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Superbugs passed on in tainted food

By Alison Motluk

30 September 2000

INFECTED meat can pass on antibiotic-resistant bacteria to people who eat it.
Danish researchers studying how this happens have found that resistant bacteria
from chickens can flourish in the human gut.

Drugs such as vancomycin, which doctors often use when other antibiotics
fail, are sometimes completely ineffective because bacteria have evolved genes
to give them immunity. Researchers already suspected that antibiotics fed to
animals to fatten them up are encouraging strains of resistant bacteria that
pass to people in meat. Now a Copenhagen team led by Marianne Blom of the State
Serum Institute and Thomas Sørensen of the Danish Veterinary…

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