The animals become sources of deadly microorganisms, such as the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacterium, which is resistant to several major classes of antibiotics and has become a real problem in hospitals.
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In 2014 pharmaceutical companies sold nearly 21 million pounds of medically important antibiotics for use in food animals, more than three times the amount sold for use in people.
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MRSA can cause deadly skin, blood and lung infections; it has circulated in hospitals for decades and, more recently, has been affecting people outside of medical settings. By 2007 one fifth of the Netherlands' human MRSA infections were identical to bacteria that had come from Dutch livestock. After this discovery, in 2008, the Dutch government announced strict policies to reduce farm antibiotic use, which then dropped by 59 percent between 2009 and 2011.
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Smith and her colleagues have continued to publish a series of disturbing studies showing that MRSA is all over American hog farms. They found MRSA growing in the nostrils of 64 percent of workers at one large farm and found that feed on another farm harbored MRSA even before it got unloaded from the delivery truck.
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Animal poop is used to fertilize crop fields, too, which means that its bacteria are literally spread on the soil used to grow our food.
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n a study conducted in Pennsylvania, people who were the most heavily exposed to crop fields treated with pig manure—for instance, because they lived near to them—had more than 30 percent increased odds of developing MRSA infections compared with people who were the least exposed.
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Although the bacteria were genetically different, many contained nearly identical plasmids with the same antibiotic-resistance genes. It was the organism-jumping plasmids, rather than the bacteria themselves, that spread resistance.
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The fact that resistance can be spread in this way—microbiologists call it “horizontally”—changes everything.
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- [note::"Horizontally spread bacterial resistance". I guess vertical is spreading resistant trains of DNA through reproduction (mitosis/meiosis)?]

also means that exposing one type of bacteria to one antibiotic in one place has the potential to change how other types of bacteria respond to other antibiotics in other places.
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So when bacteria stop being exposed to antibiotics, they ditch their resistance genes over multiple generations. Yet new research suggests that when bacteria are repeatedly exposed to antibiotics, they evolve resistance mutations that let them maintain higher reproductive rates—and then they stay resistant even if antibiotics are taken away.
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Multiple resistance genes also may end up on the same plasmid, so when one gene gives bacteria a survival advantage, other resistance genes come along for the ride. The extent of this co-selection, as it is called, is still a mystery;
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- [note::"Coselection" - When one gene gives bacteria a survival advantage and another resistant gene comes along for the ride.]

new research suggests that when bacteria get exposed to antibiotics, they share their resistance plasmids at a faster rate. It is as if the microbes band together in the face of a common enemy, sharing their strongest weapons with their comrades.
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they stopped using antibiotics for growth promotion a long time ago. Their main reason for using antibiotics now, they say, is for “disease prevention and control,” a purpose that will not be affected by the new rules.
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almost 70 percent of American hog farms mass-feed antibiotics to their animals to prevent or control the spread of diseas
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more than 70 percent of cattle raised on large U.S. feedlots are fed medically important antibiotics, and between 20 and 52 percent of healthy chickens get antibiotics at some time as well
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In a 2012 study, FDA scientists analyzed raw retail meats sold around the country and found that 84 percent of chicken breasts, 82 percent of ground turkey, 69 percent of ground beef and 44 percent of pork chops were contaminated with intestinal E. coli.
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- [note::So THIS is why it's so important to be careful around raw meat. I knew there was a risk, but damn, this puts it into perspective.]

These microbes can cause food poisoning if meat is not cooked properly before it is eaten or if a person handling the raw meat does not wash his or her hands properly afterward.
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Price and his colleagues study strains of E. coli that he calls COPs—colonizing opportunistic pathogens. As he outlined in a 2013 paper, these bacteria most likely get inside people via food but do not, at first, cause illness; they simply colonize the gut, joining the billions of other “good” bacteria there. Later, they can infect other parts of the body, such as the urinary tract, and cause serious illness.
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This is the crux of the problem: it is difficult, if not impossible, to trace resistant infections back in time to their microbial ground zeros. “It is a long way—geographically, temporally and in other ways—from the farm to the fork,”
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Yet no one is gathering this kind of information. “There are very limited data collected at the farm level,” concedes Bill Flynn, deputy director for science policy at the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine.
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A whopping 90 to 95 percent of U.S. poultry farmers and 48 percent of hog farmers (Beard being one) are contract growers—they sign contracts to raise animals for large companies like Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods or Perdue Farms. Farmers are beholden to these companies because they undertake a huge amount of debt to start their business—a new poultry or hog farm costs a farmer about $1 million—yet they do not earn any money without a company contract;
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when West Virginia poultry grower Mike Weaver invited a journalist onto his farm several years ago and his employer found out, “I was forced to attend ‘biosecurity retraining’ and was delayed receiving a new flock an extra two weeks, which amounts to a loss of revenue of around $5,000 for me,” he says. Price, as a scientist, convinced a handful of farmers to grant him farm access years ago, but then, he recalls, they “lost their contracts.”
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There is also significant opposition to the bill from industry. The National Chicken Council spent $640,000 in 2015 to lobby, in part, against antibiotic-related legislation, and the Animal Health Institute spent $130,000, according to records from the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. Center data also show that veterinary pharmaceutical companies or livestock farming organizations have made campaign donations of more than $15,000 to more than half of the members of the Health subcommittee.
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Products from Coleman, as well those from niche farms such as Seven Sons and Niman Ranch, are out of the financial reach of many Americans today. But the more that consumers demand antibiotic-free meat, the more supply there will be and—if basic economics holds true—the less it will cost.
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- [note::Yeahhh, but I have a hard time believing that it'll be the consumers who drive down costs by paying more for antibiotic free meat than it will be the government by subsidizing such practices.]