A UK organic farming group has called for urgent tests on livestock to detect a new strain of animal/borne MRSA that could pose a serious threat to human health.

The Soil Association, which campaigns for sustainable organic farming, says that a new strain of meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has been found in intensively farmed animals in the Netherlands. The association warns it could easily spread to the UK and suggests it is promoted by high antibiotic use in farming.
It says that 39 per cent of pigs in the Netherlands have been found to carry a farm animal strain of MRSA that was first identified in 2004. It also says that nearly 50 per cent of Dutch pig farmers now carry it.

Vets, abattoir workers and the families of farm workers, it says, are particularly at risk because of their direct contact with animals. It says most would not be aware they were carrying the bacteria but that serious infections such as pneumonia, meningitis, endocarditis and bacteraemia may occur if the bacteria gets into wounds or damaged skin.

The warning is contained in a report published by the Soil Association on June 25, entitled:
'MRSA in farm animals and meat - A new threat to human health'.

One of the report's co-authors, Mr. Richard Young, an organic farmer and part-time policy adviser to the Soil Association, said: 'We have only recently seen the development of this new strain that can live equally well on farm animals and humans. A lot of people won't even know they are infected and won't be suffering any harmful effects at this stage but are at greater risk of infection'.

He said: 'We have not set out to get massive media coverage and sensationalise the issue and are trying to put this to the authorities and regulators in order to get them to address the issues in a serious and sober way'.
The biggest problem in the Netherlands seems to be in pigs. Pigs don't, in fact, get MRSA infections themselves, they simply carry the bacteria, and they are passing it on to both humans and other farm animals.

Where we are lucky in the uh is that we don't import any live pigs from any of the countries that have so far got MRSA in pigs so we probably haven't got it in UK pigs at the moment. However, we do import poultry meat and live chicks and turkey poults from the Netherlands and it's only very recently that they have got MRSA in their chickens. So one of the most urgent things we are saving the government should do is to start testing live chicks coming in. They can be contaminated from as young as a day old'.

Mr. Young thought the farming community relied on antibiotics too easily. 'There are ways that veterinary surgeons, just like doctors, could hold back from using antibiotics in some situations and actually recognise that the animals will probably recover providing they, are looked after property,' he said.
Commenting on the report, a DEFKA spokesperson said: 'No cases of MRSA have been recorded in food-producing animals in the UK - with the exception of horses, which are considered a food producing species in some countries. The Veterinary Laboratories Agency has examined more than 500 isolates of Staphylococcus aureus from cattle and no MRSA isolates have been detected.'

She said that there were no plans to expand tests to pigs at the moment but plans for testing livestock and meat imports were under active review.
In her introduction to the report, food and farming director of the Soil Association, Mrs. Helen Browning writes that she and others have urged the Government to ensure that banned antimicrobial growth promoters were not simply replaced by increased prophylactic use of prescribed antibiotics.

'Yet this is what now seems to he happening,' she says. 'While action is now needed at a European level, the Government should establish a new independent group to examine the way in which antibiotics are still widely used in tile UK to prevent diseases in farm annuals that could be avoided by other means'.

The report says that the Government has ignored a requirement in EU directive 2004/28/EC to prohibit advertising antibiotics directly to farmers.

DEFRA's spokesperson said that antibiotic controls in the UK conformed to EU regulations but the department would ultimately like to reduce the use of these medications further.
'The Government allows the advertising, of all medicines including antibiotics to farmers because they are professional keepers of animals'.

SIR, Within tire past five years, there has been a marked rise in reports of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MSRA) in animals (Leonard and Markey 2007), including horses (O'Mahony and others 2005), with related discussion regarding the impact of this for animal owners and veterinary personnel (Moore and others 2006). To date, the majority of reports have focused oil the differentiation between meticillin-sensitive and resistant organisms, with virtually no attention being given to further characterisation of animal MRSA into health care associated (HA-MRSA) or community associated (CA-MRSA) types. In human clinical medicine, the latter organisms differ significantly from HA-MRSA. Although all are S. aureus they have distinct epidemiological and microbiological characteristics, which are summarised in Table 1. Notably, CA-MRSA are more likely than HA-NIRSA to produce Panton-Valentine Ieukocidin (RVL) toxin, which is it cytotoxin that causes Ieucocyte destruction acrd tissue necrosis, and have appeared as mainly virulent organisms, associated with skin lesions, but have also been reported in fatal cases of necrotising pneumonia (Zetola and others 2005). Given the relatively recent emergence of CA-MRSA in people in the British Isles (Loughrey and others 2007, O'Connell and others 3007), as well as the important clinical and epidemiological differences between these two types of MRSA organisms, we felt it was important to further characterise known equine MRSA isolates from culture collections, in order to further characterise these MRSA organisms.

