Study: Staph Found in Half of U.S. Meat

Will this be the study that finally get us to eat less meat? I am not sure. I did a detox a little while ago and I could not have meat for a week. Initially, I thought I was going to die, but once I prepared the vegetable soup that was required, it actually wasn't too bad. In light of new knowledge, could I go meatless forever?

Eatocracy is reporting that almost half of the meat and poultry sold at U.S. supermarkets and grocery stores contains a type of bacteria that is potentially harmful to humans, a new study estimates. Researchers tested 136 packages of chicken, turkey, pork, and ground beef purchased at 26 grocery stores in five cities around the country, and found that 47 percent contained Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), a common cause of infection in people. Roughly half of the contaminated samples contained strains of the bacteria that were resistant to at least three antibiotics, such as penicillin and tetracycline. Some strains were resistant to a half dozen or more. Although the high contamination rates may sound alarming, the threat these bacteria pose to humans is still unclear.

Amanda Gardner reports,"We know that nearly half of our food supply's meat and poultry are contaminated with S. aureus, and more than half of those are multidrug resistant," says Lance B. Price, Ph.D., the senior author of the study, which was published Friday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. "What we don't know [is] how often these transfer to people. We need more studies to quantify the public health impact."

We're not scientists but antibiotic resistant strains of staph make us uneasy, particularly when the U.S. eats twice the global average of meat - 8 ounces a day. We suspect when you grow and kill food at alarming rates, that bacteria is bound to happen, but this is ridiculous.

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