Via Farmworkers, Superbugs Find A Route Away From Drug-Using Farms

...Some studies have shown that bacteria can move off farms in groundwater, on the feet of flies, and via dust on the wind. What is insufficiently explored—because it is difficult to get large meat-production facilities to cooperate—is whether farm workers themselves are serving as a transport vehicle.

A new study just published (and open-access, so anyone can read it) helps to answer that question. It looks at the possibility that workers on large hog farms are carrying away drug-resistant staph or MRSA, and especially a type of resistant staph — known familiarly as “pig MRSA” and more technically as “livestock-associated MRSA” — that emerged on hog farms a decade ago and is directly linked to farm-drug use.

...The new study finds that hog farmers are carrying multi-drug resistant livestock-associated MRSA away from the farm and — this is the crucial bit — that their bodies are hanging onto those bacteria, in a way that might allow them to spread, for up to 14 days.  A little more detail about the study: It was conducted by 13 researchers with overlapping affiliations: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;  the Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH), a North Carolina nonprofit; the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University, and several departments in Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health; and the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark. It recruited 22 farm workers who work on very large-scale intensive hog farms in North Carolina (site of the biggest concentration of such hog farms in the country), and asked them to swab the inside of their noses — MRSA’s favorite hiding place — over 14 days...