19th
From the buried lede department: swine farms and seagulls
Maryn McKenna of Wired, in her last paragraph on seagulls spreading multi-drug-resistant E. coli in their feces.
Deep in the medical literature, there’s another suggestion. In 2005, researchers from the CDC, FDA and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill found antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the feces of Canada geese living on bodies of water in North Carolina and Georgia. The geese’s carriage of resistant bacteria wasn’t uniform, however. The resistant bacteria appeared only in geese that were living in waters that were close to large-scale swine farms. The resistance patterns in those bacteria matched ones that had already been recorded by federal health agencies in pigs being routinely fed antibiotics in industrial-model agriculture. The geese “could serve to disperse bacteria between widely separated locations,” the researchers concluded.
