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that pigs in confined animal feedlot operations, and the workers who tend them, routinely carry MRSA strains (her paper can be found here).

The big concern is not that humans will acquire drug-resistant bacteria from their properly cooked bacon or sausage, but rather that the bacteria will be transferred to humans from the common pests that live with pigs and then move in with us.

Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that factory-scale animal farms exact a high toll from the people who live around them in other ways, too. A study by University of North Carolina professor Steve Wing and others shows that people with the bad luck to live near giant hog farms suffer demonstrably worse health when the factories are getting up to malodorous stuff like spraying untreated (and thus antibiotic-resistant-bacteria-laden) manure on fields. Among the many hidden costs of cheap pork is that people who live near factory farms are doomed either to be sick or shut in at certain times of the year. (McKenna has an excellent discussion of the Wing study on her Wired blog.)

law banning the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics on farms

And then the antibiotic-resistant staph learned to jump back into humans.

"It's like watching the birth of a superbu

whole-genome analysis on a staph strain called CC398 and 88 closely related variations.

emerged within the past decade in pigs and has since spread widely in cattle and poultry as well as pigs.

the animal bacterium jumped back into humans with close exposure to livestock.

This "pig MRSA" has been detected in nearly half of all meat sampled in U.S. commerce

we think it may be changing gears, so to speak, and gaining the capacity to be passed from person to person.

Price says the new data provide an early warning of what might become a major public health problem.

in some areas of the Netherlands, it's causing as many as 1 in 4 human MRSA cases

"our inappropriate use of antibiotics ... is now coming back to haunt us."

the solution is clear — banning antibiotics in livestock feed, as the European Union has done.

Most antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to animals, mostly in their feed, where they act as a growth promoter and damp down infection outbreaks in large feedlots.

It said it would focus instead on "voluntary reform" by the meat industry to limit use.