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Raw food concerns

post #1 of 8
9/4/11 at 1:46pm
Thread Starter 
Just came across this, and thought I'd provide the information just in case some raw feeders or people considering raw feeding weren't aware of the problem. Not meant to change anyone's mind about raw, it's a personal choice, but it's just another risk of which some people may or may not be aware (and emphasizes to me that if you're going to feed raw, buy from local organic farmers, not supermarkets!).

Almost 50% of meat (136 samples - covering 80 brands - of beef, chicken, pork and turkey from 26 retail grocery stores in five U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Flagstaff and Washington, D.C.) tested positive for S. aureus, and 52% of that (24.4% of the total tested) were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics. US Meat and Poultry Is Widely Contaminated With Drug-Resistant Staph Bacteria, Study Finds (Science Daily, April 11, 2011).

The study: http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/conten...id.cir181.full
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post #2 of 8
9/4/11 at 2:26pm
So it appears that symptoms of an infection would manifest itself as mastitis and it seems to be quite challenging to treat once infected. On the limited plus side, from my reading it indicates that pet to human transmission is possible but unlikely.

Thanks for sharing.
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post #3 of 8
9/4/11 at 3:28pm
Thread Starter 
Actually, in cats, my understanding the most common symptom of infection is skin lesions (which can then progress to septicemia). And yes, though rare, it is a zoonotic risk. http://pets.webmd.com/cats/news/2008...-got-your-mrsa

Cats also develop their own version of MRSA, called MRSI (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus-intermedius).
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post #4 of 8
9/4/11 at 5:27pm
One of my dogs got a staph infection in July. I don't know how. . .I do occasionally give the dogs raw but I haven't for at least 6 months. And we hadn't gone out in the country to run for a while. So who knows where he picked it up. But ugh, it was nasty. Yes, skin lesions. Big nasty hot spots oozing pus, and it progressed very quickly (from when I first noticed a small hot spot, 2 days later his whole head was crusty). The vet gave me 10 days worth of cephalexin and that fixed it, it would have been really scary if his strain was antibiotic resistant.

But I wonder if kibble has that bacteria as well. It would be great if someone sent some samples to a lab to see what comes up.

And then I wonder what kind and how many bacteria it takes to be harmful. I mean, the air I breathe has tested positive for coliform bacteria (including e. coli). Yes, if you can smell cow/pig poop, that means there are particles of poop in the air, and the accompanying bacteria. But nobody comes down with e. coli from breathing. So just because there's bacteria doesn't mean it's at harmful levels.
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post #5 of 8
9/4/11 at 6:10pm
Thread Starter 
It seems to me that anything that can affect raw also has the potential to affect commercial cat foods (whether kibble, wet or raw). But the volume of commercial cat foods generally means that the food affected is a small percentage of total food sold.

I just looked up the heat resistance of staph aureus. Cooking kills the bacteria, but NOT the toxins it produces. When raw food is left out, the bacteria produces the toxins. So how prevalent food with those toxins would be in commercial pet food, I don't know.

But thawing food in the refrigerator and then cooking it asap (or feeding it to your pet asap without leaving it out for any length of time) seems to be the way to manage it, assuming it was frozen as soon as it was prepped.

Reheating cooked food won't help either, so no leaving already cooked food out (though that's something we shouldn't be doing anyway!)
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post #6 of 8
9/4/11 at 7:16pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by LDG View Post
But thawing food in the refrigerator and then cooking it asap (or feeding it to your pet asap without leaving it out for any length of time) seems to be the way to manage it, assuming it was frozen as soon as it was prepped.
Or parboiling the whole, raw ingredients before freezing or grinding to kill the bacteria.
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post #7 of 8
9/4/11 at 7:20pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by LDG View Post
It seems to me that anything that can affect raw also has the potential to affect commercial cat foods (whether kibble, wet or raw). But the volume of commercial cat foods generally means that the food affected is a small percentage of total food sold.
Uh, how does large volume equal small percentage????
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post #8 of 8
9/5/11 at 2:12pm
Thread Starter 
I was just going by the salmonella-related recalls. With a million pounds of cat food recalled one year, that's 0.01% of the total commercial canned/kibble.
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