The June issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine has a comprehensive -- and disturbing -- article on the links which JHU researchers have found between industrial farming and drug-resistant pathogens.  Here's an excerpt:

While still at the University of Maryland, Silbergeld decided her first farm project would be to study whether poultry workers and people in farm communities were at risk of carrying the same strains of drug-resistant bacteria found in chickens, a study she finished after she came to Johns Hopkins in 2001. In Eastern Shore communities like Pocomoke City, Princess Anne, Smyrna, and Salisbury, she enrolled three groups of subjects: workers whose job was to catch chickens in the barns to load onto trucks for transport to processing plants, chicken hangers who attached live birds to the mechanized line at the plant, and community residents who did not work in the industry but lived near it. She found that 41 percent of the chicken catchers had been colonized by Campylobacter jejuni, which is commensal in poultry — it derives benefit from the chicken without harming it — but pathogenic in people, where it's the second-leading cause of gastrointestinal disease in the United States. Among the workers at the poultry processing plant, the rate of colonization was 63 percent. Of the nine people who lived near but did not work in the industry, 100 percent had been colonized.

Read the whole story here.