Bacteria found in meat
Ground meat is very versatile. We can shape it into burgers, meatballs, and meatloaf. It can be stirred into chili and pasta sauce or stuffed into peppers, lasagna, and tacos. Americans like it so much that in 2021 alone, we purchased more than $13 billion worth of ground beef, turkey, pork, and chicken. But there’s a problem.
While meat increases the risk of many diseases, meat, especially ground meat, also often carries bacteria that can make you sick – or worse!
To assess the current safety of the nation’s ground meat supply, Consumer Reports recently tested 351 packages of ground beef, pork, chicken, and turkey purchased at stores throughout the country. Almost a third of the ground chicken packages they tested contained salmonella. They also found salmonella in a few samples of ground beef, pork, and turkey. To make matters worse, every single strain of salmonella was resistant to at least one antibiotic. We’ve written about the problem of antibiotic resistance developing in farmed animals before. That problem doesn’t seem to have gone away.
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They’re called superbugs: bacteria we can’t kill with antibiotics. We can’t help but be scared, and we should be. When antibiotics stop working against bacteria, it can be deadly. The miracle of antibiotics, and their ability to quickly and easily conquer formerly often-deadly, common infections, is fading, and the nightmare of death and disease from bacteria may be about to begin – if we don’t act soon. In fact, the problem has become so widespread and serious that the World Health Organization calls antibiotic resistance one of the three greatest threats to human health. Here in the US, we just had our first case of E. Coli resistant to the antibiotic of last resort, Colestin, and we have all been worried about MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus), the so called flesh-eating bacteria.