Is organic meat better for you than intensively grown meat? Putting aside whether killing animals for food at all is warranted, there is evidence that organically reared and then slaughtered animals provide meat that is of a better quality (even if ‘healthier’, as a qualitative value, is difficult to prove). A new area to add to this assessment is with organic meat containing lower levels of antimicrobial resistant bacteria.
This comes from laboratory studies, where meat that is certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture was compared with meat that is not certified. The organic meat was found to be is less likely to be contaminated with antimicrobial resistant strains of bacteria and with pathogenic bacteria in general.
Tests found that organic-certified meats were 56 percent less likely to be contaminated with multidrug-resistant bacteria. The data was drawn from examinations of meat samples collected throughout the U.S. between 2012 to 2017.
The obvious reason for the finding is that one of the criteria in the U.S., for meat to be certified as organic, is that the animals cannot be administered antibiotics or hormones. Incidentally, this is something that many microbiologists have called for as a means to slowdown the rate of antimicrobial resistance in society.
The study was performed at the Bloomberg School and it included assessments of chicken breast, ground beef, ground turkey, and pork. The assessments included microbial profiling, focusing on species of Salmonella, Campylobacter, Enterococcus, and the specific bacterium Escherichia coli. In all, a total of 39,348 meat samples were analyzed and 1,422 of these were found to be contaminated with at least one organism of concern, with the organism additional characterized as multi-drug resistant. The rate of contamination was four times as high in non-organic meat samples.
In terms of infection spread, the type of processing facility may influence the likelihood of meat contamination. In other words, the hygiene standards of the slaughterhouses where the animals are butchered plays a role in determining the likely extent of infection spread. A further influencing factor is with the degree of segregation that occurs between different animals and where organic and non-organically reared livestock are processed at the same facility.
Commenting on the research, Dr. Meghan Davis, who led the study, explains: “The presence of pathogenic bacteria is worrisome in and of itself, considering the possible increased risk of contracting foodborne illness…If infections turn out to be multidrug resistant, they can be more deadly and more costly to treat.”
The analysis also suggested that. Meat processors fall into three categories: exclusively organic, exclusively conventional, or those that handle both organic and conventional meats — so-called “split” processors. The study found that among conventional meats, those processed at facilities that exclusively handled conventional meats were contaminated with bacteria one-third of the time, while those handled at facilities that processed both conventional and organic meats were contaminated one-quarter of the time. The prevalence of multidrug-resistant bacteria was roughly the same in these two meat processor categories.
The research has been published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, in a paper titled “Samples with Multidrug-Resistant Organisms in Relation to Organic and Conventional Production and Processing: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Data from the United States National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System.”
