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Meat contaminated by a potentially lethal infection is being sold to consumers --
creating a public health threat that has largely
flown under the the radar due to powerful industry
interests and lax accountability at the federal agency in charge of ensuring food safety,
according to recent studies and a prominent investigative journalist.
"It makes salmonella look like a picnic," is how David Kirby, an investigative
journalist who has written about MRSA, a life-threatening pathogen, described it in an
interview with Consumer Ally. MRSA
(Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is an antibiotic-resistant staph infection
that kills about 20,000 Americans -- more than the number of people who die from AIDS --
each year.
MRSA affects livestock and ultimately supermarket meat. Previously associated mostly with
infections acquired in hospitals, nursing homes or by people with compromised immune
systems, for the past 15 years MRSA is increasingly being traced to industrial animal
feeding operations, so-called factory farms, where much of the nation's protein comes
from.
A number of clinical and academic studies bear this out: a recent Canadian
study showed nearly 14% of pork chops (about one in seven) and 6.3% of ground pork
sold in supermarkets carried the contamination -- taken together, 9.6% of all pork
samples. Additionally, 5.6% of the beef and 1.2% of the poultry carried the bug. The
bacterium was also found in veal, lamb and other meats.
Another report, by Louisiana
State University,
found 5.5% of pork samples and 3.3% of beef samples taken from local supermarkets were
contaminated. Yet another - this one out of the pork industry's lobby arm, the National
Pork Board -- found MRSA in 3% of pork samples. That means a family buying raw pork twice
a week brings MRSA home
an average of three times a year.
So with MRSA approaching such dangerous proportions, why isn't a federal agency looking
into the problem? While some controversy exists about the particular strains of the
infection and the likelihood that not all MRSA-contaminated meat is linked to the way the
animals were raised, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the meat industry,
does not mandate or carry out any rigorous testing for MRSA in meat, nor does it issue recalls.
"I don't think the USDA wants to touch this. They know if they start testing for
MRSA, they're going to find infected pork and that will force them to make a decision, one
that would hugely impact the meat export industry," said Kirby, who has hit a brick
wall when trying to get answers from the agency. Kirby is the author of Animal
Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the
Environment, in which he says the meat lobby enjoys unrivalled access to government.
"It would be very cumbersome and the industry doesn't want it. So they just prefer
not to deal with it, and in the meantime the FDA doesn't have to deal with it," he
says.
The FDA does not have jurisdiction over meat products, but it can
and is soon likely to regulate the prophylactic use of antibiotics, such as for growth
promotion and disease prevention. Outside the U.S., Holland, Switzerland, and Egypt
already test for MRSA in retail pork.
The Food Safety Inspection Service is aware of and takes seriously the concerns
related to MRSA and other emerging food safety threats. [We] have formed a work group to
develop a risk profile for MRSA that will be used to guide potential future actions
related to this matter," said a spokesman for the FSIS,
the public health unit of the USDA, in an e-mail to Consumer Ally.
Scientists and animal advocates agree that the presence of MRSA and other drug-resistant
"superbugs" in large-scale feeding facilities spring from the routine feeding of
antibiotics to livestock. About 100,000 Americans die each year after struggling with
antibiotic-resistant infections, according to the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics
and Policy, a public interest think tank.
With nearly 70% of antibiotics sold in the U.S. being used in factory farms, the findings
add to already urgent questions about how animal-derived food in America is raised and
brought to market. (9.27.2010, Gergana Koleva)
"To Achieve World
Government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism,
their loyalty to family traditions and national identification" Brock Chisholm - Director of the World Health Organization
"A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts, who refuse to
believe that their government and their media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a
reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the Police
State Dictatorship it's going to
get." Ian Williams Goddard
The fact is that "political correctness" is all about creating uniformity. Individualism is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of the New World Order. They want a public that is predictable and conditioned to do as it's told without asking questions.
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." Thomas Jefferson
Knowledge is the key to good health!