Antibiotic Resistant SuperBug Found In American Food | Americans Are Guinea Pigs For GMO Bananas!!!!

SUPERBUG IN AMERICAN FOOD

A dangerous “superbug” has made its way into the North American food supply for the first time, Canadian researchers  announced Wednesday. Routine testing of raw squid, imported from South Korea, revealed a strain of bacteria resistant to carbapenems, a class of antibiotics used to treat life-threatening infections.

This is concerning because carbapenems are a “last resort” antibiotic, one doctors turn to when common antibiotics fail. Health officials have been watching them closely; in April, the World Health Organization  warned that antibiotic resistance had become a serious, global threat to public health, listing the spread of carbapanem resistance as a main reason for that.

Carbapanem-resistant bacteria have been detected in the environment and in animals used for food, but this is the first time they’ve been found in food itself. That raises the stakes considerably, Joseph Rubin, assistant professor of veterinary microbiology at the University of Saskatchewan and head of the research team,  explained, because it means “the risk of exposure in the public goes beyond people with travel histories and beyond people who have been previously hospitalized” — a select group — to the general public.

Maryn McKenna, who  first broke the news, has more on why this is such a big deal:

Beyond the obvious, that this is a first finding of a resistance factor where it has not previously been, here are some concerns: Because the carbapenem-resistant bacteria tend to be gut bacteria, anything that conducts them into your gut—like, for instance, swallowing them—is problematic. The issue isn’t that the bacterium is going to cause a foodborne illness immediately; the bacteria carrying this gene was not a disease-causing variety. Rather, the concern is that the DNA conferring this resistance passes from this bacterium into the vast colony of diverse bacteria that live in your gut for your entire life, becoming incorporated into your gut flora and posing a risk of drug-resistant illness at some future point when the balance of your immune system slips.

 

That this was found on seafood—a type of food that we tend to undercook and sometimes eat raw—just increases the risk of transmission. And that’s not even to mention the possibility that bacteria containing the gene spread to other seafood or other foods in that store, or in the kitchens of anyone unlucky enough to bring them home.

 

“Finding this organism in food is extremely disturbing,” Rubin  told the Washington Post. “This widens the possibilities for the spread of resistance.”

 

As a reminder, that would be  very, very bad.

SuperBug Article can be viewed here:  http://www.alternet.org/superbug-resistant-last-resort-antibiotics-has-made-its-way-food-supply

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GMO BANANAS TESTED ON US PUBLIC

It’s been nearly a decade in development, but a genetically modified breed of bananas that’s designed to combat starvation will soon enter human testing. The bananas are rich in beta-carotene which turns into vitamin A in the body. For the children in Africa suffering from vitamin A deficiencies, this is a godsend. Also these banana are orange.

The specific research is happening at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia thanks, in part, to nearly $10 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The idea, however, is to pass off little lab-grown super banana trees (since bananas don’t have seeds) to farmers in Uganda, where there’s a huge food shortage and 70 percent of the population survives on the fruit. Vitamin A deficiencies are not only killing children but also causing them to go blind, so the research moving forward is a very good thing.

SEXPAND

These are no ordinary bananas. They’re grown in far north Queensland to boost the beta-carotene levels. The flesh of the super bananas is also orange which provides a visual clue to their genetically-modified otherness. It’s also sort of awesome.

This breakthrough is not entirely thanks to the possibilities of frankenfruit. A good old fashioned crossbreed of native banana with orange flesh in Micronesia called the “karat” has been used to improve eye sight in children for centuries. By the early 2000s, scientists in Queensland were exploring ways to cultivate the karat and, for whatever reason, decided to go the route of genetic modification.

Trials of the super bananas will take place in the United States and are expected to last through the end of the year. If all goes well—and the scientists are confident it will—Ugandan farmers will be growing the new bananas by 2020. “We know our science will work,” says James Dale, who’s led the research for years. And creepy as genetically modified foods may be, there’s nothing quite like science that works. [Guardian]

GMO Banana article can be viewed here:  http://gizmodo.com/genetically-modified-orange-bananas-are-ready-for-human-1591535115