"Pathogens in Our Pork"

Over the weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the use of antibiotics in American pork. Farmers give antibiotics to the pigs in order to keep them from getting infections, but we end up consuming these drugs which breeds "super germs"- those horrible infections you hear about that just can't be cured because they become immune to our medicines. This wasn't very shocking to me, as I'm pretty well read in the food industry arena, but it's still important for us to understand where our food is coming from, and what is being put into it before it makes it to our plates.

These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.
[...]
Public health experts worry that pigs could pass on the infection by direct contact with their handlers, through their wastes leaking into ground water (one study has already found antibiotic-resistant bacteria entering ground water from hog farms), or through their meat, though there has been no proven case of someone getting it from eating pork. Thorough cooking will kill the bacteria, but people often use the same knife to cut raw meat and then to chop vegetables. Or they plop a pork chop on a plate, cook it and then contaminate it by putting it back on the original plate.

Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.