Monday Moaning

Supermarket meat crawling with bacteria

Overall, food poisoning sickens up to a quarter of all Americans every year

Sell a little healthy raw milk to a willing consumer, and you can expect cops to burst through the door with their guns drawn — but you can pass off tainted meat on unsuspecting customers all day long, and the feds won’t do a thing about it.

Case in point: The latest study in Clinical Infectious Diseases, which showed that up to HALF of all supermarket meat is contaminated with bacteria — and half of those are resistant to multiple antibiotics.

Researchers bought 136 packages of beef, chicken, pork, and turkey from 26 supermarkets in five cities — and what they found would even make someone with an iron stomach a bit queasy.

Tests revealed that 47 percent of the meat was contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus. Nearly all of the samples were resistant to one antibiotic, and 52 percent were resistant to at least three different drugs.

And believe it or not, that’s not even the worst news — because S. aureus doesn’t even make the Top 10 list of the U.S.’s leading pathogens.

Americans are routinely infected by campylobacter from poultry, toxoplasma from pork, and E. coli from beef, just to name a few. All told, the top 14 pathogens are responsible for nearly 9 million illnesses a year, including 55,678 hospitalizations and 1,322 deaths.

But wait — because that’s STILL not the worst news.

Overall, food poisoning sickens up to a quarter of all Americans every year –- leading to some 325,000 hospitalizations and up to 5,000 deaths that we know of.

Who knows how big the real numbers are.

You may call it “contaminated meat,” but I call it “biological warfare.”

This is a bigger national crisis than airline safety, terrorism, or natural disasters — and the FDA and USDA won’t do a thing about it.

But you can.

Many of these diseases and infections begin at factory farms — festering stinkholes where animals live in filth, eat filth, and die in filth.

Along the way, they’re pumped so full of so many drugs that you get a dose with every bite.

If you can’t get your meats direct from a small farm, find a good butcher who does. Going organic is often a waste of money with many products — but in this case, it’s worth every last cent.

Source: The Douglas report

Is Supermarket Meat Safe to Eat?

Going grocery shopping today? You may want to think twice about buying meat or poultry.

A new study of 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased from grocery stores in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Flagstaff, Ariz., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., found more than half contained Staphylococcus aureus, which can cause food poisoning, The Associated Press reports. And half of the contaminated samples had a form of staph that’s resistant to at least three kinds of antibiotics.

“This study shows that much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with multidrug-resistant staph,” Paul Keim, one of the study’s authors at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona, said in a statement.

Among the types of drug-resistant germs the researchers found, one was methicillin-resistant staph, or MRSA, a superbug that can be fatal, according to the AP. They found MRSA in three of the 136 samples.

But don’t panic. Staph germs are commonly found on the skin and in the noses of up to 25 percent of healthy people. Hand-washing and proper cooking are the best ways to kill the bacteria, and federal health officials estimate staph accounts for less than 3 percent of foodborne illnesses.

“Despite the claims of this small study, consumers can feel confident that meat and poultry is safe,” James H. Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute, said in a statement on Friday.

Do you believe him?

Source: SodaHead

Opinion:

I don’t believe anything they say. They say want they want us to hear so they can continue making a profit.

The passing of the local butchers shop in favour of the supermarkets is a sad thing. Once we could believe in the safety of buying meat, today there is no knowing what goes on behind the swinging doors of the supermarket meat department.

I have bought ground beef from the supermarket and the next day it was unusable. When I buy from the butcher it is ground in front of me, I know that it’s freshly ground and hasn’t sat around all day sweating in a plastic wrap allowing the bacteria to multiply.

When you read reports like those above, then you see statements like this:

Supermarket meat CANNOT be considered safe for human consumption. According to a Government Accountability Project (GAP) White Paper dated November 1997, consumers today pay for USDA Approved fecal-soup and other filth, when they think they are buying meat stamped as wholesome. What’s worse…Consumers are being victimized by a new food chain, foisted upon them by an uncaring, greed motivated industry.

It’s enough to make your stomach turn.

The time has come when we must pressure politicians to allow farm meat production, return to the old ways.

Grass fed meat, milk and eggs need to be a right, not the whimsical choice of some politician who wants to get reelected.

The status quo is totally against the health of the nation and responsible for much of the government over spending on healthcare.

Get the corporations out of our kitchens because they are poisoning us in the grab for profits. The corporations don’t give a shit about your health or well-being, as long as their CEOs get their obscene paychecks and bonuses.