Isolated cases of drug-resistant staph infections recently in area schools have raised anxiety about health standards and safety in districts. The incidence of infections from the bacteria, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, concentrated primarily in hospitals and nursing homes, is rising in the general population.
Chances are that not many of the thousands of Americans who are infected by the drug-resistant staph, MRSA, every year (94,000 in 2005) have ever been close to a pig farm or a pig-farm worker. Yet as research studies are discovering, the trail of MRSA is winding through pig farms in Canada and in Europe.
A study published in October that focused on Canadian pig farms found drug-resistant strains of staph at nine of the 20 farms in the study. It reported a quarter of the pigs were infected. So were one-fifth of the pig farmers, an infection rate higher than in the general population. Infections also have been found in pigs in the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Singapore, the farmers in these countries contracting the infection from pigs. Pigs in the United States have not yet been tested for MRSA.
That the staph infection can skip from animals to humans (and the other way around) is disturbing, but it is hardly a novel concept. Painstaking research has traced human infections of HIV/AIDS, avian flu and the West Nile virus, for example, to apes, birds and mosquitoes.
More disturbing still is the growing list of virulent, drug-resistant strains of the bacterial and viral infections that plague both humans and animals. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month issued a warning about a dangerous ''super'' cold virus. The new health hazard joins diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria and clostridium difficile (c. diff), that have developed strains resistant to the drugs most commonly used to combat them.
The concern shared increasingly by scientists and medical experts is that heavy and/or improper use of antibiotics in agriculture, particularly in animal feed, with the residues climbing up the food chain, is contributing significantly to drug-resistant infections.
The risks to public health are immense, the costs high to find effective substitutes for drugs that no longer work. All the more reason Congress should not dither over pending legislation that seeks to eliminate the use of antibiotics in animal feed.Akron Beacon Journal
