A series of “random” checks on uncooked supermarket chicken has bought to light five cases of meat contaminated with drug resistant bacteria, and sparked a debate on whether the Health Ministry should monitor food lines for such contamination.
Green Party health spokeswoman Sue Kedgley, who randomly selected the chicken, told Stuff yesterday [Tuesday] that the findings pose a serious health issue: “Antibiotic- resistant bacteria such as salmonella, campylobacter or E. coli can make people sick.
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“Others do not directly affect humans but they can pass their resistance to antibiotics to other harmful bacteria, making infections much harder and more expensive to treat.”
The tests were conducted at Christchurch laboratory, EnviroLink, where scientists discovered two strains of E. coli bacteria resistant to the antibiotic gentamicin, two strains of E. coli bacteria resistant to the antibiotic tetracyclinethe and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus bacterium.
Kedgley explained that the presence of such bacteria was down to the way in which chickens are fed with antibiotics on the farms: “When we are feeding around 70 million chickens per year with low doses of antibiotic every day of their lives, I am astonished that the Ministry of Health does not already have a programme in place to randomly test chickens for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
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