Farm animals can carry salmonella, a kind of bacteria that can cause severe food poisoning. However, animals fed antibiotics can carry especially deadly strains of salmonella. In Minnesota in 1983, 11 people were hospitalized with salmonella poisoning. This number itself was not striking at all. Forty thousand Americans are hospitalized with salmonella poisoning every year. What was striking about the cases in Minnesota was that each patient had severe symptoms and all the patients were infected with the same, rare strain of salmonella, resistant to several common antibiotics. A young scientist, Scott Holmberg, noted that eight patients were taking the same antibiotics for sore throats. He ruled out the possibility that the antibiotics themselves were infected with the bacteria because three of the patients were not taking antibiotics at all. He later showed that the people were infected with salmonella prior to taking the antibiotics, but that the antibiotics triggered the onset of salmonella poisoning. He postulated that salmonella suddenly flourished when the patients took antibiotics, because the antibiotics killed off all other competing bacteria. He was also able to trace the antibiotic resistant salmonella to the beef that was imported to Minnesota from a farm in South Dakota, at which cattle were routinely fed antibiotics and at which one calf died of the same strain of salmonella.
As a result of this finding, the Food and Drug Administration should
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