Antibiotic superbugs were once an anomaly, but now they contribute to a massive and looming health crisis. Help send a message to some of the biggest users of meat raised on antibiotics — McDonald’s, KFC, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Subway — to help reverse this public health challenge.
Largely in response to consumer demand, Tyson will be sourcing their pork meat from pigs raised without antibiotics. This could mean, by default, that Tyson’s pigs will be treated better. We shall see. [1]
This is a new trend, it seems, since just last year mega-companies like McDonald’s promised to move away from chicken raised with antibiotics, and would only use cage-free eggs.
Going to the bathroom has deep meaning in the Netherlands – now that its first “poop bank” has opened.
The Dutch Donor Feces Bank (NDFB) is open for business at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), bringing new reason and meaning to relieving oneself. The bank was set up in an effort to reduce the prevalence of infection by Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, bacteria in the human digestive tract.
A single course of antibiotics can cause Clostridium difficile, or C. diff – a bacterium that can lead to a condition known as Clostridium difficile colitis – to flourish in the gut, according to researchers at North Carolina State University.
The discovery was made during experiments with mice. The scientists say the antibiotics were found to kill off bacteria responsible for altering bile acid.
It happened in China, and then moved on to Denmark, then to England. Now, scientists in Canada say they found a mutated gene that causes bacteria to become resistant to ALL antibiotics in 2 samples of ground beef in Ontario in 2010, and in one female patient from Ottawa in 2011.
The Ottawa women who tested positive for bacteria carrying MCR-1 allegedly contracted the bug in Egypt, where she lived for several years. Three days after she returned to Canada, she was hospitalized with an abdominal infection. [1]
In the fight against malaria, there is good news and awful news. First, the good news: malaria infection rates are on the decline. Now, the awful news: many of the new malaria cases that do occur are resistant to drugs.
In December, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that global malaria deaths fell from 839,000 in 2000 to 438,000 in 2015. But the disease still strikes 200 million people a year, often killing children.
First it showed up in China, then Denmark and now it has reared its ugly head in the United Kingdom. Bacteria resistant to all forms of antibiotics are making their way around the globe.
What will it take for the agriculture industry to stop feeding antibiotics to livestock for non-medical purposes? Will it take an all-out crisis for these farms to wake up, and will it be too late by then?
Bacteria resistant to ALL antibiotics have arrived in Europe, and experts fear it could be the start of a global epidemic of untreatable infections.
Bacteria resistant to ALL antibiotics have arrived in Europe, and experts fear it could be the start of a global epidemic of untreatable infections.
