 May 2011, researchers published an investigation into the prevalence of multi-drug resistant staff bacteria in the U.S. meat supply. Antibiotics are used extensively in food animal production for growth promotion and disease prevention due to the stressful overcrowded, unhygienic conditions in which they're often confined. Surveys conducted by NARMS, the CDC monitoring system, indicate that retail meat and poultry products are frequently contaminated with multi-drug resistant campylobacter, salmonella, endurococcus, and E. coli. But what about staff infections, which in people can cause everything from skin infections to pneumonia and meningitis? Researchers collected and tested a total of 136 meat and poultry samples from five U.S. cities, encompassing 80 unique brands from 26 grocery stores. They tested retail beef, chicken, pork, and turkey. Any guess as to which was most contaminated? Staff contamination was most common among turkey samples, followed by pork, chicken, and then beef. Three quarters of retail turkey tested, and overall 47% of U.S. retail meat tested, was found contaminated with staff. And multi-drug resistance was common. Here are 18 different common clinical antibiotics used in human medicine across the top, important drugs like erythromycin, penicillin, ampicillin, seftriacin, and then going down, these are some of the staff bacteria they found in turkey, pork, chicken, and beef. Orange means intermediate resistance to the antibiotic, red means complete resistance, and black is multi-drug resistance to three or more classes of antibiotics. These bugs were not from some hospital ICU, but right off of grocery store shelves. Conclusion Conventional concentrated animal feeding operations, CAFOs, so-called factory farms, provide all the necessary components for the emergence and proliferation of multi-drug resistant zoonotic, or animal to human pathogens. In the United States, billions of food animals are raised in densely stocked CAFOs, where antibiotics are routinely administered in feed and water for extended periods to healthy animals. The CDC has shown that multi-drug resistant E. coli and enterococcus species are prevalent among U.S. meat and poultry products. Our findings indicate that multi-drug resistant staph aureus should be added to the list of antibiotic resistant pathogens that routinely now contaminate our food supply.