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Antibiotics: Killing Off Beneficial Bacteria… For Good?
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Martin Blaser of New York University’s Langone Medical Center argues that antibiotics’ impact on gut bacteria is permanent — and so serious in its long-term consequences that medicine should consider whether to restrict antibiotic prescribing to pregnant women and young children.
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our friendly flora never fully recover
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Overuse of antibiotics could be fuelling the dramatic increase in conditions such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and asthma, which have more than doubled in many populations.
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Highly Resistant Salmonella: Poultry, Antibiotics, Borders, Risk
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If you’re a strain of Salmonella, it’s a very good week. If you’re a human, not so much.
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There are two stories occurring simultaneously that underline the rising danger of drug-resistant organisms in the food supply, and the porousness of networks for detecting the dangerous bugs in time.
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“resistant to many commonly prescribed antibiotics,” according to the CDC
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traveling on ground turkey
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has become resistant to fluoroquinolones such as Cipro, the drug usually used to treat Salmonella infections.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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Multi-Drug Resistant Staph in 1 in 4 Meat Samples
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A team of researchers from Arizona bought meat and poultry in five cities across the United States
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52 percent of those staph isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics that are commonly used in both veterinary and human medicine.
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That is: Roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the United States contained multidrug resistant staph.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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Drug-resistant bacteria: To humans from farms via food
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“Show us the science that use of antibiotics in animal production is causing this antibiotic resistance,” Dave Warner of the National Pork Council
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Clinical Microbiology and Infection
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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.
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The case has been proven on the population level: populations of chickens, collections of chicken meat, populations of humans. If you look at the 30 years of research on this question, it’s been proven time and time again.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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Ag antibiotic use: Risky — but also sloppy and wasteful
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So, to sum up: It’s always been clear that indiscriminate use of antibiotics in agriculture leads to costs outside farms, in environmental contamination and in development of drug-resistant bacteria. What this analysis shows is that antibiotic over-use has costs on the farm as well. It’s inefficient, it wastes drugs and money, and it doesn’t necessarily do what it is intended to do.
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News break: Slaughter will reintroduce PAMTA
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Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Congress’s only microbiologist, said late today that she plans shortly to reintroduce PAMTA, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, a timely move given the collapsing antibiotic market (see this morning’s post) and continuing reports of resistance moving off farms (as in this post).
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PAMTA would direct the FDA to re-examine its approvals of veterinary antibiotics that are close analogs of ones used in humans, because they can stimulate the development of resistant organisms.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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News break: FDA estimates US livestock get 29 million pounds of antibiotics per year
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The reason why antibiotic use on farms is a concern, of course, is because such use stimulates the emergence of drug-resistant organisms that move off the farm in animals, in groundwater, in dust, on the wind and in the systems and on the clothes of those who work there, and makes new resistance factors available to be swapped among bacteria.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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Second Look Behind the Headlines
