Link: Detective Work and Science Reveal a New Lethal Bacteria - New York Times.
One of the key details given short shrift in the recent spinach-contamination furor--and it really bugs me that it's been so dreadfully ignored--is that it's NOT all E. coli bacteria that are at fault. Normally, E. coli is a benign, even beneficial, bacterium that lives peacefully and in great numbers in the guts of many mammals, including homo sapiens. It's only a couple of rare, mutant strains of the bug that cause the potentially-deadly problems--and the story of how E. coli O157:H7, the culprit in recent US contamination crises, probably evolved is a fascinating and instructive one.
One of the reasons the extreme unclarity about this bug, well, bugs me, is simply that I'm a science geek and I hate bad science reporting, especially from news outlets on which millions of people are depending for potentially life-protecting news. But another is that implementing a fix for this problem will be greatly aided if all parties concerned (including we the people whom the fixing agencies are meant to serve) actually understand the true nature of the problem.
Meanwhile, those of us who have made a commitment to health by adding large quantities of fresh vegetables to our diets need to exercise caution in our commitment, as in my opinion those fix-it agencies are still only succeeding in sticking bandaids onto an extremely leaky food-conduit--mainly because they are not empowered or funded to achieve anything more than that. I think it's just plain old common sense that a huge corporate farm enterprise like Natural Selection--no matter how well-intentioned--will simply have more points where things can screw up than a local organic farm, simply because the former is a much bigger and more complex organization.
Indeed, it wasn't even one of Natural Selection's dozens of organic brands from their own fields that was at fault, but spinach from another, non-organic, farm that Natural Selection bags under contract to another company's brand. With all those dozens of brands and raw-material streams, Murphy's Law can have one hell of a "field day" (yeah, pun intended).
All other things being equal, the odds of getting safe veggies are simply higher when one buys them minimally processed from smaller, local farms.
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