FoodBanter.com - View Single Post - MRSA found widespread in Canadian supermarket pork

MRSA Scandal

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:47:18 -0000, "Pat Gardiner"
> wrote:

>Pat's Notes; Frankly, I don't have anything to say, except that Defra's vets
>are dragging Britain into a total disaster. The Politburo won't look too
>good either.
>
>I wondered why there was frantic activity recently in Britain. They knew
>this was coming obviously.
>
>I think the government now has an absolute duty to put the police into Defra
>immediately. The vets have refused, in effect, to test British pigs and pork
>for MRSA. If they continue to defy their Minister, they must be sacked and
>EU vets brought in.
>
>The reason is, of course, the covered-up PMWS epidemic in 1999. There was
>widespread criminal activity by veterinary civil servants, including the
>intimidation of witnesses to Parliamentary select committee, falsification
>of documents, employment of former senior SAS officers....you name it, they
>did it.
>
>There is no point in going after me again. Everything needed, bar a few
>shortcuts,for prosecutions has long been in the public domain. MRSA in pigs
>is linked to PMWS and other circoviruses.
>
>Pretty well all the facts have long been published and archived here on
>uk.business.agriculture. The remainder can be obtained from OLAF, the
>serious fraud squad of the EU and questioning of the maybe 20 SVS vets
>directly involved.
>
>http://03530.com/2008/03/19/canadian...-products.html
>
>TORONTO - Canadian researchers have found antibiotic-resistant Staph
>bacteria in pork products purchased in retail stores across the country - a
>discovery that raises questions about how the contamination occurred, how
>frequently it happens and whether it has implications for human health.
>
>Just under 10 per cent of sampled pork chops and ground pork recently
>purchased in four provinces tested positive for methicillin-resistant
>Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, lead researcher Dr. Scott Weese reported
>Wednesday in a presentation to the International Conference on Emerging
>Infectious Diseases in Atlanta.
>
>The bacteria would be destroyed by proper cooking, so Staph food poisoning
>is not a major concern, said Weese, an expert on zoonoses, the pathogens
>that pass back and forth between people and animals.
>
>But he wondered whether people handling meat with MRSA on its surface would
>end up inadvertently "colonizing" themselves. People who carry the bacteria
>on their skin or in their nostrils are at greater risk of going on to
>develop a Staph infection, which can range from a hard-to-heal boil to
>pneumonia to a potentially deadly bloodstream infection.
>
>"My main concern is: if there's MRSA on the surface of a pork chop and
>someone's handling it and then they touch their nose, could they transmit it
>from the pork chop to their nose?" noted Weese, a veterinarian based at the
>Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph.
>
>"If they do what they're supposed to do in terms of meat handling, then it
>should be perfectly safe. But do people do that is the question?"
>
>Where MRSA infections were once mainly acquired in hospital, in recent years
>increasing rates of infections have been recorded in people who haven't been
>in hospitals and haven't been taking antibiotics.
>
>The startling rise in so-called community acquired MRSA infections in the
>United States - a trend which is now being seen in parts of Canada - has led
>scientists to look for ways to explain the changing pattern of infections.
>
>But Weese said it is too soon to conclude that MRSA in meat might be playing
>a role. "It's way too early to say that it does. But we have to look at
>whether it does."
>
>"Basically my take-home message is I'm not going to stop eating pork because
>of this," he said. "I'm going to keep washing my hands and pay attention to
>how I handle it. And that's all I think I need to do."
>
>This is the first confirmed report of MRSA in retail meat in North America
>and one of fewer than a handful of such reported findings in the world.
>
>A group of Dutch researchers reported last fall that they had isolated MRSA
>from two pork samples in the Netherlands. And Japanese scientists reported
>in 2007 that they had found MRSA in two samples of raw chicken.
>
>Weese's team decided to look for MRSA in pork meat after finding the
>superbug in Ontario pigs, work that was reported last November in the
>journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
>
>He admitted they currently don't know how much significance to place on the
>presence of the bacteria on the meat. Nor do the testing methods they used
>allow them to say if the meat was teeming with MRSA, or simply carrying
>small amounts of the bacteria.
>
>In an interview, he described the research as a step-wise process.
>
>"Step 1 is: Is it in pigs? Step 2: Yes, it's in food. Step 3: . How much is
>there? Is it one organism or is it a billion?"
>
>"The techniques we use are fairly sensitive and they don't quantify. It's a
>Yes-No (answer)," he explained.
>
>"Now we need to refine that and say: OK, how much is there? Where is it? And
>in the broad scheme where did it come from and does it actually cause a
>problem?"
>
>The meat was purchased through the Canadian Integrated Program for
>Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance, a Public Health Agency of Canada
>program that looks for antibiotic resistant bacteria in food and food
>animals.
>
>To date Weese's team has tested 212 meat samples bought in four different
>provinces. Most were pork chops but the group also tested a few pork
>shoulder roasts and some ground pork.
>
>None of the pork roasts carried the bacteria but an equal percentage of pork
>chops and ground pork did. The rates of positive MRSA tests ranged from zero
>per cent in one province to 33 per cent in another. Weese didn't want to
>name the provinces.
>
>Molecular analysis of about half of the isolated bacteria show a mix of
>strains. Some could not be typed, which suggests they are probably MRSA
>strains known to infect pigs, Weese said. But of those strains that could be
>typed, some were of a common human strain while others were of a type known
>to infect both horses and humans.