MRSA Strain That Eludes Traditional Tests Found in Cow’s Milk, Study Finds

MRSA germ - Wikimedia image

Kristen Hallam
Bloomberg

British scientists have discovered a new strain of the drug-resistant germ known as MRSA in cow’s milk and some evidence that the animals could be a source of the infection in humans.

University of Cambridge researchers were led to the discovery while studying an infection of the animals’ udders, according to an article published today in the U.K journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Tests showed that people in Scotland, England and Denmark carried the new variant of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and that the bacteria can elude the usual means of detection.

Tests that search for the mecA gene, which enables the bacteria to resist treatment with some antibiotics, can miss the new, genetically different strain, researchers said. Relying solely on gene testing can lead doctors to prescribe medicines that are powerless against MRSA, the researchers said.

“It’s important that any of the MRSA testing that is based on detection of the mecA gene be upgraded to ensure that the tests detect the new gene found in the new MRSA,” said Mark Holmes, the lead researcher, in a statement.

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War Over Monsanto Gets Ugly

Mike Ludwig
Truth-Out

A delegation of politicians and community activists gathered on August 7 in La Leonesa, a small farm town in Argentina, to hear Dr. Andres Carrasco speak about a study linking a popular herbicide to birth defects in Argentina's agricultural areas.

But the presentation never happened. A mob of about 100 people attacked the delegation before they could reach the local school where the talk was to be held.

Dr. Carrasco and a colleague locked themselves in a car as the mob yelled threats and beat on the vehicle for two hours. One delegate was hit in the spine and has since suffered lower-body paralysis. Another person was treated for blows to the head. A former provincial human rights official was hit in the face and knocked unconscious.


Witnesses said the angry crowd had ties to local officials and agribusiness bosses, and police made little effort to stop the violence, according to human rights group Amnesty International.

Carrasco is a lead embryologist at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School and the Argentinean national research council. His study, first released in 2009 and published in the United States this past summer, shows that glyphosate-based herbicides like Monsanto's popular Roundup formula caused deformations in chicken embryos that resembled the kind of birth defects being reported in areas like La Leonesa, where big agribusinesses depend on glyphosate to treat genetically engineered crops.

The deformations resulted from much lower doses of herbicide than those commonly found on crops, according to the study.

Biotech chemical giant Monsanto patented glyphosate under the trade name Roundup in the 1970's. The billion-dollar product is a main source of Monsanto's revenue and one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. One Monsanto blogger recently wrote that decades of success has made the Roundup brand name and glyphosate "interchangeable similar to the case of facial tissue and the brand name Kleenex."

Carrasco's report was largely ignored in the mainstream American media, but gained international attention among those opposed to genetically modified (GM) crops like Monstano's Roundup Ready crops, which are genetically engineered to tolerate the glyphosate-based herbicides.

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Monsanto's Super Weeds Come Home to Roost

Charles Marqulis
Generation Green

There’s been much recent news aboutMonsanto paying farmers to use its competitors’ herbicides, in what many see as a last ditch effort to address the spread of superweeds created by the company’s “Roundup Ready” (RR) GMO crops.

Environmental scientists warned even before Monsanto’s “herbicide tolerant” GMO crops were approved that they would hasten the evolution of resistant weeds. For these scientists, the issue was obvious: introduction of high doses of a single chemical year after year would result in the exact conditions needed to breed resistance: weeds with resistance genes would be the only weeds that could survive and breed, leading to superweeds that are unaffected even by massive herbicide spraying.

Of course, Monsanto denied these early warnings. In a 1997 paper, Monsanto scientists claimedthat weed resistance was such a complex genetic phenomena that RR crops would be unlikely to lead to resistant weeds.  What’s even more troubling, though, is that Monsanto continued to ignore the spread of superweeds for years, and worked to persuade and threaten farmers against strategies to avoid resistance – since those strategies would have cut into the company’s sales of Roundup and RR crops.


For example, in a 2003 report, a Monsanto "Roundup technical manager" advised against crop rotation and warned farmers that using chemicals other than Roundup with RR crops would only add an unnecessary expense. Farmers have been growing Roundup Ready soy continuously for eight years, he said, without any resistance problems. Weeds were not resistant, he said, but were exhibiting "differential tolerance."

Which means, he said, farmers should simply use more Roundup to kill resistant weeds, because "if it’s a dead weed, it won’t produce seed."

Which is funny, because two years earlier, scientists in Delaware reported that ten times the recommended amount of Roundup was ineffective on a resistant weed strain (perhaps they should have tried 100 times the label amount).

In fact, Monsanto was spreading their “use more Roundup, because dead weeds don’t seed” line far and wide. In a 2003 pamphlet on “managing weed resistance” it sent to thousands of farmers, the company advised the growers to use maximum doses of Roundup and warned that switching to rotations with non-GMO crops would cost farmers money.

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