Have MRSA Baby, Have MRSA On Me

The Rolling Stones did a number some 45 years ago, Have Mercy, and I've got a youtube clip below with Mick and the other original Stones performing the tune to canned squeals of delight.

Today's play on words directs your attention to a crisis condition many of you may not realize we find right under our noses now. MRSA is an acronym for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This is a fairly recent bacterial strain of infection that is related to an old nemesis found usually in extended hospital stays, a Staph infection. MRSA was first detected by scientists in the United Kingdom in 1961.

Staph infections, generally, have not been considered altogether too serious unless your system is thoroughly compromised due to a surgery, or due to a serious illness like pneumonia, and any infection poses a grave threat to your health at that juncture. Staph infections usually get treated with antibiotics and routinely clear up after the necessary dosages deliver the knockout blow to the bacteria.

MRSA, however, is a mutant strain that resists these antibiotics, and now poses a grave threat because there are so few drugs left in our nation's medical supply cabinet to treat this recent type of infection.

How bad is the MRSA problem?

What if someone mentioned in conversation that MRSA now kills  more people in this country than AIDS? Would that shock you? According  to the CDC more than 18,000 deaths in 2005 were attributed to MRSA, which was roughly 2,000 more fatalities more than HIV/AIDS for the same year. Another troubling fact concerning this new killer bacteria finds very little current statistical data published today to give citizens the heads up. The last major study of significance available to the public by the CDC only gives information from 1999 through 2005.

I was in Sacramento a couple of weeks ago, and spoke to several of my old business friends. I speak to people here locally. Most people have never heard of MRSA, not to mention that this mutant staph infection now kills more people than AIDS. How is this possible given the information age we now live in?

The first stumbling block in giving people vital information about their health are the hospitals and their owners. Hospitals do not give out the numbers of  those patients treated for MRSA to the public. No big surprise that one of the major incubators of the problem would prefer not to let patients know going into the place that this dangerous and lethal staph infection more than doubled in incidence over the six year study period from 1999 to 2005.

The second major blackout on information for the public regarding MRSA occurs from the factory food industry. A study published in January of 2009 by University of Iowa researchers documents finding MRSA on pigs and humans at a large hog facility in Iowa. The researchers studied two corporate hog production operations, and the one with the highest pig concentration had 70% of all pigs with the bacterial strain ST398 and 64% of all workers with this type of staph. It has only been since 2003 in the Netherlands that the transmission link between pigs and humans of MRSA was established.

The fact that one hog production establishment had 27,000 pigs spread over several smaller locations with no MRSA found might lead one to make a very compelling argument against the horrible CAFO conditions most pigs are forced to endure in this country. A second sound argument against CAFO production facilities on all livestock is the tremendous antibiotic usage that occurs on the animals caged and raised in these facilities.

The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production estimates 70% of all antibiotic use in this country goes into the livestock we eventually eat. The PBS program, Frontline, reported that Stuart B. Levy, MD estimated that somewhere between 15-17 million pounds of antibiotics are used sub-therapeutically in America each year. There is a growing consensus in the scientific community that this large unregulated use of antibiotics is directly related to human beings being increasingly at risk from bacterial infections like MRSA. The federal government under President Obama is pushing the FDA to take stronger action against indiscriminate antibiotic use on livestock, and to potentially ban many antibiotics from the food production operations.

You may wonder why I do not call these livestock operations farms, or ranches. It is because these operations have absolutely nothing in common with those pleasant terms. These are quite simply factories used to destroy and part out animals in the cheapest way possible. If throwing dead parts of other animals into the feed along with antibiotics is cheaper than allowing an animal to be an animal before it is slaughtered then so be it. But, please do not ever suggest to me these caged operations are in any way related to a farm or ranch.

There is a tremendous push back from the so call "farm" states in this country against the removal and ultimate elimination of antibiotic use for sub-therapeutic reasons on livestock. Money is all that matters to the very few companies and their paid people who control the current food industry in America today. An informed public is essential to change the unsustainable methods currently employed by the animal factory owners.

To break up these giant food monopolies will not only serve our overall health much better, but can also mean that true opportunities in food production could happen for so many of the currently displaced and unemployed.   

Thanks for stopping by.