A sampling of grocery store meat in five US cities has shown a type of drug-resistant bacteria is contained in about a quarter of beef, chicken, pork and turkey for sale, a study showed yesterday.
Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that can cause skin infections, pneumonia, sepsis or endocarditis in people with weak hearts, was found in 47 percent of samples, the study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases said.
More than half — 52 percent — of the infected samples contained a tough strain of S aureus that was resistant to at least three types of antibiotics.
Most of the time, the bacteria would be killed off during cooking, but risks of contamination can come from handling raw meat in the kitchen and touching other utensils or from eating meat that is not fully cooked.
“For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial,” said Lance Price of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona and senior author of the study.
“The fact that drug-resistant S aureus was so prevalent and likely came from the food animals themselves is troubling and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food animal production today,” Prince added.
S aureus is not among the four bacteria routinely tested in meat by the US government: Salmonella, Campylobacter, E coli and Enterococcus.
More than 2 million people in the US are infected with these bacteria annually and hundreds die. The young and the elderly, as well as people with weakened immune systems, are most at risk.
The 136 samples that were tested included 80 brands of meat and were taken from 26 retail grocery stores in five cities: Los Angeles; Chicago; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Washington.
The report said the bacteria was found inside the meat and therefore was not likely to have come from handling.
Instead the likely culprit was “densely stocked industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics ... ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria that move from animals to humans,” the study said.
“Antibiotics are the most important drugs that we have to treat Staph infections, but when Staph are resistant to three, four, five or even nine different antibiotics — like we saw in this study — that leaves physicians few options,” Price said.
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