Supermarket Meats Are Giving Us Drug Resistant UTIs

Just in case you needed more to be afraid of in life, urinary tract infections are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics used to treat them and have the potential to become life threatening bloodstream infections. Oh, and there’s a good chance people are getting at least some of these infections from the meat they’re buying at the supermarket.

The uptick in UTIs has been confounding doctors for years—it is estimated that there are 8 million UTIs in the US per year. Via PBS’s Frontline:

“You don’t have a normally healthy 30-year-old woman come in, who’s never been in a hospital, with a resistant urinary tract infection that’s moved to her blood,” Elizabeth DuPreez, an infectious disease pharmacist who helped treat cases in Flagstaff, Ariz., explained to FRONTLINE. “Where did she get that organism from?”

Well, new research (that has yet to be peer reviewed!!) conducted by George Washington University microbiologist Dr. Lance Price claims to have found a link between UTIs and E. coli-riddled supermarket meat. Oh great.

After testing more than 1,200 samples from Flagstaff-area infections, Price says he’s genetically linked more than 100 of them to supermarket meats. A quarter of those were resistant to several antibiotics.

While Price and his team can’t conclusively connect the Flagstaff infections to antibiotic use on the farms where supermarkets get their meat, he believes his use of sophisticated whole-genome sequencing points back toward the farm.

Again, the research is not peer reviewed, but just saying: it’s never been a better time to consider Breatharianism, because literally everything is out to kill us. Including air.

Image via Getty.