Writing in Self, AHCJ board member Maryn McKenna looks at how drug-resistant bacteria have found their way into the American food supply and made foodborne illness far more perilous. Using a mix of anecdotes and well-chosen statistics and analysis, McKenna helps readers understand the origin and scope of the problem as well as, in later pages, possible short-term safeguards.
We’ve grown depressingly accustomed to the possibility that our dinner might make us sick; 1 in 6 Americans suffer foodborne illness every year, estimates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Still, most of us think of it as a day or two of misery: We cope on our own if symptoms are mild and ask our doctors for antibiotics if they are severe.
As Adams found, however, the bacteria on and in our food—not only poultry, but also meat, eggs, shrimp and produce — are getting harder to knock out. New, drug-resistant varieties of campylobacter, salmonella, E. coli and staph have all emerged. For those of us unlucky enough to catch one of these superstrains, the arsenal of drugs that work is smaller than it is for weaker strains, and treatment becomes more complicated once the bacteria have taken hold. As a result, previously minor infections are putting Americans in the hospital — and, in rare cases, killing us.
And the numbers paint just as bleak of a picture.
That evidence shows superbugs all over our food. Half of pork chops and 43 percent of ground beef and chicken breasts carry salmonella resistant to at least three families of antibiotics, according to government testing. Drug-resistant staph (including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, aka MRSA) turned up in one out of four supermarket meat samples tested by an independent institute in Flagstaff, Arizona. Researchers have found drug-resistant E. coli on grocery store beef and pork as well as the virulent intestinal bacterium C. difficile on chicken.
McKenna draws the lines between factory farming and contaminated food while pointing out the limitations of current research. She talks about life or death issues without leaning toward hyperbole or hysteria, and is careful to explain why readers should be alarmed and what the stakes are.
