From Health magazine
Foodborne illness is nothing to sneeze at in America: Each year there are an estimated 87 million cases, leading to 371,000 hospitalizations and 5,700 deaths. Produce-related food poisonings are on the rise, and foodborne disease is no longer on the decline, government officials said in a recent report.
Salmonella is the most common cause of food poisoning, at about 16 cases per 100,000 people, with campylobacter and shigella second and third, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In spite of the scary numbers, experts are making more sense of how contamination spreads and how it can be controlled or prevented—good news for the savvy consumer who wants to be as proactive as possible, says Michael Doyle, PhD, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. Here, he looks at what we need to know about some of our nation’s biggest food crises.
Peanut butter, peppers, pistachios, tomatoes
Earlier this year, pistachios were recalled after salmonella was found at a California plant. This followed a widespread recall of 3,400 peanut products linked to plants that reportedly had rodent problems. Salmonella can be found in the intestinal tracts of animals and is shed in their feces.
Roughly 700 cases of salmonella poisoning from peanut products were reported, leading experts to rethink nut safety, Doyle says. “We have to properly roast nuts to ensure that salmonella gets killed, because there is no suitable treatment for killing it once the nuts get made into something like peanut butter.”
Salmonella was also the culprit in the 2008 contamination of jalapeños and serranos that sickened more than 1,440 people, and when 561 people got ill after eating tainted Roma tomatoes in 2004. Because tomatoes typically get cleaned in communal tanks, if just one tomato has dirt on it with salmonella, it can contaminate all the tomatoes, Doyle says. “Even if the tank is chlorinated, the bacterial load could overwhelm the chlorine,” he says. “The industry really should test the water in these tanks.”
Next page: Bagged spinach, apple juice, burgers
Comments (12)
what is this counry coming too
Clearly, it’s producing people who can’t spell.
No doubt.. We used to have a “T” but now we’re just a counry. Soon- if we lose our “C” we’ll just be plain Ounry.
…coming TO, not coming “too”…
fear mongering. Please, a couple people get sick because of huge industrial agriculture methods and then the government imposes regulations that puts the small farmers out of business who are usually immune to such disease spreading problems. Way to go USA
There are actually more cases of food born illness from those small farmers that you are talking about but because they are mostly local markets they don’t make the national news. Think about it. Manure is commonly used as fertilizer and if it is mishandled/misused all the food grown in it could potentially be contaminated. No grower is completely immune. Yes, they can be careful but it can happen anywhere. The only difference is scale. Personal garden: family.
Small farm: less than 100.
Industrial Agriculture: possibly 1000s.
Country Girl, I’d be very appreciative if you could list your sources on rates of food borne illness in small farms vs. industrial agriculture. I have been doing quite a bit of research and am looking for any information on small farms rates.
Personally, I agree with Farmer John. The problem is what few government regulations there are cover all of agriculture carte blanche no matter the size of the farm.
People can change the industry by voting with the almighty dollar. Buy foods locally and in season. It’s a supreme pleasure to buy and at the same time shake the hand of the person who grew your food.
Peeps… yer gonna live to say 80, ok?
There are 300M Americans.
1/80 = x/300M ?… cross multiply… almost 4M peeps go this year. k?
50k go from car crashes.
50-100k will go from h1n1 (swine flu)
what else? a bad piece of meet for 4k?
the human condition kind of has destination…
wow great reasoning there… -.-
I was infected with listeria in 1991 and almost died.
communal tanks, ozonate them Kills all Bac,virus’s,
fungi,microbs,pathagens,forget clorine it kills organic matter-Like us! You don’t want it in your body, or on your body. Ozone is used by over 5,000
DR.’s around the world. Cures everything. Thats why
we don’t use it here, for anything. We call it smogg.
Other solutions include effective food wash:
“UGA licenses invention that kills food-borne pathogens in minutes”
http://www.fit-wash.co.uk/wp/2009/04/07/uga-licenses-invention-that-kills-food-borne-pathogens-in-minutes/