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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:17PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:17PM (#719378)

    if the pickers were paid a living wage, they could afford to buy toilet paper instead of resorting to using lettuce leaves.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:25PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:25PM (#719383)

    > if the pickers were paid a living wage, ...
    Don't you mean, if the pickers were allowed time to use sanitary toilet facilities (aka, well maintained port-a-johns) and facilities to properly wash their hands? Restaurant workers are required by law to wash hands before returning to work, does anyone know if something similar is enforced for pickers?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:56PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday August 09 2018, @03:56PM (#719436) Homepage Journal

    Pickers are mostly illegal migrant workers who are quite happy to work for less than it takes to live in the US because they don't in fact live in the US except during picking season. As long as we continue allowing them to sneak across the border and hiring them, there will be no US "living wage" for any pickers no matter where they're from. There can't be. Cheap labor keeps the cost of the produce down and anyone trying to pay a US "living wage" is going to find that their produce costs significantly more, so they have to charge more, and then their produce rots or gets sold at a loss because nobody will buy it at that markup.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.