Food, Public Health | featured news

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.

Federal health officials say at least 16 people in five states have been sickened by salmonella food poisoning linked to ground beef. No one has died, but half were hospitalized. Most of the illnesses have been in Michigan, but a few cases were scattered in Arizona, Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Friday that it would not ban the use of bisphenol A, also known as BPA, in food packaging but said it would continue research on the health effects of the widely used chemical.