yummy turkey staph

And people ask why I'm a vegetarian (from a Wired article):

There are two new studies out that confirm, once again, that drug-resistant staph or MRSA — normally thought of as a problem in hospitals and out in everyday life, in schoolkids, sports teams, jails and gyms — is showing up in animals and in the meat those animals become.

full article

MRSA is the strain of staph that is resistant to multiple antibiotics, but which normally responds to tetracycline. If you don't know what an  MRSA staph infection implies, then by all means click this link. Not if you're eating though.

But when the researchers looked at the strain they found in factory farms they found something disturbing in factory turkey samples:

In this paper, all of the staph found in pork and turkey was tetracycline-resistant even when it was not MRSA (which, definitionally, is resistant to methicillin or its close analog oxacillin). Six of the seven staph-containing turkey samples were t034, and one was t337, which is associated with another MRSA strain that has emerged in pigs in China. “This suggests that turkeys, in addition to pigs, are a possible reservoir for both the ST398 and ST9 strains in the United States,” the authors say.

(ST398 and ST9 are the tetracycline-resistant strains of staph.)

Could we, through our mindless addiction to cheap meat, be producing the very diseases which will eventually kill us off? Far-off and far-fetched though this might seem, it is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility.

Yeah, that's shit all over them. Delicious.

And really, if the conditions in meat-producing facilities aren't enough to gross you out on factory meat (which is statistically all the meat you will ever consume in modern America) then maybe the thought of the uber-diseases these corporations are creating in their petri dish facilities by pumping these animals full of massive doses of hormones and antibiotics might do it.

(warning: very disturbing images of animal abuse)



Do any parents ever consider what they are training their kids to consume for life? Do they ever wonder if they might be making their kids sick or at least priming to become sick later in life by feeding them things like chicken nuggets or even store-bought meat?

Think about that when you line up for another plate of turkey.

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