Kirk Smith has chicken on his mind. Chicken, that is, that the Minnesota epidemiologist purchased in his local supermarkets. 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.
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. A little more medical sleuthing showed that about half of those travelers had been to Mexico, where fluoroquinolone use in poultry increased almost fourfold between 1993 and 1997. First found in Europe, where its spread was linked to an antibiotic growth promoter, VRE arrived here in the 1990s and has proved deadly in many U.S. hospitals. Searching for a cure, the pharmaceutical company Rhone-Poulenc Rorer developed Synercid. John Keeling of the Animal Health Institute, a pharmaceutical trade group, says no action should be taken until more data demonstrate a significant risk to humans.