As residents of North Carolina, the country’s leading pork-producing state, will readily tell you, hog confinements aren’t kind to the nose.
But while the stench of factory farms is a given, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health looked at something else that may end up in the noses of workers at hog farms for a study published last week in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine—the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, or staph.
Although roughly a third of Americans carry the bacteria without becoming sick, it’s more widely feared in its more notorious guise, methicillin-resistant S. aureus, or MRSA. The antibiotic-resistant strain can be deadly, with infections resulting in 9,670 deaths in 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If hog confinements, in which animals living in close quarters are routinely fed antibiotics, are an ideal breeding ground for MRSA, public health researchers want to know if the bug is making its way off the farm. So the Johns Hopkins scientists turned to the noses of 22 workers in North Carolina to see what forms of staph they might find there.
via Factory-Farm Workers Found to Carry High Levels of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria | TakePart.
