Egypt's political future may be looking brighter, but what about the environment?

June 2011 monthly subscribers newsletter

Ecologist

12th June 2011

Welcome to your June subscribers newsletter. This month we look at, amongst other issues, the timber mafia threatening the Siberian tiger, fair trade carbon credits, the problems with peat and Namibia's conservation programme... To access this content, log in and scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you can download your newsletter

The recent E.coli outbreak and the emergence of a new strain of MRSA in the UK dairy herd have put modern food supply and production chains in the spotlight like never before.

Scientists’ discovery earlier this month of the new - potentially deadly - MRSA bacteria in dairy cows (one almost identical to a strain recorded in human hospital patients) should be a particular cause for alarm.

Strains of MRSA, which causes infections in humans and is resistant to many existing antibiotics, have already been found in pigs, poultry and cattle in several other European countries, but this is the first hard evidence of MRSA being discovered in UK farm animals.

Claims that the disease’s emergence in the UK dairy herd could in fact be due to the now ‘routine’ antibiotic use in modern farming are even more...

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