by A new study of the public meat supply indicates half of all meat purchased at common stores is contaminated with Staph and other bacteria.
A study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute, found that Staphylococcus aureus – a bacteria that causes most staph infections including skin infections, pneumonia and blood poisoning – are present in meat and poultry from U.S. grocery stores at “unexpectedly high rates.”
Researchers found nearly half of the meat and poultry samples — 47 percent — were contaminated with S. aureus
What’s more frightening is this additional information:
more than half of those bacteria — 52 percent — were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics
The issue here is that the drug-resistant bacteria are then transferred to humans via kitchen cross-contamination, making antibiotics less effective or completely ineffective against common ailments.
According to the findings published in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease, “industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics, “are ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria that move from animals to humans.”
None of this is new; however, the knowledge that half of our meat supply is infected should give us the necessary motivation to change the way the food supply is managed in this country.
