Researchers Need to Distinguish Between Salmonella Strains

With so many different strains of salmonella infections, it makes sense to continue refining the methods used to distinguish them. According to the article below, the CDC uses a method of DNA fingerprinting track the strain that caused the outbreak, but it doesn't work so well with Salmonella Enteritidis, so they're are developing a new and more accurate method of acquiring the bacteria's identity.
   . . . June


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Researchers developing way to distinguish between salmonella strains:
Penn State Live  Tuesday, September 21, 2010

University Park, Pa. — As scientists with the federal government search for the source of the salmonella that made thousands of people sick this summer and trace how it spread, researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences are developing a new and more accurate method of acquiring the bacteria's identity.

The outbreak began last May. By August, at least 1,000 more people than usual around the country had gotten sick with salmonella poisoning. Investigators from the Food and Drug Administration discovered that two large enterprises in Iowa supplied eggs that carried a common type of salmonella, Salmonella Enteritidis, frequently associated with eggs. More than 500 million eggs from those farms were recalled, and investigators are piecing together how the outbreak occurred.

Hospitals reported the cases to state health authorities, who took a kind of genetic fingerprint of the bacteria and passed that information along to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. But in this case, the genetic fingerprint wasn't very helpful for tracing the bacteria because it was the most common fingerprint for Salmonella Enteritidis in CDC’s database.

As a result, "Investigators couldn't tell if all those people really got sick from the same thing," said Stephen Knabel, professor of food science, who has been working with faculty colleague Edward Dudley for the past year to develop a new and more accurate method for DNA fingerprinting the top 10 types of salmonella bacteria.

"The problem is that different strains of Salmonella Enteritidis are highly related and very difficult to distinguish between," Knabel said. "The CDC uses a method of DNA fingerprinting called PFGE to track the strain that caused the outbreak, but it doesn't work so well with Salmonella Enteritidis."

Read More . . .

Are Antibiotics In Livestock Feed Partly to Blame For Drug-resistant Bacteria?

 The article below brings out a very valid point. They say that the practice of lacing animals' feed with low-dose antibiotics to accelerate their growth is spreading drug-resistant bacteria to humans and rendering common antibiotics useless to treat illness. After all, isn't that why our doctors are being so careful not to treat every minor infection we have with antibiotics? 
     . . . June


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Doctors sound alarm over antibiotics in livestock feed
The Green Man:

The Canadian Medical Association is pressuring the federal government to investigate the human health impacts of feeding antibiotics to healthy beef cattle, poultry and hogs.

Doctors and scientists say the practice of lacing animals' feed with low-dose antibiotics to accelerate their growth is spreading drug-resistant bacteria to humans and rendering common antibiotics useless to treat illness.

A food chain contaminated by drug-resistant bacteria bodes ill for both public health and the cost of health care, and as drug resistance in microbes increases, the number of effective antibiotics in the doctors' arsenal has dropped.

"As doctors we are seeing that people have infections that were easily treated years ago, when all the basic antibiotics took care of most of the infections that people had," said Vancouver physician Dr. Bill Mackie, chairman of the environmental health committee of the B.C. Medical Association. "Of late there has been increasing [drug] resistance; when you put someone on an antibiotic that you expect to do its job, it doesn't work."

When a course of antibiotic treatment fails, people stay sick longer and doctors must resort to more exotic and often more expensive drugs, Mackie said.

The BC Centre for Disease Control has tracked a rise in the number of courses of antibiotics required to treat common bacterial illnesses, such as bladder infections.

Medical authorities are also grappling with a rise in multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which mainly affects hospital patients but is also found in hogs and cattle, where it can be passed to humans, according to a 2009 report by the European Food Safety Authority.

Read on . . .