Superbug by Maryn McKenna

Author:Maryn McKenna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

INTO THE FOOD CHAIN

It was cool and dim inside the old swine barn. Humidity lingered thick as mist in the corners of the thick brick walls. A thunderstorm had roared through the night before, the first harbinger of autumn come unfairly early, and two hours after dawn, clouds still hung low over the fairgrounds. Outside the barn, early arrivals milled in lines for cinnamon mini-donuts and slabs of maple-glazed bacon on a stick, fueling up for the gleeful, raucous chaos of Labor Day weekend at the 2008 Minnesota State Fair. Solemn high schoolers in rubber boots worked over their pet llamas with hair dryers and brushes, keeping a nervous eye on the ranks of exhibition judges in fleece vests and tractor caps. In an asphalt lane lined with trailers and humming generators, two women chatted and smoked while the horses they were leading nibbled their shoulders and snorted into their hair.

The swine barn smelled of burned coffee and bologna-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, and ammonia rising from the wet sawdust where the pigs had been lying. The fair had been going for a week, and most of the pigs were gone, sold for slaughter or trucked home for breeding. Most of the slatted-wood enclosures stood empty, breed banners and tinsel streamers hanging limp over upended feed pans, wire gates left unlatched for the cleaning crews that would scour the concrete floors before the last class of pigs and pig-raisers moved in for the weekend. Near the door, 1,240-pound Squeaky, “Minnesota’s largest boar,” snored next to a table of pig-shaped key chains.

In a corner, two eight-month-old sows destined for auction slept under placards that advertised their grand-champion awards and specified their owners and breed. Dr. MacDonald Farnham, a veterinarian from the University of Minnesota, snapped on a pair of bright-blue gloves and unwrapped a set of swabs that resembled long, single-ended Q-tips. Squatting next to the pen, he reached a long arm under the gate, delicately inserted a swab into one pig’s nostril, and quickly twirled it. The pig snorted and shook itself awake, stumbling to its feet and backing away. Farnham quickly drew the swab back, deftly avoiding the pig’s flopping ears and the gate’s rusty wires, and slid it into a long tube. He handed the tube to Tara Smith, PhD, a microbiologist from the University of Iowa. Smith had driven five hours overnight, through the thunderstorm and across plains still scattered with debris from brutal summer floods, hoping to get what she now held: a few samples of pig snot.1

Smith is an assistant professor of epidemiology and a well-known science blogger, and deputy director of Iowa’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, which investigates illnesses that cross from animals to humans. At the beginning of the summer, she and several of her graduate students had quietly released startling news: seven out of ten pigs on farms in Illinois and Iowa were carrying an odd new strain of MRSA.2

Their findings marked the first time that MRSA had been found in a pig in the United States, but a few concerned scientists had seen the development coming.

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