Saturday, February 26, 2011

People who live by Factory Farms are prone to Sickness, here's why:

Photo Via: Grist.org by Steve Wing
An EcoInteractive post this morning brought another factory farm issue to my attention.  The fact that flies and cockroaches spread disease to the communities living around these large factory farms.  This article has a lot more information concerning MRSA that I was not aware of like: MRSA kills more people annually in the U.S. than that of AIDS and that of course the fact that the H1N1, or Swine Flu, didn't actually originate anywhere foreign but right here on U.S. soils, in the state of N.C. reports Wired.com.  The irony in the fact that the factory farms that raised pork petitioned to have swine flu renamed to H1N1, so as to not give pork a bad name, isn't missed.

In this article titled: "Flies and Cockroaches carry drug resistant bacteria from Factory Farms" you can read all about the issue along with links verifying their information.  There is a pop up, a practice which I hate BTW,  when you first load the page but once you close that window you are free to read uninterrupted.

Here is a blurb from the article:


"And we know that a kind of antibiotic-resistant staph infection called MRSA now kills more people than AIDS -- and infects people who never set foot in a hospital, which is the site where MRSA is thought to have originated. We also know, due to the stellar work of Iowa State University researcher Tara Smith, that pigs in confined animal feedlot operations, and the workers who tend them, routinely carry MRSA strains.


We also know that, by the FDA's own reckoning, meat on grocery store shelves is routinely infected by pathogens resistant to multiple antibiotics (again, McKenna's work brought the FDA's perhaps intentionally obscure report to light).


And now we know of yet another means by which antibiotic-resistant nasties can make their way from meat factories into the broader community: through the cockroaches and flies drawn to the titanic amounts of manure produced on factory farms"

No comments: