Monday, July 8, 2013

A Connection Between MRSA and Confinement Buildings?

Possibly:
For the study, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere examined workers at several pork and chicken farms in North Carolina. Because the workers could be at risk of losing their jobs if farm owners found out they’d participated, the researchers didn’t publish the names of the farms or workers, but surveyed them about how animals were raised at their farms and categorized them as industrial or antibiotic-free operations.
The scientists also swabbed the nasal cavities of the workers and cultured the staph bacteria they found to gauge the rates of infection by MDRSA. As a whole, the two groups of workers had similar rates of normal staph (the kind that can be wiped out by antibiotics), but colonies of MDRSA—resistant to several different drugs typically used as treatment—were present in 37 percent of workers at industrial farms, compared to 19 percent of workers at farms that didn’t use antibiotics.
Perhaps even more troubling, the industrial livestock workers were much more likely than those working at antibiotic-free operations(56 percent vs. 3 percent) to host staph that were resistant to tetracycline, a group of antibiotics prescribed frequently as well as the type of antibiotic most commonly used in livestock operations.
This research is just the beginning of a broader endeavor aimed at understanding how common agricultural practices are contributing to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The scientists say that surveying the family members of farm workers and other people they come in frequent contact with would help to model how such infections spread from person to person. Eventually, further evidence on MDRSA evolving in this setting could help justify tighter regulations on habitual antibiotic use on livestock.
 This is going to be a major issue going forward for confinement operations.  If I were in building design, I would consider some significant changes to try to minimize routine antibiotic use.  Farmers are going to have to get out ahead of this, and soon.

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