are making their way into the community.

“Antibiotic resistance is exploding in our hospitals and communities. Medical experts point to the profligate use of antibiotics in animal feed as a significant cause, but those in charge of safeguarding our food system are mostly just whistling in the dark,” said Rebecca Goldburg, Senior Scientist at Environmental Defense.

The heavy use of antibiotics in industrialized livestock operations can select for resistant bacteria, such as MRSA. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 70% of all the antibiotics and related drugs used in the United States are used as feed additives for chicken, hogs, and beef cattle. Antibiotics use in pig farms in the Netherlands is believed to be facilitating the spread of MRSA there.

Proposed federal legislation would phase out the use of antibiotics that are important in human medicine as animal feed additives within two years.

New Study Links Animal Agriculture To More Than 20% Of MRSA Infections In The Netherlands.