Health Law

MRSA Found In Pigs & Farmworkers By University of Iowa

By Marler Clark

Andrew Schneider, Senior Correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ruined many a breakfast this morning---that’s if any of his Emerald City readers still eat bacon with their eggs.

You see Schneider put in his newspaper today what had already been on his Seattle P-I's "Secret Ingredients" blog:  that Tara Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa Department of Epidemiology, and her graduate researchers found MRSA in more than 70 percent of the pigs they tested on farms in Iowa and Illinois.

MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus –is a potentially fatal bacteria. Schneider reports:

In what is apparently the first testing of swine for MRSA in the U.S., Smith and her team swabbed the noses of 209 pigs on 10 farms. They also found the bacteria among livestock workers employed by those hog operations.

On Friday, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, Abby Harper, one of Smith's graduate assistants, presented the results of the study on farmworkers. She said she and Michael Male tested 20 workers at the Iowa swine farms and found that 45 percent carried the same MRSA bacteria as the pigs.

As they say in Seattle, "Its in the P-I" here.

Full post as published by Food Poison Blog on June 09, 2008 (boomark / email).