Discovery News
Fri Apr 15, 2011
The picture below is staphylococcus aureus also known as staph.
Staph bacteria contaminated nearly half of U.S. meat samples in a recent analysis, with 96 percent of bacteria showing resistance to at least one type of drug. The scientists took meat from five cities and 26 stores. Greater than three fourths of the turkey had staph, chicken and pork had about fourty percent and 37 percent of the beef had staph. the staph in the turkey was resistant to more than three antimicrobials. The scientists also found MRSA. Cooking meals at the right temperature can kill these bacteria. However, you can still get these bacteria from handling uncooked meat. Staph is not included in the list of bacteria that the U.S. inspects for. The authors believe that the overuse of antibiotics has resulted in this.
I think that it is absurd for bacteria like this to be allowed in meat. I can consider myself a carnivore, so this is kind of scary to think that the only thing protecting me from bacteria like staph is the cooking temperature. Farms should stop this overuse of antibiotics because it is leading to these super bacteria.
What is your opinion on this amount of infected meat?
Should this be against the law?
Should the meat industry have to test for staph?
I was surprised when I first saw this article, but when I thought about it some more I began to change my mind. Thinking back to probstat class where we learned about sample sizes, biased samples and the like, I have a feeling that sampling only 5 cities out of the hundreds in the US is a bit too small for accurate results. Secondly, the article didn't seem to mention where in the US these 5 cities were located. Were they in the north or the south? West coast or east coast? Were they randomly chosen? These factors would be helpful to know because location could easily bias this study. What if farms in one part of the country used different sterilization techniques than those in another? For something like this to be a serious concern, there has to be enough reliable information to back it up.
ReplyDeleteAs far as my opinion on the infected meat itself, I think that it isn't a large problem, at least not yet. As the article said, the bacteria that was found can be killed through cooking, so unless your chef is a total greenhorn these things aren't likely to cause an epidemic. However, it was also said that the reason more bacteria are emerging is because of the overuse of antibiotics. This prospect does worry me because it could end up unleashing "super bugs" regardless of how people cook or handle meat. If these bacteria were to escape by any means, we would be stripped of our ability to fight them and have to resort to even more powerful chemicals. I think that instead of curing the symptoms of this disease (no pun intended), we should head right to the source by cutting down on the use of antibiotics.