Cents,
This problem looks like a worldwide issue and here follows an old article from washington post.Apologize if it's already been posted.
CDC: Food System Leads to
Bacteria
By Curt Anderson
AP Farm Writer
Tuesday, December 9, 1997; 6:33 p.m. EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The efficient, worldwide food system that gives grocery shoppers more choices and lower prices carries a troubling cost: an upsurge in food poisoning.
Cases of salmonella illness alone have doubled over the past 20 years.
The way outbreaks occur also is changing. In the past, most
cases originated in restaurants or at events like church suppers
-- caused by mistakes in the kitchen.
Such cases still happen -- one person died and 750 were sickened by salmonella at a Maryland church outing last month.
But there is now a bigger problem: Food sometimes is tainted
during processing at the growing number of huge food factories
and is widely distributed before anyone gets sick.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
estimates that 9,000 people die every year from food poisoning
in the United States. Millions more are sickened; reported
salmonella cases have risen from about 22,600 in 1975 to
46,000 in 1995.
''Industry consolidation and mass distribution of foods may
lead to large outbreaks of foodborne disease,'' Dr. Sean F.
Altekruse, a veterinary epidemiologist with the Food and Drug
Administration, said in a new CDC report on emerging
microbes.
For example, about 224,000 people in many states were
sickened by salmonella in 1994 because tanker trucks used to
haul thousands of gallons of ice cream previously had been
used to transport contaminated liquid eggs, according to the
CDC.
''The huge epidemic was the result of a basic failure on an
industrial scale to separate the raw from the cooked,'' said
CDC researcher Robert Tauxe.
A single day's production at a modern ground beef plant can
turn out hundreds of thousands of pounds of hamburger, which
are then quickly trucked all over the country.
'That means any single problem that happens can be spread
very quickly and cause massive illness before we even know
about it,'' said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at
the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Along with the industrial food processing system, Altekruse
said the trend toward large-scale livestock operations in which
thousands of animals are crowded together is another reason
for increased problems with bacteria.
In 1945, for example, there were about 500 birds in a typical
henhouse. By 1995, houses contained as many as 100,000
hens, which can spread salmonella through their eggs.
''Multiple houses were often linked by common machinery,
resulting in large flocks with common risk,'' Altekruse said.
There have also recently been increases in food poisoning from
imported and domestic produce such as cantaloupe,
strawberries, raspberries and tomatoes. The CDC report
identified several causes, including use of contaminated water
to spray the produce and instances when animal manure
containing E. coli touched fruit during picking.
Other factors cited by the CDC include: more people eating
out, consumer ignorance about safe handling of food, and an
increased chance of illness among the growing number of the
elderly and people with suppressed immune systems, such as
AIDS sufferers. Doctors are also getting better at diagnosing
and reporting food illnesses.
One disturbing trend is that some microbes are developing
resistance to antibiotics used to treat ill people. One reason:
Antibiotics are frequently given to livestock to prevent disease,
serving as an unintended inoculation for the bacteria that live
with the animals.
In Britain, a strain of salmonella called DT104 has proven
resistant to many antibiotics, including tetracycline, and has
triggered a jump in human illnesses from the strain -- from 259
in 1990 to 3,837 by 1995 -- said E.M. Foster of the Food
Research Institute in Madison, Wis.
More than one-third of the people infected with DT104 were
hospitalized and 3 percent died, Foster said. The strain is now
emerging in the United States.
''These figures are very unusual for ordinary salmonella
infections and indicate serious problems ahead,'' Foster said.
Food safety experts say the world's governments and private
industry must spend more money on research into the causes
and prevention of food poisoning, from the farm to the dinner
table, and on identifying how the bacteria are getting into the
food system.
In the United States, a new surveillance system called FoodNet
is being set up to monitor outbreaks. In addition, scientists are
able to use DNA fingerprinting to trace microbes that sicken
people in many places back to a single source.
That is how Colorado officials were able to discover that an
unusually high number of people sickened with E. coli this
summer had eaten tainted frozen hamburgers produced by
Hudson Foods Inc., resulting in the recall of 25 million pounds
of ground beef.
Regards
Sri. |
