Pigs and Bees

[Article by Michael Pollan]

Photo - Ken Hammond - USDA

Modern confinement hog farming facility. Recent studies have found that hog operations in Europe and Canada have become reservoirs of MRSA.

MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria, is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It's Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace.

The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals in the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called "community-acquired MRSA" — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal-feeding operation, or CAFO.

To learn more about how pigs and bees contribute to unsustainability and health risk, buy the March/April edition of Touch the Soil magazine at a retail outlet or subscribe online.