Link Between Chicken & UTIs

An estimated 8 million Americans are diagnosed annually with urinary tract infections (UTIs), and scientists observe a rise in antibiotic-resistant strains that is making treatment more complicated and costlier.   Amee Manges, from McGill University (Canada), and colleagues previously have shown that strains of Escherichia coli (E coli) that caused community-acquired cases of urinary tract infection can also be found in retail chicken meat. To elucidate whether other forms of meat played a role, if the transmission was human-to-human (through contamination of food), or if the source was the animal itself, the team tested E coli isolates from beef, pork, and chicken, both in shops and in slaughterhouses. They also tested isolates taken from humans with urinary tract infections. Reporting that in the case of retail meats, genetic analysis found 15 clonal groups including 63 isolates – 41 of them from retail meat and the rest from humans, the researchers observed that although two-thirds of the overall number of retail meat samples were from beef and pork, they made up only 29% of the isolates in the clonal groups, while isolates from chicken accounted for the remaining 71%.  The team submits that the data suggests that isolates from retail beef and pork are much less likely than chicken to be clonally related to isolates from people with urinary tract infections.  A similar analysis, looking at cecal samples from animals in abattoirs, found eight clonal groups, including 29 isolates from animals and 17 from humans, with the proportion of the isolates from chicken was significantly higher than expected.   Taken together, the researchers submit that the chickens themselves may be the source of extraintestinal pathogenic E coli, concluding that: “transmission from food animals could be responsible for human infections, and chickens are the most probable reservoir.”