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Environment

Sick as a Pig

Jim Wickens 26/03/2009

It has plagued hospital wards for years, picking off the elderly and infirm, but now another strain of MRSA is emerging from the factory farms of Northern Europe, and it is linked to the insatiable demand for cheap meat on our plates. The Ecologist Film Unit travelled to the Netherlands to investigate. Report by Jim Wickens

It is a landscape of clinical efficiency. Flat, square fields, neatly interspersed with row upon row of anonymous factory units, greet the passer-by. Behind the silent facades, every building contains thousands of farm animals. It could be veal calves, turkeys or chickens, but in this region of the Netherlands, close to Eindhoven, it is predominantly pigs. The Netherlands has a higher concentration of farm animals per square kilometre than any country on the planet, and these farms are now at the frontline of a new battle against MRSA.

‘Community-acquired’ or ‘farm animal’ MRSA has a grim track record. Commonly causing skin infections, this strain of bacteria can also cause pneumonia, bone infections and endocarditis. And in the Netherlands it is spreading. ‘What we have seen here in our region is a rise of MRSA-positive patients, from an average of 40 or 50 MRSA-positive patients in this entire region in a year to last year 224, and about 60 per cent of those are animal-related MRSA,’ says Mireille Wulf, a microbiologist based in Eindhoven.

Recent studies have shown that between 30 and 50 per cent of all pig farmers in the Netherlands carry the bacteria. This growing trend has so worried the health authorities that they have brought in legislation to stem it: all pig farmers entering a Dutch hospital must now go into quarantine upon admission.

And it’s not just the hospitals that are concerned. Willie Buysse is a vet who works on pig farms in the south of the Netherlands. ‘If I have to go to hospital I would like to be helped,’ he says. ‘If they refuse me, I have a problem. And one can infect other people and animals, so it is something to worry about.’

The common factor in all this is antibiotics, says Dik Mevius, a professor of microbial resistance at the university of Wageningen, who is studying the recent upsurge in MRSA outbreaks. ‘The typical feature of the animal-derived MRSA that is spreading in animals right now is that it is always tetracycline resistant. Tetracyclines are the most used antibiotics, so it's quite likely that the use of tetracyclines is one of the reasons that these MRSAs are commonly present,’ he says.

To continue reading this article and many more from the Ecologist – the world’s leading environmental magazine:

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Jim Wickens is a journalist and producer with investigative agency Ecostorm

This piece first appeared in the Ecologist April 2009

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