Why Killer E. Coli Outbreaks Are Here to Stay
[UPDATE: German authorities say it was the sprouts after all. But how the deadly bacteria got onto the sprouts from a small organic farm remains a mystery.]
The really scary thing about the deadly E. coli outbreak in Germany -- besides, of course, the fact that it's killed 26 people and will leave 674 people with lifelong kidney malfunction, and besides the fact that this bacteria is resistant to at least a dozen antibiotics -- is that German authorities may never actually figure out what caused it. After ruling out cucumbers from Spain and backing off accusations of sprouts from a domestic organic farm, health officials can only guess that the culprit probably lurks within the unhelpfully broad category of "raw vegetables."
And even if investigators get lucky and isolate the offending food, it's going to be almost impossible to then figure out how a toxic strain of E. coli, which always originates in animal poop, got onto or into a product from the plant world. After all, it's tragic to realize that almost five years after the bagged spinach outbreak of 2006, U.S. government officials still don't know for sure how that deadly E. coli found its way onto farms in central California. Not that they're still looking.
Food supply: We've lost control
Such official uncertainty is frightening because it suggests a collective lack of control. If we don't know what's turning our lunch into something that could kill us or put us on dialysis machines for the rest of our lives, then how do we stop it?
The problem has to do with both the nature of E. coli and the way agriculture has been centralized in the U.S. and to a slightly lesser extent in Europe. An E. coli infection can take more than a week to produce the first symptoms and by the time it's diagnosed, good luck getting horribly sick people to remember what they ate on Tuesday two weeks ago. And the more time that passes, the higher the chance the contaminated food will no longer be in the food supply.
But let's say you find the source, as was the case with bagged spinach. The bigger challenge is figuring out how the food got contaminated in the first place. In his NYT column yesterday, Mark Bittman detailed the myriad possible modes of adulteration:
It's likely that most of the thousands of people sickened in Germany ate a vegetable that was contaminated in its handling: manure got into the growing or rinsing water; or it was on the hands of a picker; or it got dropped on a veggie by a bird, or brushed onto it by a wandering animal; or it was in a truck that took the sprouts to the packager, or some other innocent accident....The food safety reform legislation passed late last year will likely help with some of this. It requires that all food processing facilities come up with and implement their own science-based standards for safety. For vegetable producers, this would presumably mean they would need to do testing of irrigation and rinsing water and establish better safety protocols for workers.
There's also a provision in the law requiring growers of leafy greens to sterilize the area around farms so wild animals can't get in, a result of the FDA's theory that wild boars were to blame for the spinach outbreak.
No budget, no safety
But if some budget-cutting Republicans in the House get their way, these measures might not happen. Last week, the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the FDA voted to give the agency $87 million less for food safety than it's getting today, which might make it impossible for the agency to implement and oversees the food safety reforms required by the new law.
If the Republican budget goes through, a gutted FDA food safety infrastructure is something that may go unnoticed by the public until exactly the point at which the next major outbreak hits. And in an age when toxic bacteria are increasingly mutating and developing resistance, it's a question of when, not if, a mutated, antibiotic-resistant superbug outbreak hits our shores.