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Big News But: USDA Bans “Other” E. coli Strains
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today from the US Department of Agriculture: It has agreed that, starting in March 2012, six more strains of E. coli will be considered “adulterants,” putting them in the same regulatory category as the much-feared E. coli O157:H7. |
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Declaring an substance to be an adulterant means that it cannot legally be distributed in food, and that therefore food processors can legally be held to account for products that contain it.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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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.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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Ringing the Warning Bell: Colistin-Resistant Klebsiella
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In all the latest bad news about bacteria becoming highly resistant — through carbapenem resistance, or the “Indian supergene” NDM-1 — there has been one hopeful thread: All of the organisms have remained susceptible to one very old, little-used drug called colistin.
That might be about to change. Which would be very, very bad news.
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To recap: A resistance factor is spreading that leaves very serious infections treatable by only a single remaining drug, one which is acknowledged not to be perfect. The more a drug is used, the faster resistance against it develops. Especially for Gram-negative infections, there are no new drugs in the pipeline.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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Drug Resistance in Food — Coming from Aquaculture?
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Salmonella Kentucky ST198, it is much more drug-resistant than the US Heidelberg outbreak, and it has been spreading since 2002 from Egypt and north Africa through Europe, and has now been identified in the United States. Its primary vector appears to be chicken meat.
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The authors are especially concerned about farms that practice what’s called “integrated aquaculture,” in which chicken litter and manure are used to fertilize ponds in which fish are grown, and waste from the ponds is harvested and used as poultry feed.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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Resistant Salmonella: Deadly Yet Somehow Not Illegal
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confirmation, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that the Salmonella samples recovered from patients are resistant to several antibiotics — ampicillin, tetracycline and streptomycin — that are commonly used not only in human medicine, but in agriculture as well. (The strain still responds to Cipro, a fluoroquinolone; ceftriaxone, a cephalosporin; and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, a drug combination best known under the name Bactrim.) |
But the biggest revelation may have been that, in strict legal terms, there may have been no wrongdoing in the distribution via turkey of the drug-resistant strain that has killed one person and sickened 78 — because Salmonella, the organism in question, is not classified by the federal government as something that is illegal to distribute.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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E. coli: A Risk for 3 More Years From Who Knows Where
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European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reveals that, despite the epidemic curve’s trending down, the outbreak can’t be considered over. The ultimate source — the contaminated seeds from which salad sprouts were grown — has been so widely distributed that no one really knows where they have gone or for how long they might remain for sale. One prediction, based on the probable package labeling, is that they could remain on shelves for 3 more years.
Read more at www.wired.com |
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Drug-resistant bacteria in bedbugs
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Researchers in Vancouver, BC have found bedbugs there carrying drug-resistant staph, MRSA, and vancomycin-resistant enterococci, VRE.
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Bugs that came from two of the men were carrying VRE
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Bedbugs from the third man were carrying the classic community-associated strain of MRSA
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Second Look Behind the Headlines – News you can use…
Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News 