The Salmonella Outbreak and the Government Shutdown

Maryn McKenna:

We’re 11 days now into the federal shutdown and four days since the announcement of a major foodborne outbreak in chicken that is challenging the shutdown-limited abilities of the food-safety and disease-detective personnel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture. Here’s an update.

The CDC has been able to bring back a few personnel to work on this — but only a few. Meanwhile, the Salmonella causing the outbreak has been shown to be multiple strains, several of which are resistant to multiple families of antibiotics.

McKenna goes through the CDC program and its staffing, then tells a little bit about the bacteria involved:

Now, the organism itself: This is interesting and troubling.

• There are seven strains of Salmonella circulating within this outbreak.
• Within the limited testing they have been able to do, the CDC has determined that four of the seven strains are drug-resistant.
• Two of the four are resistant to many antibiotics.
• The antibiotics to which the strains are resistant are: ampicillin, chloramphenicol, gentamicin, kanamycin, streptomycin, sulfisoxazole, and tetracycline.
• This complex resistance pattern “is probably contributing to the high hospitalization rate,” Braden told me.

If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you’ll know that I’m interested in drug resistance in food, because it distributes drug-resistant infection more broadly through the world, and because it often indicates that the resistance arose from antibiotic use in agriculture......The pattern of resistance in these isolates is different from that in the earlier Foster Farms outbreak; there also was just one strain in that outbreak compared to seven in this one. In addition, that outbreak was centered on Foster Farms slaughterhouses in Washington State; this one appears to be centered in California.
“Presumably there is something (in the Foster Farms production chain) that is feeding into multiple facilities,” Braden said. And then he added something that made my heart skip a little:

The information that we’re getting from this outbreak — with so many strains, the fact that a number of them are multi-drug resistant, the fact that there’s some overlap with the previous outbreak, but there’s some new ones — is outstripping our understanding of what’s happening in those facilities and what’s happening in the production farms back upstream.

If Republicans' plan was to shut down the government to highlight important work done by said government, they are doing a hell of a job of it in this case.  I don't believe that was their intention, but if they were looking to inform the public opinion of themselves as nihilistic morons who have no business in public service, they are doing a hell of a job of that, too.

On the ag side of things, this is one more marker that something will have to change, and the sooner the better when it comes to confinement livestock facilities and routine use of antibiotics.  We are flirting with disaster, and the less things change, the higher the probability that such a disaster will come.  Hopefully, as the Republicans give up on their idiotic shutdown, CDC will get back to work, and maybe they'll find out this outbreak isn't as scary as it sounds like.  But, before that can take place, the Republicans have to give up on their idiocy, and they are pretty proud of said idiocy.