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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.
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What started it all:
On 2019-08-24 13:02:01 UTC an accusation (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=884682#commentwrap) was made that a Journal Entry "It would have been posted before 6 hours ago" (i.e. posted at approximately 2019-08-24 07:00:00 UTC) was deleted by a member of the staff at SoylentNews. The circumstances surrounding the making of the Journal Entry are elaborated upon in this comment. (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=885191#commentwrap)
I have been with this site since before it went live. Its founding principal has been the making available of a forum whereby the community can submit stories — and post comments — to predominantly tech-related items. Further, each logged-in user has been made available the ability to post entries to their Journal.
As Editor-in-Chief I took this allegation seriously and performed an independent and in-depth investigation. My findings are presented below.
Note: It is not lost on me the futility of trying to prove a negative. It is for good reason that the criminal justice system in the US is founded on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." It is not up the the accused to vindicate themselves, but for the accuser to bring sufficient evidence to bring about conviction.
NB: In the course of writing this, I discovered a bug in how the site displays wide elements contained in an ECODE element. It incorrectly wraps the text onto the next line (leading to a jumbled mess) when it should, instead, provide horizontal scroll bars. Please accept my apologies for its current appearance.
Executive Summary:
An in-depth investigation making use of: external resources, the UI presented by SoylentNews, and ad-hoc queries of the site database (DB) failed to locate a "smoking gun", i.e. found no clear proof that a Journal Entry was posted to the site and subsequently deleted by anyone other than an author.
It is my estimation that the user submitted an entry, but the site failed to receive and save it correctly. In other words, the user tripped over some kind of bug be it in the site's code, communications between the user and the site, or something else.
Recommendation: When a user completes making a Journal Entry and submits it to the site, the code should respond by using the newly-created journal parameters in conjunction with the normal journal-loading code to present the Journal Entry to the user as confirmation that the entry was properly received and saved. That is to say, affirmative feedback of receipt, storage, and accessibility of the Journal Entry.
(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.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:25PM (2 children)
I fill at least one or two Z-Paks a day at the pharmacy I work at. The idea of the bugs causing these diseases becoming resistant is a nightmare scenario...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:33PM (1 child)
On the bright side... no more filling Z-pax?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:22PM
kiiiinda outweighed by the pig zombies, turns out the virus more easily spread to "longpigs"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:35PM (10 children)
Not only cattle, sea farm salmon are doped up to the fins with antibiotics.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:49PM (9 children)
Yeah, let's blame it on livestock and not the millions of unbathed filth pouring through our borders and carrying medieval-era diseases.
You'd think that there wouldn't be much magnitude to the attack vector even if the farmers were fucking diseased cows and jerking off diseased bulls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:24PM (4 children)
Were you born that stupid or did you have to study?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:32PM (3 children)
Why the ad hominen attack on a poster who raises a valid scientific point? His view may be controversial, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. Remember, the Catholic Church burned Galileo at the stake... Pope Francis had to apologize for that blunder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:55PM
Nope, EF is a known fool. Call 'em as you see 'em - he is stupid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:18AM
When someone says "are you fucked in the head?" to think this way, they don't literally mean fucked in the head. They just mean how can you be this bigoted and fucking stupid to even have thoughts like that.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday August 26 2019, @04:19AM
"Remember, the Catholic Church burned Galileo at the stake... Pope Francis had to apologize for that blunder."
Galileo was threatened with this if he did not recant. Galileo was 68 years old and sick. Threatened with torture, he publicly confessed that he had been wrong to have said that the Earth moves around the Sun. Legend then has it that after his confession, Galileo quietly whispered "And yet, it moves."
Unlike many less famous prisoners, Galileo was allowed to live under house arrest. Until his death in 1642, he continued to investigate science, and even published a book on force and motion after he had become blind.
Francis did apologize for the condemnation of Galileo, but you may be thinking of Giordano Bruno, a rationalist philosopher who was burned at the stake for heresy 460 years ago, around 40 years before Galileo, however the Catlickers still hold the line on that one. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, said the church ''regretted'' that it had resorted to violence in Bruno's case, but pointed out that Bruno's writing was ''incompatible'' with Christian thinking, and that he therefore remains a heretic.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:29PM (1 child)
Shit, EF is back from vacation. More hateful spew. What doooo you get out of this shit? Troll the libs, making people as angry as you are? I can believe it, I had someone seriously say they piss other people off to pass their own anger on to them. It doesn't actually work, more like an emotional narcotic that simply clouds the symptoms.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday August 25 2019, @05:37PM
Eth isn't just a troll any longer. I'd estimate that he actually wholeheartedly believes the shit he spews, and has done for a good 2 or 3 years now. He's guilty of the classic drug dealer's mistake, viz., getting high on one's own supply. Now he's hooked on his own homemade butt-hash, and has to keep his head wedged up somewhere in his transverse colon to get his fix.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:44AM
Poor people who don't have antibiotics in the first place don't breed antibiotic-resistant strains.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:22AM
Disease has multiple vectors. The Jew and the Brown Man can't be the only vectors of disease in this world. FFS, EF, get a grip!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:51PM
Why point the finger at our bovine friends when the spike also correlates to H1B visas? And don't rule out homeless Californians... shit in the street's a great way to spread bacteria.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:27PM (3 children)
I thought this was due to romaine lettuce? How does salmonella survive cooking?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:41PM (1 child)
It gets transferred from Diego or Subinder's hand onto the cooked food while they're plating it between bathroom breaks. Remember: all employees must wash their hands after shitting. Enjoy your next burger with this in mind.
(Score: 3, Funny) by rylyeh on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:28AM
I'd like an inoculation to the mutual osculation of Dumb-asses! 🐙
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @04:24AM
The recommended process to kill Salmonella is to cook to a 145 degree hold for 3 minutes followed by a 5 minute rest (note that is not enough to kill other types of bacteria that may be present). Medium rare is an internal temperature of 135 degrees and a 5 minute rest. Even medium's 145 internal temp and 5 minute rest is not enough to reliably kill Salmonella, and don't get me started on rare meat. And that doesn't even get to the idea of cross contamination, storing cooked meat below raw meat in the walk-in freezer or touching the wrong piece of raw meat followed by touching some finished food without a proper re-gloving are two easy ways to get someone sick.