December 28, 2011

A Quarter of All Burgers Tainted With Drug-Resistant Bacteria

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdickert/2423872941/sizes/m/in/photostream/">ILoveButter</a>/Flickr

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Responding to the same FDA cave-in to the meat industry I flagged earlier today, Mark Bittman points to a damning study I missed when it came out in April.

In it (press release; full text), researchers gathered 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork, and turkey from supermarkets in five US cities and tested them for staph aureus, a common food-poisoning bacteria that causes everything from from minor skin infections to serious diseases like pneumonia, endocarditis and sepsis.

The results: 47 percent of the samples contained the staph; and of those, fully half were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. This suggests that a quarter of the meat in US supermarket shelves are tainted with multi-drug-resistant strains of this potentially deadly pathogen.

That may seem jaw-dropping, but it shouldn’t. The FDA itself routinely checks supermarket meat samples for resistant pathogens—and routinely finds them. Scroll around the FDA’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) site, and I dare you to ever touch factory-farmed meat again. For example, did you see that more than 70 percent of the salmonella the agency found in ground turkey samples in 2007 was resistant to the common antibiotic tetracycline?

But NARMS only tests for four pathogen types: E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter, and enterococcus. This latest study suggests that if the FDA looked, it would find that are meat supply is commonly laced with resistant strains of other microbes, too.

And of course, infected to meat isn’t the only way the public can be exposed to resistant disease strains. Research has also shown that flies and cockroaches can carry them from factory farms to surroundings.

All of which makes the FDA’s latest cave-in on farm antibiotics not only inexcusable, but also really, really gross.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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