Pat's Note: Since the Canadians are so far ahead of Britain in
investigating the origins of MRSA and C.Diff, I thought I would have a
dig about with Canadian search engines.
This is 8 months old, but interesting. Certainly fits with the
"Gardiner Hypothesis" that Britain's bent government vets are
responsible for superbug outbreaks worldwide.
You san see why they are too scared to test the pigs, can't you?
They face an international tribunal and charges of mass manslaughter.
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2006/10/16/cdiff-meat.html
Discovery of C. difficile in meat puzzles scientists
Last Updated: Monday, October 16, 2006 | 10:09 AM ET
C. difficile bacteria have been found in a variety of ground and
processed meats bought from grocery stores in Canada and the United
States, an unexpected discovery some experts say may be linked to
recent baffling changes in the pattern of the disease.
Some of the U.S. meats contained the hypervirulent C. difficile strain
responsible for severe outbreaks in hospitals in Quebec, Britain and
parts of the U.S. over the past few years, the Canadian Press has
learned. In Quebec alone, the so-called epidemic strain is blamed for
roughly 2,000 deaths in 2003 and 2004.
Though still largely a plague of the elderly in hospitals, C.
difficile-associated disease has undergone unexplained ****fts of late
some deaths in younger people, more infections outside the hospital.
At the same time, there has been a rapid spread of the epidemic strain
across North America and to Europe.
Experts keen to figure out what's going on with this bug say the meat
finding may provide a clue and must be explored.
More evidence needed
"I don't think we know what it means, but it's a serious concern and
it could potentially be contributing to cases, not only in the
community but in hospitals as well," said Dr. Dale Gerding, of Hines
Veterans Affairs Hospital in Chicago, who was not involved in the
research.
But it is too early to conclude people can develop the severe,
recurrent and sometimes fatal C. difficile diarrhea by eating meat
containing the bacterium, Gerding and other experts insisted.
"The bottom line is that we don't have any evidence to say that C.
difficile is a foodborne illness, that people get it from foods," said
Dr. Clifford McDonald of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta.
Two teams of researchers under Dr. Glenn Songer at the University of
Arizona and Dr. Scott Weese at the Ontario Veterinary College in
Guelph found C. difficile s****es in some samples of ground beef,
veal, turkey and ****k, ****k sausage, chorizo, summer sausage and
liverwurst.
Nearly 30 per cent of the meats tested in Arizona (24 of 81 samples)
and 18 per cent tested in Ontario (11 of 60) contained C. difficile.
The Guelph team did not find the human epidemic strain.
A preliminary re****t of the Guelph work was to be presented Monday to
the World Buiatrics Congress in France. (Buiatrics is the science of
treating cattle diseases.)
Each team bought meat over a period of several months from three
different grocery stores in Tucson, Ariz., and in the Guelph, Ont.,
area respectively. The two projects were conducted independently.
The Ontario researchers, who only tested ground beef and ground veal,
are currently working on a larger sampling study, including meat
bought in Quebec.
Both research teams had already shown C. difficile infects food
animals like dairy calves and pigs. And some of the strains found in
those animals and the sampled meat were virtually identical to
some that cause disease in humans.
CDC laboratories confirmed the University of Arizona testing.
The CDC's McDonald said it is a matter of "public health urgency" to
find out if meat is playing a role in the worsening profile of disease
outbreaks.
No alarm for consumers
"That's one of our priorities, to start doing the types of studies to
determine whether people who eat certain foods would be at increased
risk over other persons who don't eat those foods," he said.
Songer, a veterinary microbiologist, hadn't expected to find the
bacterium when he started the meat testing, so when it turned up in
virtually each type of product he sampled, he was startled. He said
when he found the epidemic strain.
"I really about had a seizure."
Still, Songer doesn't think consumers should be alarmed at this point.
"What we need is more information, not panic."
For one thing, no one knows if this is a new phenomenon, or if C.
difficile s****es which are widely dispersed in soil and water have
always found their way into some meats. (Gerding noted though that a
study of hospital food in the 1980s did not find C. difficile.)
Earlier this month, Songer and McDonald met with officials of the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
Food Safety and Inspection Service to lay out the findings and discuss
the need for further research.
Weese, whose lab did the Canadian sampling, said the fact that C.
difficile is a s****e-forming bacteria heightens the need for answers.
S****es can potentially survive cooking, though exposure to
temperatures of 80 C for 10 minutes will kill C. difficile, Gerding
said.
"It's something we need to explore," said Weese.
"Currently, there is no objective evidence indicating that C. diff is
a foodborne pathogen, but the recent changes in C. diff epidemiology
and the emergence of C. diff as a community-associated pathogen
necessitates looking at areas such as food to explain these changes."
It has been known for about 25 years that C. difficile is a cause of
severe and sometimes life-threatening diarrhea in people, typically
elderly hospitalized people taking antibiotics. Antibiotics destroy
the normal balance of bacteria in the gut, allowing C. difficile to
run rampant.
Within the last eight years, though, the pattern of disease has shown
signs of ****fting.
Hospitals in Pittsburgh, then Quebec, Maine, Florida and later Britain
began to re****t persistent outbreaks with sharply elevated death
rates. Some deaths were among younger, previously healthy patients.
More recently, researchers are finding the disease in people who
hadn't been hospitalized, many of whom hadn't recently taken
antibiotics. How they became infected and why they were susceptible is
a puzzle to scientists, who believe that C. difficile cannot cause
illness unless the bacterial balance of the gut has been seriously
disrupted.
Contributing to epidemic?
Meat may provide some answers, experts acknowledge.
"The question is: Is it contributing to the current epidemic
situation? Obviously we don't know whether that's a contributing
factor or not," Gerding said.
"But one of the things we've wondered about for years is: How does
this epidemic strain get around so readily to such a wide variety of
hospitals? And how does it spread from the U.S. to Europe, and country
to country in Europe? So this is one possible vehicle for how that
might occur."
But until the issue has been studied further, that's just a
hypothesis.
"I think we're a long way from saying that meat is an im****tant part
of the epidemiology of this disease," said Dr. John Bartlett, of Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
--
Regards
Pat Gardiner
Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
www.go-self-sufficient.com
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