A year or two ago, a Murfreesboro child playing in her yard fell and skinned a knee. This wound was to change her life. At one point, doctors (and though now at home she still has several) predicted she wouldn’t live through the night, though she did.
The child had contracted, evidently through that little wound, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA (pronounced mersa). Today, she must have immediate medical treatment for routine childhood subcutaneous wounds.
This antibiotic-resistant staph killed 18,000 Americans last year. That was more than AIDS and the figure is certain to rise because:
1. Industrial farms feed antibiotics to all livestock. This consumes 70 percent of the nation’s antibiotics; and
2. The staph varieties fight back by mutating and becoming increasingly prolific. The more antibiotics, the more super-staph.
This could easily be helped by Congress. That won’t happen. Hog farmers have huge monetary resources and Congress is sensitive to that. It doesn’t buck National Rifle Association, the National Farm Bureau and big pharma, that same big pharma that makes and sells antibiotics. Fat bank accounts portend the adequate funding of a potential political opponent. Politicians don’t mess with industrial livestock farming.
In Louisiana the state tested 90 retail pork samples. Five had MRSA. In D.C. it was found in one of 300 samples.
In North Carolina, where hog farms flourish and where the hog corporations control the state ledge, it is said that hogs excrete twice the daily feces as a human. This brings further problems. A researcher found that from 25 to 39 percent of all hogs carry MRSA and the staph has been found in some ground water.
Stock farms use antibiotics prophylactically, feeding antibiotics to every animal, thereby providing additional breeding grounds for MRSA and heaven knows what else. This could be proscribed by the laws Congress never will pass.
Four hundred fifty million dollars was spent on lobbying against any laws to govern global warming. That’s getting close to a mill for each Congressional member. Our nation is a moneyocracy.
It’s a shame. Democracy was a noble idea.
Meanwhile, wash your hands, knives, counter tops or anything that comes in contact with meat, cook meats well, and get right with God.
(Facts in the above were taken from the Mayo Clinic Web site and the Nicholas Kristof NY Times columns of 3/12/09 et seq.) |
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