Poultry, Public Health | featured news

Chinese scientists have for the first time found strong evidence of how humans got infected with a new strain of bird flu: from chickens at a live market. In a small study of four patients who caught the new H7N9 virus, Chinese scientists compared swabs from birds at live markets in eastern China to virus samples from patients. The scientists found the virus from one patient was nearly identical to one found in a chicken. The research was published online Thursday in the journal Lancet.

With confirmation that a sixth person has died from a mysterious avian-borne virus, Chinese officials escalated their response on Friday, advising people to avoid live poultry, dispatching virologists to chicken farms across the country and slaughtering more than 20,000 birds at a wholesale market in Shanghai where the virus, known as H7N9, was detected in a pigeon.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve wondered what percentage of retail meat has foodborne pathogens, and of those, which pathogens are antibiotic resistant. Well, you’re in luck. The Food and Drug Administration’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System puts out a yearly report looking at the rates of antibiotic resistance of foodborne pathogens in retail meat and poultry samples. A thorough examination, the Retail Meat Report is hefty chunk of research to wade through. Because of this, it’s not easy to make conclusions on the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in the meat case just by reading through the report’s 80-plus pages.