ATLANTA — Half the meat and poultry sold in the supermarket might be tainted with the staph germ, a new report suggests.
The estimate is based on 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased at grocery stores in Chicago; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Proper cooking kills the germs, and federal health officials estimate staph accounts for less than 3 percent of foodborne illnesses — far less than more common bugs such as salmonella and E. coli.
The new study found more than half the samples contained Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that can cause food poisoning. Staph germs are commonly found on the skin and in the noses of up to 25 percent of healthy people.
Half of the contaminated samples in the study had a form of staph that is resistant to at least three kinds of antibiotics.
“Now we need to determine what this means in terms of risk to the consumer,” Paul Keim, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement.
Keim and his co-authors work at the nonprofit Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona. Their study will be published in the journal Clinical infectious Diseases, an institute spokesman said.
