Drug-Resistant Bacteria: To Humans From Farms via Food
Monday, March 14, 2011 at 12:15PM
Chickens, chicken meat and humans in the Netherlands are carrying identical, highly drug-resistant E. coli — resistance that is apparently moving from poultry raised with antibiotics, to humans, via food.
For anyone who thinks about these issues — anyone interested in sustainability, organics or small-scale farming, anyone working to combat foodborne disease — this may seem like a foregone conclusion. And it should. The first observation that giving antibiotics to animals spreads antibiotic-resistant bacteria to humans was made in 1976, and there has been a steady accumulation of evidence since. Nevertheless, the argument keeps being made that the connection is not water-tight , and that antibiotic use outside agriculture — in human medicine, perhaps — can be blamed for the vast rise in antibiotic resistance.
For those who don’t want to believe in this connection — and it is, at this point, a matter of belief much more than it is of evidence — this new paper too may not convince them. To me, though, it’s more good evidence that overuse of antibiotics in farming is a human-health threat. -Wired Magazine
A public-private team from the Netherlands (several universities and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment) gathered samples of E. coli, the ubiquitous gut bug, from live poultry and from retail chicken meat. They looked for a particular resistance pattern: extended-spectrum beta-lactamase resistance, or ESBL.
ESBL is an emerging problem in human medicine. It tends to appear in Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli and also Klebsiella, species that cause hospital-acquired infections in vulnerable people such as ICU and burn patients. ESBL confers protection against whole families of drugs, starting with penicillin and extending to the later generations of cephalosporins, and leaves bacteria treatable by only one remaining small family of drugs, the carbapenems.
ESBL incidence has been rising steadily for the past two decades, even in countries in the European Union where human antibiotic use is strictly controlled by government policy — meaning there are not a lot of antibiotics washing around, exerting the selective pressure that drives the emergence of resistance.
Read more from the original article here:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/superbug/