Study: Drug-Resistant Bacteria in U.S. Meat Researchers Find Superbugs in Raw Turkey, Pork, Beef, and Chicken Sold in Grocery Stores

There’s a new reason to be careful when handling raw meat at mealtimes.
Researchers testing raw turkey, pork, beef, and chicken purchased at grocery stores in five different cities across the U.S. say that roughly one in four of those samples tested positive for a multidrug antibiotic-resistant “superbug” bacterium.

“The findings were pretty shocking,” says study researcher Lance B. Price, PhD, director of the Center of Food Microbiology and Environmental Health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff, Ariz.  “We found that 47% of the samples were contaminated with Staph aureus, and more than half of those strains were multidrug resistant, or resistant to three or more antibiotics.”   link