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Antibiotic-Resistant Livestock Bugs Are Finding Their Way Back to People

Factory farm workers are carrying super germs created by habitually lacing livestock with antibiotics.
Photo: CDC

A new study published in PLoS ONE shows that workers on factory farms in North Carolina carry the same drug-resistant bacteria in their noses as the livestock housed on the premises. Even employees of the industrial-scale farms who didn't have direct contact with the animals have it. It's at all surprising, considering the shockingly high amounts of antibiotics that animals confined on factory farms need to stay even marginally healthy.

The bacteria in question are Staphylococcus aureus, which includes the dangerous MRSA bug. In humans, a staph infection can cause a range of illnesses, ranging from minor to life-threatening. Infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria, like those strains found here, are particularly difficult to treat. Though new drugs are being developed to combat this, the rate of development is not keeping pace with the rate of resistance.

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Dr. Christopher Heaney, a report co-author from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, "This study shows that these livestock-associated strains are present among workers at industrial livestock operations and that these strains are resistant not just to methicillin, but to multiple antibiotics, including antibiotics that are used to treat human infections."

The study found that multidrug-resistantstaph bacteria were found to be twice as prevalent in employees of the factory farms examined, compared to employees of antibiotic-free farms. For workers that had direct exposure to the animals, the multidrug-resistant bacteria were found to be 19 times as prevalent.

MRSA, which isn't limited to farms, is becoming a big problem. According to a 2010 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, roughly 19,000 people die in the US every year due to MRSA, more than those killed by AIDS.

At the same time, over 80 percent of all antibiotics prescribed in the United States are given to farm animals. The vast majority of which simply pass through their digestive systems, and then spread throughout the wider environment, whether as waste run-off or fertilizer. One Johns Hopkins study even found evidence that flies may be able to carry drug-resistant bacteria away from poultry operations.

Based on the results of this study, North Carolina now has the dubious distinction of being the third state in the US where drug-resistant bacteria found in farm workers has been associated with contact with livestock, following a study finding the same in Iowa and Illinois last year. With Iowa and North Carolina being the first and second largest producers of pigs in the nation, the increasing risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria infecting humans should be of big concern to farmers.