Click here for a special offer. 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.