FOOD CONTAMINATION A WORLD WIDE PROBLEM ?
I am printing this article only for the sake of good information it contains even though it may not be very significant......
SPOILED
The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire
Then we are in the right place... From Denver Post
Sept. 28 - Journalist Nichols Fox reports that "the world's safest food supply" may have overcome some common problems of the past - infections and spoilage - but it has produced a whole new set of dangers to consumers. Her indictment of modern food processing falls just short of Upton Sinclair's 1906 "The Jungle," the muckraking volume that first brought regulation to the meatpacking industry.
Most of "Spoiled" is also about meat, but the problem with meat in modern America is not so much decay as pathogens that have been given easier access to human stomachs through the very technological innovations that have removed decayed meat from the market.
Listeria loves to grow in the cool, oxygen-depleted environment of packaged, refrigerated meat or precut salads. Chicken carries Salmonella to us, as well as Campylobacter. Beef often has a particularly virulent strain of Escherichia coli living on it. Raspberries may come with Cyclospora as well as seeds. And then
there's mad cow disease, the cause of which may be a virus or a previously unknown sort of infectious agent that changes the shapes of some proteins.
All in all, it's a frightening list. Worse, the people most likely to become seriously ill are the most vulnerable among us - the very old, the very young, cancer and AIDS patients, anyone with a weakened immune system.
The underlying problems are with the way we grow, process, store and transport meat.
At the beginning of the cycle is the problem of microbes infecting food animals. Some of the most dangerous bacteria and viruses are opportunistic infections that take over after routine antibiotics kill off more common (and benign) microbes.
Some make the animals ill but others, like Salmonella in chickens, have no effect on the food animal itself.
Most of the diseases are infections of the animals' intestinal tract, which get into the meat we eat when the carcasses are gutted. The more mechanized the processing lines become, the more likely it is, Fox reports, that the meat will come into contact with intestinal matter. Various methods of cleanup are used, but none is fully effective.
Crowded conditions en route to and at the slaughterhouse lead to further exposure to fecal matter
as the animals respond to danger and unfamiliar surroundings as many humans might, with loosened bowels. Thus one infected animal can transmit disease to thousands.
Though meatpackers run cleaner shops than in the past, microbial agents have found ways to lurk about. Some are able to cling even to stainless steel and to resist a light scrubbing.
America's favorite food, hamburger, is particularly susceptible to infection. The meat of dozens or hundreds of cows is mixed together in batches of up to 40,000 pounds. A batch is then divided and sold, often to any number of retailers, ending up in thousands of individual kitchens.
Regards,
Sri |
