A warning from Denmark, to US society, re public scientific research

[iceaura]

The Republican Party's successful efforts to defund and otherwise cripple Federal and State research programs, as well as block public access to past findings and data compilations, has sharply reduced the ability of the US to address several critical issues of public health and wellbeing.

This is one of them: https://mbio.asm.org/content/9/6/e02459-18?cpetoc=

The epidemiology of the opportunistic pathogen Staphylococcus aureushas changed substantially over the last 3 decades. S. aureus was originally considered chiefly a hospital-associated organism, but new classes of strains that emerged outside of the hospital setting were identified in the 1990s (community-associated methicillin-resistant S. aureus [CA-MRSA]) and in the 2000s (livestock-associated MRSA [LA-MRSA]). - - -

- - - What is unique about this new work is the fine-grained detail provided about not only genomic sequences of bacteria isolated from the farms and the ability to track those from donor to recipient farms but also the possible ways that antimicrobial use on these farms may have influenced their survival and evolution. This includes uses of tetracycline and zinc supplementation of feed, which have previously been suggested to be drivers of MRSA evolution (9–11).