Now farm-to-table locavores have another argument for sticking with locally grown meat — a last-resort-antibiotic-resistant gene, discovered last month in China, has now shown up in Denmark, said researchers.

It could make its way into common bacteria and create superbugs resistant to all modern antibiotics, they warn.

The gene was found by a Danish study, led by Professor Frank Aarestrup’s team from the Danish National Food Institute, in their collection of bacteria as well as in a patient thought to have picked up the gene via contaminated meat, according to an article by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The five poultry samples that had the gene were from tissue that originated in Germany from 2012 to 2014.

The Danish meat had been imported from Germany, but researchers do not know at present if that meat was in fact imported into Europe from elsewhere.

“I was not surprised but I had really sincerely hoped not to see it,” Frank Aarestrup, head of the genomic epidemiology group at the National Food Institute, told STAT, adding that other researchers with similar databases should look for presence of the mcr-1 gene. “They should do it and they should do it now,” he said.

The gene can give resistance to the common bacteria E. coli, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas through small bits of DNA called plasmids, a process that allows a faster spread than through chromosomes. That's because transfer through chromosomes limits spread to specific bacteria and their descendants, whereas DNA fragment spread can pass to other bacteria.

The mcr-1 gene gives resistance to colistin antibiotics, widely used in Chinese agriculture. Even though WHO wanted to limit its use, as colistin is the last line of antibiotic defense, at present, "most of the 12,000 tons of colistin fed to livestock each year is in China. In Europe, polymyxins (the colistin class) were the 5th most heavily used type of antibiotic in agricultural use in 2013. Colistin is not widely used in the U.S., but it is not prohibited either," according to Forbes.

Faced with the appearance of potential superbug creator mcr-1 in four countries so far — Germany, Denmark, China and Malaysia — the situation has been called "alarming," Lance Price, head of George Washington University’s Antibiotic Resistance Action Center, told STAT, also arguing for a ban on the agricultural use of colistin.

“We must act swiftly to contain the spread of colistin-resistant bacteria, or we will face increasing numbers of untreatable infections,” Price said in a statement.

Aarestrup agreed with the idea of a ban for agricultural use, but went further, telling STAT, “We really need to drastically, drastically, drastically reduce the use of antibiotics.”

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