![chicken](http://uploads.neatorama.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/chicken-150x150.jpg)
If
you’ve ever suffered from a Urinary Tract Infection (UTI), you know how
painful and unpleasant it can be. But if antibiotics weren’t able to
cure it, the infection could spread to one’s kidneys and the rest of the
body, and could even be fatal. Which is why doctors are very concerned
to find that the microorganism that causes such infections,
E. coli, is growing more resistant to antibiotics. Why is that happening?
But the origin of these newly resistant E. coli has been a
mystery — except to a small group of researchers in several countries.
They contend there is persuasive evidence that the bacteria are coming
from poultry. More precisely, coming from poultry raised with the
routine use of antibiotics, which takes in most of the 8.6 billion
chickens raised for meat in the U.S. each year.
Their research in the United States, Canada, and Europe (published
most recently this month, in June, and in March) has found close genetic
matches between resistant E. coli collected from human patients and
resistant strains found on chicken or turkey sold in supermarkets or
collected from birds being slaughtered. The researchers contend that
poultry — especially chicken, the low-cost, low-fat protein that
Americans eat more than any other meat — is the bridge that allows
resistant bacteria to move to humans, taking up residence in the body
and sparking infections when conditions are right. Touching raw meat
that contains the resistant bacteria, or coming into environmental
contact with it — say, by eating lettuce that was cross-contaminated —
are easy ways to become infected.
“The E. coli that is circulating at the same time, and in the same
area — from food animal sources, retail meat, and the E. coli that’s
causing women’s infections — is very closely related genetically,” said
Amee Manges, Ph.D., an associate professor of epidemiology at McGill
University in Montreal who has been researching resistant UTIs for a
decade. “And the E. coli that you recover from poultry meat tends to
have the highest levels of resistance. Of all retail meats, it’s the
most problematic that way.”
Policy concern over antibiotic-resistant bacteria — where they come
from and how they affect human health — is at a peak right now.
About 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States each
year are given to livestock as “growth promoters” that allow animals to
put on weight more quickly, or as prophylactic regimens that protect
against the confined conditions in which they are raised.
Read a lot more about this research and the link between poultry and UTIs at
The Atlantic.
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