This December, I caught a nasty food-borne illness called
Campylobacter jejuni. Yes, it’s difficult to spell, but the
route of infection is pretty simple: it comes from contaminated,
usually undercooked or improperly handled meat and poultry. The
gruesome details aside, I ended up in a local emergency room,
extremely feverish and in pain, where the doctors put me on an
IV to get re-hydrated and performed tests to see if the
infection had “sensitivities.” Huh? I lived with that thing for
more than a week and I can tell you it was not sensitive—that
thing was mean. But what the doctors meant, I learned, was
whether the infection would respond to antibiotics (I thank my
lucky stars that it did). The problem of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria is a growing one, one that has raised the concerns of
federal officials and several medical organizations—and one that
relates to our farmers. The most recent estimates from the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration report that nearly 80% of all
antibiotics used in the United Stat