And if agribusiness didn't have the USDA on a choke-chain, this would be all the evidence needed to ban antibiotics from use in animals that do not have a diagnosable medical condition.

Not gonna happen.

Scientists in Denmark have sequenced a 700,000 year old horse’s genome

Bring back the quagga, scientists!

"And if agribusiness didn't have the USDA on a choke-chain [....]"

Well, that and if the study were convincing that it is the antibiotics that are the main problem. Which it is not. (Note that I am not arguing here that the effect does not exist; merely that this paper does not convincingly show the effect, especially not to an extent to base public policy on.)

Primary among other problems from a quick read of the paper, 90% of the "ILO"-categorized workers spent more than 20 hours a week working in direct contact with livestock; in fact, 77.5% of them spent more than 40 hours working in direct contact with livestock. In contrast, 88% of the "AFLO" workers spent less than 20 hours a week in direct contact with livestock, and none spent more than 40.

Since the study was not able to sample the actual livestock and see if the Staph species of interest were more prevalent among ILO stock, I don't see any way to address the probable confounding without doing another study.

Another major possible confounder was the finding that ILO workers were by dramatic majority-Hispanic and AFLO workers were majority non-Hispanic white. It is very difficult to remove cultural and socio-economic confounding from this kind of evaluation.

The last complaint I will make here is that the sampling technique used ("snowball") is not one that is suitable for generalizing the results to any other population. There is no reason to think the sample is representative of anything in particular.

In general I think the science reporting here is sloppy; the paper overstates its conclusions and although the authors in Discussion do an okay job of acknowledging all the possible shortcomings of the research, the reporting here does not pass that on.

@3: The fact that agribusiness has the USDA on a choke chain is probably why researchers can't get access to the animals themselves. And these preliminary findings are certainly enough to warrant further study, particularly on the livestock involved.

@3 These Science Today posts are meant to be a quick rundown of what's happening in current science news; while I try my best to pack in as much context as I can, there certainly isn't room to present even the amount information that you just did in that comment. This is why I fill my posts with links to the studies and stories that provide further, more in-depth analysis and opinion than I have room for here, including one to the actual study and discussion to which you're referring. While the authors did acknowledge these shortcomings, they also concluded that their results are worth reporting, and do warrant further study.

@3 and @4, the researchers who did the study acknowledged themselves that European countries have been able to do similar research with access to the livestock, but in the US they have yet to be able to:

"The present study would be strengthened by sampling animals and production facilities [14], [53]; however, we did not have access during the course of the study. Access to livestock operations by the public health research community in Europe and other countries has allowed a robust body of evidence to develop there regarding the extent of exposure to S. aureus, MRSA, and MDRSA among ILO workers as well as the potential dissemination of livestock-associated strains into the broader community."