When it feels like you’re raining hellfire into the toilet bowl, it’s fair to wonder what caused you to be cursed with a urinary tract infection. While UTIs are common in women, living through one can be an agonizing experience that you’d rather avoid in the future. Now, new research suggests that you could have gotten your UTI from an unexpected source: meat.
That’s the main takeaway from new research published in the journal mBio, which concluded that UTIs caused by meat are much more common than people realize.
Sure, your first priority when you have a UTI is to get treated so you can feel better. But if recurrent UTIs are an issue for you, or if you’d just rather lower your risk of slogging through this health issue again, the meat connection is worth paying attention to. Here’s what’s behind it.
A solid portion of UTIs may be caused by meat.
For the study, researchers collected more than 5,700 E.coli specimens from patients with UTIs, along with samples of meat from stores from the same neighborhoods. They used a special modeling system to estimate whether the E.coli strain started with humans or animals.
After crunching the data, the researchers found that 18% of the UTIs were linked to E.coli strains from meat. (These are known as foodborne UTIs.) The strains with the highest risk of causing infection were most likely to be found in chicken (38%) and turkey (36%). But beef and pork also contained E.coli that was linked to infections—14% and 12%, respectively.
The researchers discovered that people living in low-income areas had a 60% higher risk of getting a foodborne UTI compared to those who lived in wealthier neighborhoods. Also, women and older men were especially vulnerable to UTIs from meat.
How do you get a UTI from meat?
There are a few possible ways you can get a UTI from meat. But it starts with the meat itself. “This is happening because the meat is contaminated,” Lance Price, PhD, study co-author and a professor of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, tells SELF. “Unfortunately, we haven’t done anything from a food safety perspective about contaminated meat.”
E.coli can live in the gastrointestinal tracts of animals, and can wind up in the meat from cross-contamination during the slaughtering process, Ellen Shumaker, PhD, food safety expert and director of outreach for the Safe Plates program at North Carolina State University, tells SELF. “In the event that meat is contaminated with E. coli and a person ingests it, that person is going to be shedding E. coli in their feces,” she says.
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