Click here for our free newsletter. Chicken, that is, that the Minnesota epidemiologist purchased in his local supermarkets. Resistant strains threaten medicine's ability to treat human disease. Most troubling are antibiotics approved for animal use that belong to the same classes of drugs needed for curing people. These include all of the fluoroquinolones, vancomycin, and a new drug, Synercid, soon to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Farmers use the drugs to spur faster growth and treat livestock diseases.
But while most bacteria exposed to the antibiotics are killed, at least a few survive. These resistant bugs multiply and can be passed to humans through raw or undercooked food, water, and manure. From 1992 to 1998, Smith and others at the Minnesota Department of Health studied bacterial cultures from residents infected by Campylobacter jejuni, a microbe that causes an estimated 2 million to 8 million cases of gastroenteritis in the United States annually. In 1992, only 1.3 percent of Minnesota's cases were caused by strains of campylobacter that were resistant to fluoroquinolones, among the most useful drugs for treating serious foodborne infections. By 1998, resistance had grown to 10.2 percent.