Most Active Stories Tue February 21, 2012 How Using Antibiotics
In Animal Feed Creates Superbugs Researchers have nailed down
something scientists, government officials and agribusiness
proponents have argued about for years: whether antibiotics in
livestock feed give rise to antibiotic-resistant germs that can
threaten humans. A study in the journal mBio, published by the
American Society for Microbiology, shows how an antibiotic-
susceptible Staph germ passed from humans into pigs, where it
became resistant to the antibiotics tetracycline and
methicillin. And then the antibiotic-resistant Staph learned to
jump back into humans. "It's like watching the birth of a
superbug," says Lance Price of the Translational Genomics
Research Institute, or TGen, in Flagstaff, Arizona. Price and
colleagues in 19 countries did whole-genome analysis on a Staph
strain called CC398 and 88 closely related variations. CC398 is
a so-called MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus
aureus, that emerged within the past decade in