Phoenix, AZ, USA. A survey of meat and poultry from U.S. grocery stores across the country shows the presence of drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria linked to a wide range of human diseases, in unexpectedly high rates of infection.

Proper cooking can kill staph, but it may still pose a risk to consumers through improper storage, food handling, and cross-contamination in their kitchens. This article presents the facts from the survey.


The data and analysis comes from a nationwide study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) a non-profit biomedical research institute. This is the first national assessment of antibiotic resistant S. aureus in the U.S. food supply. The data and analysis appear in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.



Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)

MRSA is a bacterium directly responsible for several human infections that haven proven to be very difficult to treat.

The bacterium poses special difficulties in hospitals. Patients are more vulnerable to infection than the general public because of invasive devices, open wounds, and weakened immune systems.

By definition, MRSA is any Staphylococcus aureus strain that resist beta-lactam antibiotics (e.g., the penicillins and cephalosporins.

MRSA also is called multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or oxacillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (ORSA).Researchers collected and analyzed 136 samples — covering 80 brands — of beef, chicken, pork and turkey from 26 retail grocery stores in five U.S. cities: Chicago, Flagstaff, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.

Nearly half of the meat and poultry samples (47 percent) were contaminated with S. aureus, and more than half of those bacteria (52 percent) were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. And, DNA testing suggests that the food animals themselves were the major source of contamination.

"For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial," said Lance B. Price, Ph.D., senior author of the study and Director of TGen's Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health.

"The fact that drug-resistant S. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from the food animals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food-animal production today," Dr. Price said.

Densely-stocked industrial farms, where food animals are steadily fed low doses of antibiotics, are ideal breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria that move from animals to humans, the report says.

"Antibiotics are the most important drugs that we have to treat Staph infections; but when Staph are resistant to three, four, five or even nine different antibiotics — like we saw in this study — that leaves physicians few options," Dr. Price said.

"The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria — including Staph — remains a major challenge in clinical medicine," said Paul S. Keim, Ph.D., Director of TGen's Pathogen Genomics Division and Director of the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at Northern Arizona University (NAU).

"This study shows that much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with multidrug-resistant Staph. Now we need to determine what this means in terms of risk to the consumer," said Dr. Keim, a co-author of the paper.

The U.S. government routinely surveys retail meat and poultry for four types of drug-resistant bacteria, but S. aureus is not among them. S. aureus can cause a range of illnesses from minor skin infections to life-threatening diseases, such as pneumonia, endocarditis and sepsis.

The paper suggests that a more comprehensive inspection program is needed.

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