uk.business.agriculture really has been a boon for getting information
into the public domain.

I have been talking to a couple of journalists recently specialising
in the current "superbug" crises and it has been easy to direct them
on how to find their own references especially to material removed
from the WWW in relation to the link to livestock disease.

The advice can be summarised as:

read "Stop the World"  giving the writer's personal experiences and
much background spread over a main page and 16 chapters:
http://www.go-self-sufficient.com/stopworldmain.htm

For personal reasons this ceased to be updated over a year ago and
posting was confined to uk.business.agriculture until very recently.

UK.business.agriculture can be reached through Google Groups and the
deliberate and irritating abuse from stalkers encouraged by paid
lobbyists can easily be removed using the advanced features of "Google
Groups."

Anyway, enough of that. One very important possible fact came from
those discussions with a bearing on the spread of MRSA ST398 - "Piggy
MRSA"

It is a rumour, but given the deliberate withholding of information,
we have no other sources.

Scotland was known to have three human cases of MRSA and the strain
was acknowledged to be ST398 "piggy MRSA" The information came six
months late and was accompanied by the assurance that there was
thought to be no direct link to pigs.

It is rumoured that the patients were actually children, either
infants or babies. Now we do know from elsewhere that infants do get
MRSA and obviously would be unlikely to have direct links to pigs.

That means, that most likely there is a carrier in the hospital,
possibly a doctor or nurse, perhaps with links themselves to pig
farming. The standard nasal tests are not very reliable and more
intrusive testing is needed to detect carriers.

That is not a happy scenario, given the very natural reluctance of
health care people to undergo constant tests.  But it is alas the
result of refusing to implement the tests and procedures that the
Dutch recommended four years ago.

In talking to others researching in the same field, there was a sense
of alarm and despondency, even without the possibility of pigs and
poultry providing both a source and reservoir of infection unchecked

The government is directly responsible for the delay.of four years.

-- 
Regards
Pat Gardiner
Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
www.go-self-sufficient.com  and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com/