Staph in US meat supply

[JHeald]

They were documenting incidence of contamination, not a change as compared to a control group. No significance stats apply to this situation as far as I know.

That's a good point, one that I think still challenges the idea that the sample size was too small. I did notice in the supplemental data that they calculated an Odds Ratio, so they did do some statistics...but again, no p-value anywhere.

I think there are plenty of ways a statistician could examine this data. They could have determined whether the higher percentage of contaminated turkey compared to beef was statistically significant, or whether one brand had a statistically significant higher incidence of contamination, or whether packaging materials/methods made a statistically significant difference. I don't think additional analysis was absolutely necessary (the findings of the paper are interesting alone), but it could have added value to the paper.

I do really like the cool graphics they used to display multilocus sequencing typing.

[gfweb]

To me the phenomenon is established. Although the extent hasn't been precisely quantified,I'd move on toward finding ways to control the degree of colonization/contamination. A disinfectant bath before slaughter perhaps?

That sounds tasty. But I don't think you can solve a problem caused by overuse of antimicrobials with more antimicrobials; that way lies madness. The inertia of the system works against change: the food producers have designed their system to be able to process meat as quickly and cheaply as they can, pretty much regardless of any consequence. Introducing quality or safety controls slows the process and hence increases costs; the processors will fight tooth and nail (or hoof) to resist. And they have a lot of power to do so, with friends in Congress and the agencies that are supposed to oversee them.

A disinfectant is not an antibiotic. Disinfectants typically are toxic stuff like chlorine, iodine,or gluteraldehyde or detergent that interfere with many bacterial structures nonspecifically. Antibiotics are precise inhibitors of one or at most a few enzymatic processes or structures.This is an important difference. Bacteria can find away around inhibition of one or two processes and become resistant. They can't (or as yet haven't) found a way to get around something that denatures all their proteins or trashes their membranes.

Disinfectants are commonly used prior to surgery and also to eliminate carriage of resistant bugs like MRSA. It might well work to have the swine wade through a disinfecting bath before slaughter.

[Karri]

So none of you read the data as I did, that there is no specification in to the producer nothing, as was pointed earlier it is possible it came from the same suppliers.

But I feel there is a larger game afoot, this "study" will be cited in years to come to support something, what it will be remains to be seen.

[Moopheus]

So none of you read the data as I did, that there is no specification in to the producer nothing, as was pointed earlier it is possible it came from the same suppliers.

A pretty sizable portion of the meat sold in this country comes from a very small number of suppliers: Tyson, Smithfield, Cargill, and a Brazilian company called JBS, which recently bought Swift and National Beef. Perdue and a couple of others make up the second tier. There isn't that much difference between them in terms of their basic operations.

[andiesenji]

To me the phenomenon is established. Although the extent hasn't been precisely quantified,I'd move on toward finding ways to control the degree of colonization/contamination. A disinfectant bath before slaughter perhaps?

That sounds tasty. But I don't think you can solve a problem caused by overuse of antimicrobials with more antimicrobials; that way lies madness. The inertia of the system works against change: the food producers have designed their system to be able to process meat as quickly and cheaply as they can, pretty much regardless of any consequence. Introducing quality or safety controls slows the process and hence increases costs; the processors will fight tooth and nail (or hoof) to resist. And they have a lot of power to do so, with friends in Congress and the agencies that are supposed to oversee them.

The main problem with government oversight is that there just are too few inspectors, stretched way too thin and the operators of these corporations know it!

And even worse is that some in congress (I'll allow you to form your own opinions) believe that what little oversight there is, is still TOO MUCH, and they want to cut funding further and reduce the number of personnel that do the inspections.

One congressman received a hefty chunk of money from one of these multinational corporations for his campaign fund. He is just about the loudest proponent of "less government overreach" and "keep government out of "small" businesses." As this business could not even remotely be considered "small" you can easily guess where this is going.

This is the same man who believes the oil companies need more subsidies and should be paying less taxes!

[Moopheus]

The main problem with government oversight is that there just are too few inspectors, stretched way too thin and the operators of these corporations know it!

This is true. As much as we might sometimes like to believe otherwise, in every government agency there are employees--career civil servants--who actually want to do their jobs and carry out the mission of their department as well as they can. The problems come largely at the political level--the appointees who run the department and make policy, and the congressmen who control the funds. They can control what the enforcement priorities are, what problems will be deemed no significant, and how much resources are given.

[ScoopKW]

I think that unfortunately it's going to take a plague of near-biblical proportions to get people motivated to change the way we raise animals for slaughter.

In the meantime, there's always the halal, kosher, wagyu, etc. That's the route I go. My best form of protest is to vote against CAFO-raised meat with my wallet.

I ask waiters if they know the provenance of their meat. I'll google to see where the ground beef comes from before getting my quarterly cheeseburger.

I can't say that I consume zero CAFO/Tyson/Smithfield meat because it's damned near omnipresent. But I make a conscious effort to not eat the stuff. Eventually, the invisible hand will correct this health hazard. I doubt government ever will. They haven't done squat since Upton Sinclair.

[gfweb]

Things may be slowly changing. Purdue now has a cage-free line of chicken. Who'd have thunk. Must mean that there's demand.

[gfweb]

I had an object lesson re meat contamination not so long ago. I set a warm meatloaf on top of a new unopened package of ground beef in the fridge. Next AM the raw meat package had inflated and smelled like garbage. Makes you think twice about rare hamburgers.

[technophile50]

Given that "Thirty-two unique susceptibility profiles were identified among the S. aureus isolates", it's extremely unlikely that they got a bunch of duplicate samples from one contaminated batch.

The Pew Charitable Trust is concerned that "Foodborne pathogens cause tens of millions of illnesses, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths in the United States every year, according to estimates by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In addition, the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that 2% to 3% of all acute cases develop complications and long-term illnesses. Furthermore, the overall health-related cost of foodborne illness across the nation has been estimated to be $152 billion annually."

Which is why they funded this study.

The The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a non-profit 501©(3) organization, has considerable expertise in genetic analyses necessary to isolate and identify the drug resistant S. Aureus strains they found.

The members of the Board of Directors of TGen (who are likely large benefactors) are mostly people who made a bunch of money in Real estate, investing and venture capitalism, and other non food related enterprises.

I can't see any indication that this is some nefarious attack on the meat industry by some entity with "...a larger game afoot."

It's more likely someone(s) with some clout at Pew asked "how big a problem is antibiotic resistance from their promiscuous use in our food animals?" and decided to do a preliminary study like this to see if it's worth a larger scale study(which it is, IMHO)

[StanSherman]

Things may be slowly changing. Purdue now has a cage-free line of chicken. Who'd have thunk. Must mean that there's demand.

You have to remember with chickens that there are birds for eating "broilers" and hens for eggs. Broilers are usually not in cages. The have 59,999 birds in one building. These are a Cornish Cross breed. They don't wander more than a few feet from the chicken chow. They are typically harvested as one building at seven weeks. They eat so much so fast that they will rarely make it to 8-9 weeks.

When you see "free-range" it means there is a door left open and a few get lost outside.

The most humane treatment is typically "pastured". Usually that is done with movable cages where the birds are moved over new grass daily.