What’s bugging your meat? Shit and antibiotics, probably

Take a deep breath, carnivores: 87 percent of supermarket meat — including beef, pork, chicken, and turkey products — tests positive for normal and antibiotic-resistant forms of Enterococcus bacteria.

Resistant or not, the mere presence of these types of microbes means the majority of our meat comes into contact with fecal matter at some point.

The threat of these superbugs goes beyond the academic. Three of the bugs listed above cause tens of thousands of illnesses and hundreds of deaths a year. Resistant salmonella-tainted meat recently caused several outbreaks, one of them quite deadly. And E. coli from supermarket chicken has been linked to millions of antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infections in women.

Medical researchers are all but begging livestock producers to scale back on the heaps of antibiotics fed to food animals every year — sound advice since 80 percent of all antibiotics consumed in the U.S. go to food animals — but the industry contends that such a reduction would be impossible. That’s true in a way: Most livestock would not be able to survive the cramped, stressful, disease-ridden conditions in which they are raised without a constant low-level dosing of antibiotics.

As an additional boon, these antibiotics seem not only to prevent disease but also to increase animal size and weight for reasons that are not well understood.

For now, it’s up to consumers to protect themselves from superbugs as best they can. As EWG concludes, they must “assume that all meat is contaminated with disease-causing bacteria.”

[link to grist.org]