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posted by chromas on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the 💩 dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Manure from a high-density cattle farm that holds upward of 100,000 cows may have been the source of a deadly Escherichia coli strain that found its way onto romaine lettuce and caused a massive outbreak earlier this year. That's according to a new hypothesis announced this week by the Food and Drug Administration.

The bacterium behind the outbreak was a particularly nasty strain of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157:H7 that produces only Shiga toxin type 2 (Stx2), the more toxic of two types of toxins E. coli tends to carry. Stx2 causes cell death, triggers immune responses, and leads to the destruction of red blood cells, which can damage the kidneys.

Such Shiga-toxin producing E. coli are shed from the guts of animals (particularly cattle) and are spread by feces.

Traceback investigations by federal authorities linked the illnesses to romaine lettuce grown in the Yuma region of Arizona. Further work found that the outbreak stain was present in canal water running along farms. That pointed experts to the idea that tainted canal water was used for irrigation, literally showering crops with deadly germs.

In the new update, the FDA notes that a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is located nearby to a cluster of romaine lettuce farms. Such high-density farms are notorious for causing water quality issues. Thus, poopy runoff from the CAFO may have contaminated the canal water, which then made its way onto vegetables directly through irrigation or some other indirect route. The FDA noted that it has been pondering other hypotheses, but it didn't outline what those were.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:02PM (6 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:02PM (#719370) Homepage
    Who in their right mind eats salad? Vegetables are what food eats.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:27PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:27PM (#719385)

    > Vegetables are what food eats

    You seem to have forgotten that this is *Soylent* News (grin).

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:51PM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:51PM (#719433) Homepage Journal

      7-Eleven carries it now. That means they got distribution!

      But at $3.99 a bottle it is too expensive to actually live off of.

      What started as a sore throat became an infection all over the inner part of my mouth. I've never even heard of this happening. Even my salivary glands are infected; simply to _taste_ something good causes crippling pain when I salivate.

      I like Soylent OK, it's more filling than I expected, but I have to say their Coffee flavor is indistinguishable from their Cacao.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:47PM (#719394)

    Who in their right mind eats salad without washing it?

    Leave it soaking, scrub it and put it in a salad crisper like any technologically advanced herbivore.

    Vegetables are what food eats.

    Really? [thegrownetwork.com]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:29PM (#719419)

      Doesn't work. The bacteria that get on the lettuce is extremely hard to get off due to the way it grows. If it were as simple as just washing it like that, we wouldn't have these recurring issues with food poisoning from pre-washed produce.

      The problem here is that there's inadequate regulation of the farmers and ranchers involved here. This is something that the general public should have known about for years as this has been making the press for years. Hopefully the regulatory agencies and actual farmers knew about it before then.

  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:27PM (1 child)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:27PM (#719417) Journal

    Who in their right mind eats salad? Vegetables are what food eats.

    Well, sunshine is what the vegetables eat [phys.org] -- do you not go outside?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:46PM (#719429)

      Obviously not!

      A summary of the food chain is then in order: the primordial forces of the universe (gravity and hydrogen fusion) → sunlight → vegetabes → predators → humans → me.

      - Hannibal