Super Staph Infection Free with One-Third of Fish at Large Korean Supermarkets!

by Brendon Carr

Korea Beat today translates a Yonhap News report that a random check of fish on sale at selected large supermarkets in Seoul found almost one-third (16 of 50 samples) infected with Staphlococcus Aureus, or “Golden Staph”:

The Korean Food and Drug Administration (식품의약품안전청) announced on the 14th that it took 50 samples of fish and squid seasonings from four major supermarkets in January, finding 16 cases of Staphylococcus aureus (황색포도상구균), also known as “Golden Staph”.

Oh boy.

Golden Staph is known as a “superbug” because of its ability to become drug-resistant to all known antibiotics. Because of Golden Staph’s immunities, vancomycin—our last line of defense against it—is on rationing in the States, to be used only in very limited instances. Korean doctors, on the other hand, looooove antibiotics, handing them out to an eager public even when the infection is viral. I’m not sure if vancomycin is under any special controls here in Korea, but given the prevalence of Golden Staph contamination in supermarket fish, I sure hope so.

(Thank goodness I Fear the Seafood™, like any good Midwesterner.)

I am also suspicious that the supermarkets may have lower sanitation standards than we might like. They let guys waltz in with buckets full of turds.

I like the last blurb:

On the 5th the KFDA announced that it was considering administrative measures including a possible recall.

For those of you keeping score: Known deadly, drug-resistant bacterium found on one-third of fish for sale to the public? We’re considering measures. The slightest possibility of US beef’s contamination with thumbnail-size chips of bone matter (and the occasional big ol’ spine!), suspected of maybe, possibly causing—or not, nobody knows for sure!—a disease which nobody in America is known to have caught? Instant embargo.

Attention, Democrats in Congress: Korea’s “food-safety concerns” about US beef are, to put it mildly, bullshit disingenuous.

2 Responses to This Entry

1. Korea Beat on February 17, 2008 @ 9:50 pm

   Good point about the beef embargo. As for the last point, Obama has been making a little bit of noise along those lines.

2. gordsellar@gmail.com on June 07, 2008 @ 3:08 pm

   Most people don’t get sick from the S. aureus that they’re exposed to on a daily basis, after all. There’s enough of it on our skin that people with atopic dermatitis are much more likely to get sick from it S. aureus as well. (Popping a zit in the wrong spot can even get you infected.)

   (IWhich… gah! The more I read about this stuff, the more uneasy it makes me.)

   As for vanomycin, the most recent report I could find suggested use wasn’t being properly controlled as recently as 2000, and that researchers noted an alarming rise in nosocomial infections as a result. But things could well have changed since then.

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