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Deadly superbug outbreak in humans linked to antibiotic spike in cows
A deadly outbreak of multi-drug resistant Salmonella that sickened 225 people across the US beginning in 2018 may have been spurred by a sharp rise in the use of certain antibiotics in cows a year earlier, infectious disease investigators reported this week.
From June 2018 to March of 2019, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified an outbreak of Salmonella enterica serotype Newport. The strain was resistant to several antibiotics, most notably azithromycin—a recommended treatment for Salmonella enterica infections. Before the outbreak, azithromycin-resistance in this germ was exceedingly rare. In fact, it was only first seen in the US in 2016.
Yet in the 2018-2019 outbreak, it reached at least 225 people in 32 states. Of those sickened, at least 60 were hospitalized and two died. (Researchers didn't have complete health data on everyone sickened in the outbreak.)
Infectious disease researchers investigating the cases traced the infections back to beef from the US and soft cheeses from Mexico (mostly queso fresco, which is typically made from unpasteurized milk). Genetic testing suggests that cows in both countries are carrying the germ.
In a report published August 23 by the CDC, the investigators note that just a year earlier, the Food and Drug Administration recorded a spike in the use of antibiotics called macrolides by cattle farmers. From 2016 to 2017, cattle farmers increased their use of macrolide antibiotics by 41%. Macrolides are a class of antibiotics that includes azithromycin. Because antibiotics within a class work to kill bacteria in similar ways, bacterial resistance to one drug in a class could lead to resistance to other drugs in the same class.
The investigators suggest that the surge in macrolide use could have encouraged the rise and spread of the azithromycin-resistant Newport strain.
"Because use of antibiotics in livestock can cause selection of resistant strains, the reported 41% rise in macrolide use in US cattle from 2016 to 2017 might have accelerated carriage of the outbreak strain among US cattle," they wrote.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SparkyGSX on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:11PM (12 children)
For fuck sake, stop using our last-resort antibiotics on cattle, they are often administered in low dosage to cows that aren't even sick yet. Those large beef factories (we're not talking about small farms here) are indirectly killing people to get a little more profit by stuffing a few more cows in the same space.
It's a tragedy of the commons, a few greedy farmers cause a lot of harm to all of us.
At the same time, the pharmaceutical companies keep selling those antibiotics to the farmers at a price where such abuse is economically advantageous, instead of protecting it for use on humans for the long run.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:26PM
The days of foretold have been commenced: My nutsack, doubled in width and hanging down to my knees. The skin, thick, rubbery plastic. What is sliced, a grating sound into your destination!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:44PM
Use of macrolides started in 1952 (erythromycin). Macrolides suffer from cross-resistance issues; IOW, bacteria do NOT care about trademarks, only molecular structure. Who woulda thunk it, yeah?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrolide [wikipedia.org]
A small modification to same general structure allows patenting of a "new" compound for a new 20-years span, maybe improves some consumer properties, but generally cannot fool no bacterium none. Running this scam for more than half a century and then passing off the blame for the inevitable consequences onto anything and anyone under the sun but the greed-crazed execs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:33PM (6 children)
Stopping healthcare for cattle will just cause more disease and infection in humans. I would rather have healthy meat from healthy cattle than million cases of salmonella in humans requiring them to spend more money on healthcare.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:55AM
The whole point is that these were apparently health cattle; otherwise, they would have been flagged for potential adulteration at the farm or slaughterhouse. There are exactly two reasons for giving the cattle non-therapudic doses of antibiotics. The first is because you are overcrowding your CAFO or have poor waste management practices, and therefore need to use such doses to prevent local epidemics from taking hold. The other reason is to increase your FCR, as it is well-known that using sub-therapeutic doses screws around with their gut biome to produce bigger animals for the same food intake.
And on top of that, if you do get sick from these animals, there is a higher chance you get a resistant strain. This means that the antibiotics won't work to help you or the cows and you either have a longer, more expensive stay or more expensive drugs. Also, with such low doses, sick cows can easily be asymptomatic until slaughter. If your concern is money, you are better off treating the relative few people and cows when they are actually sick rather than carpet-bombing all of them and letting resistance take hold.
It is also worth noting that azithromycin and most macrolides are not approved for sub-therapeutic use in the United States in order to try and keep resistance from spreading. In addition, non-targeted use of antibiotics to treat disease is illegal. In both cases, the farmers, veterinarians, pharmacies, and agricultural supplier could lose their licenses, pay steep civil fines, and face criminal charges for using them in such a manner.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:31AM (2 children)
No it won't. Raising cattle under unhealthy, unsanity conditions, feeding them corn meal and reprocessed waste and whatnot is the problem. I live in a country where you grow cows by putting them out in a paddock and having them eat grass. We don't dose them with antibiotics or other crap, and there's no problem with disease or infection in humans because they're naturally healthy cows in an environment that's good for them.
Leads to much better quality meat as well. I've been to the US and eaten "USDA prime beef"... holy fsck, some of that stuff would be dog food over here, I tried to send it back thinking they'd got a bad lot and was told that they were all like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @04:10AM (1 child)
That is the reason why some brands of beef don't let you market your meet using the brand if you raise the cows with too high a density or without following the approved diet. Many farmers, including some of my neighbors, will tell you it doesn't make a difference, while also following said guidelines because the second they don't they know that the auditors will magically appear because they somehow pulled the knowledge out of the Aether.
FWIW, USDA grades are not "quality" measures in the way most people think. Instead, the more practical aspect is how they look and cook. They are based on the age of the cow, the tissue types, the marbling of the meat, uniformity of cut, "juice" content, and other processing information. In fact, most meat people eat and consume is Standard or Commercial grade because it doesn't need to look pretty or the other factors that can be adjusted for in processing.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @04:17AM
Yeah, I found that out afterwards, "Prime" sounded like it'd be certified high-quality meat but then friends explained it doesn't work that way, so some of the problem would have been my misunderstanding of what the term "USDA Prime" was promising.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:13PM (1 child)
none is talking about healthcare for cattle, ffs. we're talking about factory farming scum giving low dose antibiotics to prop up their inhumane treatment of animals for profit and the seditious fucks in the government too busy raiding milk coops to slap the shit out of the factory farming scum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @02:48AM
The reason why they hit coop dairies is that they have a propensity to sell raw milk. Raw milk is linked to around 13% of all food-borne illness outbreaks every year and the vast majority of dairy outbreaks (since they started tracking the number is almost 97% vs a little over 3% where it was pasteurized or had unknown status). This is a huge relative risk because most of the milk sold is pasteurized.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:20AM (2 children)
If I may change one word in your post?
" a few greedy businessmen cause a lot of harm to all of us."
IMO, those people who run those corporate and even privately owned mega-farms are not farmers at all. Farmers are at the least marginally in touch with, and in tune with, nature. Businessmen whose only motivation is profit know little if anything about nature.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @08:49AM (1 child)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/brazilian-farmers-believe-they-have-the-right-to-burn-the-amazon-875879/ [rollingstone.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:31AM
Not really farmers, then, are they? They aren't "in touch" with nature. Maybe they aren't big business businessmen either, but still, not real farmers.