The news is abuzz lately with stories of the "superbug," partly because we need to be scared at all times of all things, except for buying newspapers and watching the news, but also because it's pretty scary - for instance, a Brooklyn middle school student died on the 14th from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. That's a big set of words or a smaller but confusing acronym for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

So how do bacteria get resistant to drugs? I guess if you're a fan of intelligent design, they just do (maybe they work out or something), but the general theory is that the ones that die from antibiotics don't get to reproduce, leaving only the tougher bacteria behind.

Now wait, how do so many bacteria get exposed to the drugs in the first place? Sure, there's a general "take a pill and go away" syndrome in medicine that can lead to overprescriptions, but there's also the use of antibiotics in farming, particularly in factory farming.

Enough setup, here's the money shot. Dr. Anthony J. Billittier IV, New York State's health commissioner, has gone on record saying that the overuse of antibiotics for food animals raised in stressful conditions on tightly confined factory farms [is] an issue that needs to be addressed at a national level (statement attributed, but not quoted directly from Billittier)

So how badly do you want that cheap chicken sandwich?