Yep...but "up there" only applies to the hills, not the hollows. :)
Here's the article:
Posted on Thu, Jan. 01, 2004
Mad cow may be the least of our food fears
OTHER LETHAL ILLNESSES ABOUND
By Alison Young
KNIGHT RIDDER WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON - In the week since mad cow disease was discovered in the United States, more than a million Americans were sickened by food they ate. About 6,000 became so ill they were hospitalized and nearly 100 died, according to federal health estimates.
But mad cow disease wasn't the culprit. Indeed, not a single American is known to have contracted the human form of the disease from eating food in this country.
Instead, salmonella, E. coli, listeria and other dangerous bacteria routinely take a huge toll on public health, yet get little of the attention that's now focused on the beef from one Washington state Holstein found infected with mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
"There is not enough attention to general food-borne diseases," said Dr. Christopher Braden, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's chief of outbreak response and surveillance in the food-borne disease branch. "While bovine spongiform encephalopathy is of concern, it's not the greatest public-health concern we face in food-borne disease."
The toll from food-borne disease is staggering: 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year, according to CDC estimates.
Salmonella, for instance, caused 32,000 confirmed illnesses last year -- and many times that number probably were sickened by the bacteria but never had tests to confirm it. "Certainly, if this were a disease hitting the radar screen and it was the first time it had ever been discovered and there were 30,000 cases reported, it would be an uproar," Braden said Tuesday.
Attention long needed
Organisms that consumers may never have heard of cause many illnesses. Campylobacter, a bacteria associated with raw or undercooked poultry, causes about 2 million cases of diarrhea, nausea and vomiting each year, and sometimes causes life-threatening infections or triggers rare immune-system responses. Listeria monocytogenes, a cold-loving bacteria found in lunch meat and hot dogs, causes about 2,500 illnesses a year, and most of those people are so ill they are hospitalized. About 500 will die, the CDC estimates.
Brad Matthews, 27, of Raleigh, N.C., no longer takes for granted that the food he eats is safe.
He's been unable to work since July 2001, when he was hospitalized for food-borne illness caused by campylobacter. He recovered from the nausea and vomiting but developed Reiter's syndrome, a painful inflammation of the joints thought to be triggered by the bacteria.
"I was an administrative assistant just right out of college," Matthews said Tuesday. "My future looked bright, and it just happened out of the blue." The pain in his joints has made it impossible to live normally, he said. He can't drive, walk his dog or play the guitar.
The public needs to pay more attention, Matthews said. "I don't think people really care. I knew about these food-borne diseases, but I thought to myself it wouldn't happen to me," he said.
A call for a trace-back system
Food-safety advocates hope the furor over mad cow disease and calls for reform will help focus the attention of policy makers and the public on broader issues in farming and food manufacturing that could help reduce the number of Americans sickened by what they eat.
"I don't think mad cow is a public-health crisis," said Carol Tucker Foreman, who was an assistant secretary of agriculture in charge of food safety during the Carter administration. "I do think we have a serious public-health problem with regard to food-borne illness. And it's not just meat and poultry, but fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs and fish."
Tucker Foreman, who heads the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, said the mad cow case -- and efforts by regulators to find the Holstein's birth herd -- had demonstrated the need for a system that allowed cattle to be traced.
"We've urged the USDA to establish an animal trace-back system for 20 years," she said. "Not only do you need to trace back an animal that has signs of mad cow disease, but you also could trace back an animal that has a gut full of E. coli 0157:H7."
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would establish such a tracking system.
Advocates also have urged for years that the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration be given the authority to order companies to recall tainted products. The current system allows only for voluntary company recalls, Tucker Foreman said. |