Sixteen previously laboratory confirmed MRSA isolates were obtained from the Irish Equine Centre, Johnstown, Naas, County Kildare. These isolates had been obtained from equids in 2006 (n=14) and 2007 (n=2), by bacteriological culture from pathological specimens, including wound swabs, joint fluids, lung wash fluids, uterine wash fluids, an umbilical abscess swab, a cervical swab, nasal swabs and skin scrapings. In order to further characterise these isolates to determine whether they were HA-MRSA or CA-MRSA, two genetic loci were examined, namely, presence of the PVL toxin gene, in accordance with the method of Lina and others (1999), and characterisation of the SCCmec gene arrangements, in accordance with the method of Zhang and others (2005).
Results indicated that all 16 MRSA isolates were PVL-negative and produced a PCR banding pattern similar to SCCmec IVd. Confirmation of the SCCmec IVd subtype was made by direct automated sequencing of the 746 base pair (bp) PCR amplicons and were confirmed as SCCmec IVd by BLAST analysis. A represcentative SCCmec IVd DNA sequence (746 bp) from the Irish equids has been deposited in GenBank with accession number EF634484.
To date, there has been very little description in the literature of CA-MRSA (PVL-negative, SCCmec IVd subtype) from either humans or animals. One recent report describes 10 isolates of this MRSA type accounting for 10.3 per cent of MRSA from humans, in a Japanese study in hospitals, between 1979/85 (Ma and others 2006). Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, this type of MUSA has not yet been described in isolates from humans either from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, suggesting that humans are not the primary source of this clonal lineage of MRS A for horses.

In conclusion, this report describes the presence of PVL toxin-negative MRSA organisms, belonging to the SCCmec IVd subclass in Irish equids, suggesting a community origin for these organisms, as opposed to a health care origin. Unlike human clinical medicine where reports are numerous, there is little evidence to indicate the importance of such CA-MRSA in animals. Therefore, we urge veterinarians and veterinary microbiologists to further characterise all isolated MRSA organisms from animal populations, as described above, in order to help gain an evidence base to help with out understanding of the potential clinical importance of emerging CA-MRSA in animal populations.

Yasunori Maeda, B. Cherie Millar, Anne Loughrey, Colin E. Goldsmith, Paul 1. Rooney, John E. Moore,
Northern lrelanrl Public Health Laboratory, Department of Bacteriology, Belfast City Hospital, Lisburn Road, Belfast BT9 7AD.
Juluri Rao,
Molecular Diagnostics Environmental and Public Health Microbiology Unit, Agri?Food and Biosciences Institute, Newforge Lane, Belfast BT9 5PX.
Thomas Buckley, Claire Egan,
Irish Equine Centre, Johnstown, Naas, County Kildare, Ireland.
James S. G. Dooley, Colm J. Lowery,
School of Biomedical Sciences, Centre for Coleraine, County Londonderry BT25 1SA
Mottoo Matsuda,
Laboratory of Molecular Biology, School of Environmental Health Sciences, Azabu University, Fuchinobe 1-17-71, Sagamihara 229-8501, Japan.

1st International Conference on MRSA in Animals

Around 65 delegates attended the long awaited First International Conference on MRSA in Animals held on the 21st The event, which was organised jointly by the University of Liverpool and The Bella Moss Foundation, brought together some of the vet- erinary world's leading authorities on aspects of MRSA and who presented new information of great importance to veterinarians around the globe. The event was opened by Dr. Susan Dawson from the University and Jill Moss, President and founder of The Bella Moss Foundation.