Gert van der Hoek
In Memoriam - Editor, Senior Moderator
Edit: more on this subject from Maryn McKenna: Investigation: Drug Resistance, Chicken And 8 Million UTIs
MARYN MCKENNA
How Your Chicken Dinner Is Creating a Drug-Resistant Superbug
JUL 11 2012
Continuing to treat urinary tract infections as a short-term, routine ailment rather than a long-term food safety issue risks turning the responsible bacteria into a major health crisis.
Adrienne LeBeouf recognized the symptoms when they started. The burning and the urge to head to the bathroom signaled a urinary tract infection, a painful but everyday annoyance that afflicts up to 8 million U.S. women a year. LeBeouf, who is 29 and works as a medical assistant, headed to her doctor, assuming that a quick course of antibiotics would send the UTI on its way.
That was two years ago, and LeBeouf has suffered recurring bouts of cystitis ever since.
She is one of a growing number of women, and some men, who have unknowingly become infected with antibiotic-resistant versions of E. coli, the ubiquitous intestinal bacterium that is the usual cause of UTIs.
There is no national registry for drug-resistant infections, and so no one can say for sure how many resistant UTIs there are. But they have become so common that last year the specialty society for infectious-disease physicians had to revise its recommendations for which drugs to prescribe for cystitis -- and many infectious-disease physicians and gynecologists say informally that they see such infections every week.
Dr. Jehan El-Bayoumi, LeBeouf's physician and an associate professor of medicine at George Washington University Medical Center, said she has seen "a really significant increase, especially within the past two to three years."
But the origin of these newly resistant E. coli has been a mystery -- except to a small group of researchers in several countries. They contend there is persuasive evidence that the bacteria are coming from poultry. More precisely, coming from poultry raised with the routine use of antibiotics, which takes in most of the 8.6 billion chickens raised for meat in the U.S. each year.
Their research in the United States, Canada, and Europe (published most recently this month, in June, and in March) has found close genetic matches between resistant E. coli collected from human patients and resistant strains found on chicken or turkey sold in supermarkets or collected from birds being slaughtered. The researchers contend that poultry -- especially chicken, the low-cost, low-fat protein that Americans eat more than any other meat -- is the bridge that allows resistant bacteria to move to humans, taking up residence in the body and sparking infections when conditions are right. Touching raw meat that contains the resistant bacteria, or coming into environmental contact with it -- say, by eating lettuce that was cross-contaminated -- are easy ways to become infected.
"The E. coli that is circulating at the same time, and in the same area -- from food animal sources, retail meat, and the E. coli that's causing women's infections -- is very closely related genetically," said Amee Manges, Ph.D., an associate professor of epidemiology at McGill University in Montreal who has been researching resistant UTIs for a decade. "And the E. coli that you recover from poultry meat tends to have the highest levels of resistance. Of all retail meats, it's the most problematic that way."
Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...sistant-superbug/259700/#.T_49bKPHi8Y.twitter
See also:
Chicken as Reservoir for Extraintestinal Pathogenic Escherichia coli in Humans, Canada
Food-Borne Origins of Escherichia coli Causing Extraintestinal Infections
Antimicrobial Resistance and Resistance Genes in Escherichia coli Isolated from Retail Meat Purchased in Alberta, Canada
MARYN MCKENNA
How Your Chicken Dinner Is Creating a Drug-Resistant Superbug
JUL 11 2012
Continuing to treat urinary tract infections as a short-term, routine ailment rather than a long-term food safety issue risks turning the responsible bacteria into a major health crisis.
Adrienne LeBeouf recognized the symptoms when they started. The burning and the urge to head to the bathroom signaled a urinary tract infection, a painful but everyday annoyance that afflicts up to 8 million U.S. women a year. LeBeouf, who is 29 and works as a medical assistant, headed to her doctor, assuming that a quick course of antibiotics would send the UTI on its way.
That was two years ago, and LeBeouf has suffered recurring bouts of cystitis ever since.
She is one of a growing number of women, and some men, who have unknowingly become infected with antibiotic-resistant versions of E. coli, the ubiquitous intestinal bacterium that is the usual cause of UTIs.
There is no national registry for drug-resistant infections, and so no one can say for sure how many resistant UTIs there are. But they have become so common that last year the specialty society for infectious-disease physicians had to revise its recommendations for which drugs to prescribe for cystitis -- and many infectious-disease physicians and gynecologists say informally that they see such infections every week.
Dr. Jehan El-Bayoumi, LeBeouf's physician and an associate professor of medicine at George Washington University Medical Center, said she has seen "a really significant increase, especially within the past two to three years."
But the origin of these newly resistant E. coli has been a mystery -- except to a small group of researchers in several countries. They contend there is persuasive evidence that the bacteria are coming from poultry. More precisely, coming from poultry raised with the routine use of antibiotics, which takes in most of the 8.6 billion chickens raised for meat in the U.S. each year.
Their research in the United States, Canada, and Europe (published most recently this month, in June, and in March) has found close genetic matches between resistant E. coli collected from human patients and resistant strains found on chicken or turkey sold in supermarkets or collected from birds being slaughtered. The researchers contend that poultry -- especially chicken, the low-cost, low-fat protein that Americans eat more than any other meat -- is the bridge that allows resistant bacteria to move to humans, taking up residence in the body and sparking infections when conditions are right. Touching raw meat that contains the resistant bacteria, or coming into environmental contact with it -- say, by eating lettuce that was cross-contaminated -- are easy ways to become infected.
"The E. coli that is circulating at the same time, and in the same area -- from food animal sources, retail meat, and the E. coli that's causing women's infections -- is very closely related genetically," said Amee Manges, Ph.D., an associate professor of epidemiology at McGill University in Montreal who has been researching resistant UTIs for a decade. "And the E. coli that you recover from poultry meat tends to have the highest levels of resistance. Of all retail meats, it's the most problematic that way."
Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...sistant-superbug/259700/#.T_49bKPHi8Y.twitter
See also:
Chicken as Reservoir for Extraintestinal Pathogenic Escherichia coli in Humans, Canada
Food-Borne Origins of Escherichia coli Causing Extraintestinal Infections
Antimicrobial Resistance and Resistance Genes in Escherichia coli Isolated from Retail Meat Purchased in Alberta, Canada
