Cattle faeces can contain the highly toxic E.coli strain O157:H7. Without good hygienic practices in processing meat and producing and packing vegetables it can get into the human food supply, with potentially fatal consequences.
I have been swotting up the Wikipedia entry on E.coli, and reading an excellent article by scientists Valeria Souza, Amanda Castillo and Luis Eguiarte on 'The Evolutionary Ecology of Escherichia coli' to make sure I understand how this incredible little organism works, and why it is able to develop new (and virulent) strains so easily. Basically, it is one of the most diverse species of bacteria on the planet. There are lots of strains or sub-species, only 20% of the E.coli genome is common to all those strains, some strains have more genes than others, and some genes (up to 25% of the total) can be unique to a particular strain. (By contrast, the human species has 99% of its genes in common.)
It is easy for E. coli to be so diverse because it has three means of reproduction available to it - mutation, gene duplication and horizontal transfer of genes. It is this last characteristic which has made it useful as a tool for genetic engineering purposes, and it is also believed to be the way that the very toxic E. coli strain O157:H7 got to be that way.
It helps explain how merely nasty strains of E.coli can suddenly become super-toxic, if the 'wrong' genes are transferred, and also how E.coli strains can quickly develop antibiotic resistance (as many of them have). This is a biology which humans can't beat, so if we are going to protect ourselves from ever more deadly E.coli outbreaks in future we have to be more aware of these characteristics of the species, and pay closer attention to making it harder for more toxic strains to develop, multiply and move around.
Jeff Benedict, the author of Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat (which focuses on the 1993 E.coli O157:H7 outbreak in the USA which killed four children and made hundreds very ill after they ate tainted hamburger meat) wrote about 'The Next Outbreak' in the New York Times on June 4. He says that the way to protect Americans from more such outbreaks (which keep continuing and can now be traced to vegetables as well as meat) is to enforce mandatory government inspection and testing of raw foods. Hence he is glad that ''In December, [2010] Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, a landmark law that goes a long way to improving food safety in the United States through mandatory recalls, stricter inspections and better resources for tracking the sources of outbreaks.''
Jeff Benedict, the author of Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat (which focuses on the 1993 E.coli O157:H7 outbreak in the USA which killed four children and made hundreds very ill after they ate tainted hamburger meat) wrote about 'The Next Outbreak' in the New York Times on June 4. He says that the way to protect Americans from more such outbreaks (which keep continuing and can now be traced to vegetables as well as meat) is to enforce mandatory government inspection and testing of raw foods. Hence he is glad that ''In December, [2010] Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, a landmark law that goes a long way to improving food safety in the United States through mandatory recalls, stricter inspections and better resources for tracking the sources of outbreaks.''
However, he says ''...so far nothing has happened because Congress hasn’t provided money for the Food and Drug Administration to enforce the law. '' He also says that ''The most important part of the law includes stronger regulations on food imports. Only 1 percent of them are now inspected. Yet imported cucumbers, tomatoes and leafy greens are the most likely suspects behind the current outbreak.''
Is a government inspection system the best or the only way to protect consumers from toxic forms of E.coli? There are lots of downsides to such a system. It is very expensive to ensure that sufficient numbers of inspectors get to every meat processing and vegetable packing facility and every importing warehouse regularly, and that scientists keep testing foods regularly. Who should pay for this? Why should taxpayers subsidise corporations which don't or won't include food safety in their production standards? Isn't food safety a basic cost of being in the food trade? Shouldn't the food businesses be paying whatever it costs to keep toxic E. coli strains out of our food? Yet can such corporations be trusted to maintain suitable safety standards without public oversight?
Raw food 'safety' regulations can also penalise small, artisan producers who are unable or unwilling to meet the standards set by government bureaucrats to ensure that mass-produced industrial food is not contaminated. In New Zealand free-range egg producers have been put out of business because it is too expensive (as well as being silly and unnecessary) to install the expensive hygiene technologies required by battery farms (which are disease-breeding grounds). Thus perfectly safe and environmentally-friendly food sold on local markets is penalised by the state, while long-distance industrial food (degraded at best and dangerous at worst) is given state sanction and support.
Vehicles which are inherently unsafe can not be made safer by being inspected and tested more often. The same goes for food systems. Mass production and corporate concentration are central features of the industrial food system. They will always undermine the safety of what is produced this way, and in so doing they will always compromise public health.
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