Meat is the source, but that's not the point of the scientist's paper
Sure, meat is almost certainly the original source of the resistant staph. However, that's NOT what the scientists' paper was about. They claimed that the use of sub-therapeutic antibiotics simultaneously created the same resistant version of staph bug at many different farms. Given that all these farms feed antibiotics in different amounts and started out with different staph bugs, that's hard to believe. In the paragraph I quoted, I showed that the scientists themselves had not tracked down the original source; they just made assumptions without scientific proof.
As a plausible alternative, I'm simply saying that the super bugs could have originated at one farm through improper use of antibiotics, and then been spread throughout the meat found at grocery stores because of a common infection point -- either in the trucks used to haul the animals to market or in the meat packing plant itself. This would more reasonably explain why the same superbug was found in grocery stores in meat from many different farms. Am I saying that this must be the cause of the superbugs? Absolutely not. I'm just saying that accepting the scientists' implication of sub-therapeutic antibiotics when the scientists themselves said they didn't scientifically eliminate plausible alternatives is jumping to conclusions without proof.
When a particular strain of flu suddenly appears in the human population, nobody believes that it suddenly appeared simultaneously in many different places. Instead, epidemiologists spend their time looking for common sources of infection. Similarly, if the same super staph bug is found in meat in many different grocery stores, why would anybody assume it didn't have a single common source?
