A Terrifying Superbug Just Showed Up on a US Farm for the First Time

The bacteria found in a hog operation is resistant even to some of our most powerful antibiotics.

More than 70 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the United States go to livestock farms, one of the main triggers driving a rising crisis of antibiotic resistance in human medicine.

On Tuesday, researchers from Ohio State University published an alarming finding in a peer-reviewed journal: On a US hog farm, they found bacteria that can withstand a crucial family of antibiotics. Carbapenems, as they are known, are a "last line of defense" against bacterial pathogens that can resist other antibiotics, the paper notes. Worse still, the gene that allowed the bacteria to resist carbapenems turned up in a plasmid—small chunks of DNA found in bacterial cells. Plasmid-carried genes bounce easily from one bacterial strain to another, meaning that carbapenem resistance is highly mobile—making it more likely to find its way into bacterial pathogens that infect people.

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