CDC: Turkey burger salmonella drug-resistant

WILLMAR, Minn. - The salmonella strain that prompted a recall of nearly 55,000 pounds of frozen raw turkey burgers last week is resistant to many commonly prescribed antibiotics, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC said that as of April 1, 12 people ranging in age from 1 to 86 have been reported infected with the Salmonella Hadar strain.

The illnesses were reported in 10 states over the past four months, with 3 cases in Wisconsin, and 1 case each in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, and Washington. Three people have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.

CDC press release: Outbreak of Salmonella Hadar infections

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced the recall Saturday.

Jennie-O Turkey Store said the turkey burgers were distributed nationwide but sold only at Sam's Club Stores.

Jennie-O recall information

The CDC said Monday that not all patients have been linked to the recalled meat, but at least three (in Colorado, Ohio, and Wisconsin) reported eating Jennie-O turkey burgers before falling ill. Samples of the meat collected by public health agencies from two patients' homes tested positive for the outbreak strain.

States have reported antibiotic resistance of the outbreak strain to several clinically useful drugs including ampicillin, amoxicillin/clavulanate, cephalothin, and tetracycline.

The recall includes 4-pound boxes of Jennie-O's "All Natural Turkey Burgers with seasonings Lean White Meat." Each box contains 12 individually wrapped burgers. The packages have a use-by date of Dec. 23, 2011, and identifying lot codes of "32710" through "32780."

The products were packaged on Nov. 23.

The company said consumers should not eat the turkey burgers, but should return them to a Sam's Club store for a refund.

The USDA could expand the recall as it continues to investigate illnesses connected to products from the Willmar, Minn.-based turkey processing company.

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ANIMAL FACTORIES AND PUBLIC HEALTH

"Animal factories"-- huge farms using unnaturally high-density livestock concentration to reduce production cost-- are powerful incubators for disease and pose a continuous threat to public health. Disease is such a persistent problem, high-density farms are heavily reliant on antibiotics, and use an estimated 75 percent of US annual production

State regulators of agriculture are budget-crippled and understaffed, so they typically cannot monitor farms very closely for disease prevalence. Nonetheless, insiders in the industry suggest antibiotic usage has reached its limits, and some strains of bacteria are now strongly resistant.

Medical authorities remind us disease outbreaks are directly attributable to contamination in the food supply, and poorly-regulated mega-farms can be a potent source of that contamination. Some studies suggest viral strains once confined to birds, pigs or humans have combined in mega-farm-type environments to form hybrid strains, able to move from one species to others.

According to the World Health Organization, avian flu H5N1 is in the third phase of development toward a world-wide epidemic (pandemic)-- the flu has caused clusters of illness in human populations, but shows no capacity yet to move freely from person to person. Yet, viral transmissibility was the major fear in 2004-2009, when many humans in SouthEast Asia in close contact with chickens died of confirmed avian flu complications, and some associates and family members also became ill.

Fortunately for us, the vast majority of the human population has remained unaffected, evidence the avian and other flu viruses have not yet learned to spread as well from person to person as did a variant of swine flu, responsible for the 1918 pandemic of ("Spanish") flu that killed an estimated 50 million people.

Today, the World Health Organization, the CDC and many other centers for disease research and control warn the danger is still with us, that a deadly flu virus someday is likely to learn how to spread easily among people, and become our next pandemic.