Then she sat down to a meal with a girlfriend in June 2010 and ordered a grilled-chicken salad.
The next afternoon, she was struck with intense nausea and her stomach started rumbling.
“Uncontrollable diarrhea,” the 42-year-old recalls with a wince.
She tried to wait it out, but 24 hours later, she was seeing blood in her stool.
So she begged her doctor to see her on a busy Friday.
She gave her an antibiotic and urged her to head straight to the emergency room for IV fluids.
A few days later, test results revealed she had campylobacter, an infection that undercooked chicken can transmit.
The doctor gave Adams a second antibiotic, Cipro, which normally knocks out the germ.
She took it for 10 days and felt slightly better.
Still, the mere thought of eating made her feel faint.
She sipped chicken broth, but anything more than a bite of bread roiled her stomach again.
“Stick with it,” she recalls the doctor telling her.
“When an infection wipes out your intestines, it can take some time to reset.”
But within days of finishing the drugs, Adams found her symptoms had returned in full force.
“I was miserable, and so scared for my health,” she says.
As someone who blogs about cancer, Adams is medically sophisticated.
But the possibility that foodborne illness could be resistant to antibiotics had never occurred to her.
Nor could she have imagined the damage the bacteria could do.
A third prescription killed the infection, but the aftermath stretched on.
For four months, she could take in nothing but liquids and the simplest carbs.
She was exhausted and couldn’t exercise.
By the time she finally recovered, she had shed more than 20 pounds from her already slim frame.
“People would say, ‘What are you doing?
Are you running?'”
“And I’d think, No, I’m dying.”
New, drug-resistant varieties of campylobacter, salmonella, E. coli and staph have all emerged.
Many major heal th organizations, including the American Medical Association, see it differently.
That evidence shows superbugs all over our food.
“Can you imagine the public response?
And yet that is what the food-animal industry is doing to us every day.”
It took another decade for scientists to realize there might be a downside.
The problem is that animals’ guts, like ours, are full of bacteria.
There’s another problem: Bacteria don’t develop resistance only by mutation.
“And then that salmonella causes a resistant infection in a human.”
This April, the agency announced guidelines it hopes will phase out growth promotion in three years.
But the rules are purely voluntary and allow for prophylactic use of antibiotics.
Farmers use antibiotics to prevent, control and treat diseaseand to fatten up their animals quickly.
The drugs kill off weak germs but leave the strongest, creating superstrains that circle back into the herd.
The result is serious, lifethreatening infections of the gutand perhaps the skin, bladder, blood and more.
And the majority of animals taking the drugs are not sick.
In badly run CAFOs, this overcrowding leads to filthy conditions that increase disease.
Farmworkers may also bring the bacteria home and spread them to friends and family.
Nine-month-old Ruby Lee got sick after eating only a few morsels sauteed by her 24-year-old mother, Melissa Lee.
“It was the first time she had eaten ground meat,” Lee says.
Soon Ruby was fussy, feverish and soiling 20 diapers a day with diarrhea.
“She said, ‘We don’t know what this is,'” Lee says.
“That is not something you ever want to hear.”
Three nights later, Byerly woke up vomiting, achy and shaking with chills.
“The fever lasted after the vacation ended,” she says.
“Every morning I woke up with headaches and sweats.”
They made little difference.
While symptoms had dragged on, her bug had spiraled into sepsis.
“I felt I had no control over what had happened to me,” she says.
“I am so lucky it didn’t get worse.”
You don’t have to be older, immune-compromised or an infant to be at risk.
In the spring of 2010, Mae Gentry was taken by surprise by a bladder infection.
“I don’t know what to do to prevent this from happening again.”
Confronted with such a sweeping problem, whatcanconsumers do?
Smart food-safety precautions will protect against all bacteria, including resistant strains.
“The one thing disease-causing bacteria are not resistant to is heat,” Dr. Levy adds.
Shoppers can support organic meat and produce farmers, who can be prosecuted for fraud if they use antibiotics.
(Grass-fed,cageifreeornaturalproducts aren’t drug-free by definition.)
Still, growers of organic veggies aren’t required to use manure from only organic herds.
And organic meat is sometimes processed in the same slaughterhouses as conventional meat is.
But organic farmers do work to mitigate the risk.
Other advocates continue to want a ban on certain antibiotics in farming.
For Everly Macario, the debate is settled.
“Antibiotic resistance is a huge problem, and it’s getting worse.
It might get to the point where our medicine just doesn’t work.”
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