Meat, greed and deadly microbes: no matter what you eat, you're at risk - includes a guide for vegetarians, and Pres. Bill Clinton's food safety plan

Vegetarian Times, Nov, 1996 by Luise Light

IT WAS THE week from hell for JoBeth d'Agostino. Her five-year-old daughter Elizabeth started getting violently ill on the plane while traveling home from a peaceful family vacation at the Grand Canyon. Elizabeth's severe pain and bloody diarrhea forced the family to rush to an emergency room as soon as the plane landed, but matters only got worse. Two days, three emergency rooms and two rounds of tests later, the results were in: Her kidneys had stopped functioning. She was in critical condition as a result of a toxin-producing bacteria (E. Coli 0157:H7), and the outlook was bleak. Rushed to the intensive care unit of a nearby children's hospital, Elizabeth was one of the lucky ones. She survived because the hospital staff had treated hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) before and knew what to do. After a total exchange of blood plasma to clean her blood of toxins, and many months of recovery, Elizabeth is now just fine.

Another case of undercooked hamburgers? Not likely, as Elizabeth and her mom are committed vegetarians. No one knows for sure how Elizabeth contracted the disease--it may have been from swimming in a stream polluted with livestock runoff while on vacation; it may have been something she ate.

It seems no one is safe these days from the ravages of food poisoning. The words seem mutually exclusive--food is supposed to nourish our bodies, not poison them. But, in fact, microbial food poisoning is spinning out of control; the list of invisible, deadly invaders is growing exponentially while we eat, sleep and go about our daily lives. This past summer alone, the outbreaks of E. Coli poisoning seemed to be just about everywhere: Oklahoma, New Hampshire, suburban New York City and on and on. In Japan, 10,000 people became ill and at least 12 died, quite possibly from tainted U.S. meat.

It didn't have to be this way. For over 10 years, scientists, especially those at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), have been pleading with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to take action against the growing threat of microbial food poisoning. Many predicted dire consequences if the food supply, especially the meat industry, wasn't cleaned up. It wasn't, and today's headlines look like the chapter headings of a Michael Crichton novel.

The biggest sources of dangerous food bacteria, of course, are beef, poultry and eggs. Salmonella, a bacteria that thrives in raw and undercooked foods rich in fat and animal protein, affects more than two million people yearly with a death rate of two per thousand cases. More life-threatening is E. Coli 0157:H7, found mostly in ground hamburger meat and affecting about 20,000 people a year, killing 500 of them, mostly young children and the elderly. E. Coli lives in the gut of cows and can be passed along to food either directly, since during slaughter the cow's innards can contaminate the meat that is later consumed or indirectly, through a cow's fecal matter, which is often used as fertilizer. The disease doesn't seem to harm the cows, only the humans who eat the meat or who are exposed to the cow's waste products. And these are just the tip of the pathogen iceberg. By the USDA s own reckoning, 4,000 Americans die each year just from infected meat and poultry.

How do vegetarians such as little Elizabeth contract the disease? Because E. Coli has been left unchecked for so long, it now has invaded our lives in hundreds of places. Cross-contamination occurs whenever clean food, surfaces, water or hands come in contact with infected soil or food. It can happen in so many places it is hard to account for them all--on supermarket checkouts, where ground meat has passed by, at day care centers where unwitting caregivers have passed the bacteria from one child to another, in backyard wading pools, restaurant salad bars, supermarket back rooms, even on organic farms that use animal-waste fertilizer and in recreational lakes downstream of livestock farms.

AN EARLY WARNING

Infectious diseases of this epidemic scale don't come out of thin air, as a 1995 report from the NAS pointed out in "Infectious Diseases in an Age of Change," which warned of the rapid, global spread of food and water-borne infections. They are the products of shifts in human behavior and ecology that set up conditions in which deadly microbes can flourish, an old story in human history that has played a major role in the rise and fall of nations.

In our time, the spread of deadly forms of Salmonella and E. Coli are the unexpected harvest of an industrialized agriculture where vegetables and animals are raised on massive farms designed to supply our enormous public appetite for cheap and uniform food. The NAS report cites the example of egg production on such a monumental scale that it creates an ideal setting for a crop of microbes as virulent as the Typhoid Bacillus that decimated European and American cities one hundred years ago.

In 1993, a dangerous outbreak of Salmonella was traced to a single egg-producing farm that housed more than 400,000 egg-laying hens in a henhouse "city." Henhouses typically accommodate 8 0; 000 birds, with cages stacked one on the other, an environment ready-made for the rapid spread of infection through a flock.