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One thing the article left me wondering... what should I do? My bias makes me think that the cheap supermarket meats have more of this resistant staph than far
by sudonim 16y ago
One thing the article left me wondering... what should I do? My bias makes me think that the cheap supermarket meats have more of this resistant staph than farmers market or whole foods meat. Is that a fallacy?
- bretthopper 16y agoThe main takeaway from the article is to be more careful when it comes to handling and preparing meat. Always wash your hands with soap and hot water after handling meat and always be thinking about cross-contamination (everything you or the meat has touched).
- shawndumas 16y agoThoroughly Clean every surface that raw meat touches. Including your hands.
- burgerbrain 16y agoYou should do absolutely nothing (differently from what you have been doing). We haven't seen mass outbreaks of staph infections (outside of hospitals..), this article is just standard fear-mongering.
- burgerbrain 16y agoAnyone care to enlighten me as to why this isn't just fear mongering, instead of downvoting me? If there is actually cause for alarm, I'd like to know...
- nhangen 16y agoBecause it's a legit study, and posted on a legit site. It's not like this was written by Peta.
- burgerbrain 16y agoI'm not questioning that there are indeed elevated staph levels on cheap raw meat, I'm simply saying that without data that actually shows that this is a problem, then it is inappropriate to suggest that it is. In other words, I am not questioning the validity of the study at all. I suggest you read my comments a second time.
- jrockway 16y agoI'm simply saying that without data that actually shows that this is a problem, then it is inappropriate to suggest that it is. What data do you need? Say you are flying an airplane. All of the engines fail. Would you say that "without more data that actually shows that this is a problem, it's inappropriate to suggest relighting the engines" and wait until you smash into the ground? No. Because you can anticipate the consequences of the current situation and make changes to prevent something bad happening. Specifically, we're noticing that there are a lot of MRSA strains on meat. So we should probably stop feeding animals antibiotics as frequently. A good way to do this is to raise them somewhere other than in a pool of their own feces, which tends to carry a lot of disease (necessitating the overuse of antibiotics). That's where the article is going. Should we wait for a problem in case there isn't one, or should we try and prevent the problem from occurring in the first place?
- burgerbrain 16y agoIf eating such meat were the equivalent of the engines falling off a plane, then it should be trivial to show the actual harm it is causing.
- araneae 16y agoStaph infections are a common bacterial skin infection, especially in athletes and among wrestlers. And even though MRSA is largely a problem in hospitals, that doesn't mean it's not a problem for all of us. Most people visit a hospital at some point. My cousin got a staph infection for going in to have a baby.
- burgerbrain 16y agoWell whatever the possible harm elevated staph levels in raw supermarket meat may cause, is it actually harm that we can statistically detect? Can we actually show this is causing any harm?
- mechanical_fish 16y agoWe certainly know that multidrug-resistent bacteria cause harm. Plenty of case studies there. I'm no biologist, so I don't know whether or not we can show, for any given strain of multidrug-resistent bacteria found in a sick patient, whether its ancestors most likely acquired its resistance genes while living in a farm animal, while living in an adult human who was taking antibiotics for some other condition, or someplace else. My guess is that such a demonstration might be possible -- cheap gene sequencing, plus extensive statistics, yields a lot of deductive power -- but I don't know if it has been done already or not, and maybe I'm wrong and it's going to be impossible to do conclusively. Bacterial genomes aren't always that big, and bacteria are quite promiscuous with genetic material, so their line of family descent gets fuzzy much faster than it does with multicellular creatures like ourselves. One thing is certain: There will be a lot more work attempting to answer these questions.
- hartror 16y agoAs others have said cleaning up properly. Add to that chopping boards. Never use the same chopping board for raw meat that you use for vegies etc.
- gregwebs 16y agoIf this implications of this article are correct- antibiotic resistant bacteria are a result of feeding animals antibiotics- then yes, buying grass fed meat (or meat that did not receive antibiotics) will help.