People take for granted that the food they are buying is semi-fresh and safe to eat once cooked. However this is a semi-recent development in the world of food. As recently as 1906 meat packers would take meat that had rotted, fill it with spices, stick in sausages and sell it for a cheaper price. Now, a little over 100 years later, people buy food every day from grocery stores across America without any thought. However now more than ever Americans should be worried about where their meat and even their vegetables have been and what’s gone into them. Today we don’t have to worry about rotted meat but there is an even worse danger lurking in every meat packing factory in America, E. Coli. Cows, pigs and chickens are now treated regularly with antibiotics in order to keep more of the animals alive. While this appears to be working it has one major downfall, the emergence of antibiotic resistant pathogens. These pathogens such as the newest strain of E. Coli, can resist the antibiotics fed to the animals, and thus survive to make it into our food. While E. Coli has been in our food for years now, it hasn’t been dangerous until now. Some bacteria in our meat was never a huge problem because even if the pathogen survived long enough to make it into a person and make them sick, there were antibiotics that could quickly kill it. There are currently strains of E. Coli that have a resistance to every antibiotic known to man. While these cases are extremely few and far between, there were 4 cases in a span of 3 years, they worry doctors. What happens when these cases suddenly become outbreaks that can’t be stopped? The overuse of antibiotics in the past fifty years has set the scene for a pandemic of global proportions, the deadly virus already exists. Now all that is needed is a highly contagious strain to emerge and the world could quickly be facing the worst pandemic it has faced since the black plague wiped out Europe in the Dark Ages.