Lively and relevant information on sustainable living from a
variety of contributors. March 27, 2009; The Use of antibiotics
in livestock and the possible connections to the emergence of a
super bug? You may have read, that in 2005, there were 18,000
known deaths in the US that resulted from a type of Staph
bacteria, Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA),
pronounced mer-sa. MRSA (Staph) is resistant to broad-spectrum
antibiotics, and has recently been discovered in pigs (and farm
workers), on farms in Iowa and Illinois. You may also have read
that more people died from MRSA than died of AIDS, over the same
period of time. While that information may be accurate as a
whole, the relationship between MRSA deaths (in general) and the
swine strain (in particular) are quite misleading. MRSA causes
more than one type of disease depending upon its strain. There
are many Staph strains of MRSA, those widely associated with
community outbreaks; and those associated with outbreaks in
hospitals. There is one m