Shop for antibiotic-free meat, cook it thoroughly, and get rid of the other antibiotics in your medicine chest.

Big chicken farms may be growing antibiotic-resistant bacteria along with poultry.

03-27-09 RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Flies can do more than annoy you at a summer picnic. A new study in press at the journal Science and the Total Environment has revealed that they can carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria, increasing our exposure to germs that are hard to kill.

THE DETAILS: Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health set up traps to collect flies near 8 poultry farms and then collected samples of poultry litter (a mix of manure and bedding materials) from 3 large-scale, conventional poultry operations in that same area. Both the poultry litter and the flies were found to harbor antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria—“superbugs” that don’t respond to medicines commonly used to treat them. This isn’t the first study linking large-scale farms, often referred to as CAFOs, or "concentrated animal feeding operations,"CAFOs are agricultural facilities that house and feed a large number of animals in a confined area for 45 days or more during any 12-month period. Federal regulations require CAFOs to carry a permit and to develop nutrient-management plans designed to keep animal waste from contaminating surface water and groundwater. The number and type(s) of animal(s) the operation houses, and the extent to which waste from the operation could pollute surface water and groundwater, determine whether EPA considers a feeding operation to be a CAFO. to drug-resistant bacteria. A small study of 20 Iowa hog farms, published in February in the online journal PLoS One, found that nearly 50 percent of the animals carried methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. That study is in line with others from Canada and Europe that have found similar relationships between MRSA in hog farmers and their animals. MRSA, one of the most widely publicized forms of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, can cause a severe skin infection that does not respond to standard antibiotics and can be fatal.