Spinach tainted from Cow manure. ewww

[lies and propaganda]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/13/MNG71LOT711.DTL

So that EColi came from cow shit running off into a spinach field.

Which just makes me think this could happen to any of our food and its pretty damn gross.

[Sequoia]

1. I suspected that from the start

when the news cameras were showing the cows nearby chewing their cuds and just being mellow. I thought why in the world would there be cows so close to the gardens.

[originalpckelly]

8. I know, and everyone wonders why people were getting sick...

duh dumb fuck it might be the cows shitting in the water down stream! It amazes me how little common sense people have in this day and age.

[Sequoia]

42. Indeed!

KRON (I'm sure it was them) did a story on it and showed the cows and the reporter said something like: look at these cows, how close they are to the spinach farm, ya think...and kept showing those cow, the grass, the farm and so forth. He didn't say much but let the camera speak for itself.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

2. ...

I enjoy the reactions of some people when they see manure being sprayed onto fields.

[lies and propaganda]

6. ewwwww. , Just as nasty as bio -solids.

Maybe less sick because biosolids come from people :barf:

[Buzz Clik]

17. Just as a point of clairification about biosolids:

"Biosolids" is the broad brush term applied to any solid waste material that originally comes from living things. In the strictest sense, it is limited to dung, composted/treated or otherwise emanating from any creature that excretes. However, the term could conceivably include food waste, yard waste, etc.

Sorry to be anal about this, but biosolids aren't limited to sewage sludge, although sewage is the first thing to come to mind when talking of biosolids.

[Buzz Clik]

3. No surprise here.

Organic farms use organic fertilizers (duh), and it's best to be close to the source. I'm a bit amazed, however, that the neighboring animal operation is getting away with a clear violation of allowing runoff from their property. (But let's not fool ourselves -- not all organic fertilizer is composted.)

If the concept of smearing cow poo all over your food is gross, don't ever EVER go to a dairy and see how it's done. Cows deliver milk and dung from the same general vicinity. I'll never understand those who would ever drink a glass of unpasteurized milk.

[Maine-ah]

21. I was raised on milk straight from the cow.

completely organic from a small farm, along with eggs, and pig meat, fresh veggies. Our family was almost never sick (no colds, viruses, ect..), and we're talking about four kids in school at the same time, along with our father who was a teacher. The teachers all swapped their farm goods.

I look at kids now, like my sister's, who are sick all of the time. Raised on skim milk, and processed foods. I find nothing wrong, if done right, with unpasturized milk, and organically raised meats. If I could find a cheap way, like those teachers did, to continue on with that type of diet, I would, and I'd raise my kids on it too.

[Buzz Clik]

22. Nothing could diminish your experience, and I won't try.

However, pasteurization was developed for the specific reason that people were getting sick (and dead) from tainted milk. It may have been sloppiness, but other factors come into play as well.

As for organically grown food, I have no problem with that. Keeping pesticides, excessive antibiotics, and growth hormones out of my food only makes sense.

[AngryAmish]

35. When I was a kid I had a rock

The rock protected me from attack by tigers. In fact, nbobody in my town was ever attacked by a tiger.

Do you want to buy the rock?

[Buzz Clik]

37. self delete...

[SpreadItAround]

4. Boy am I glad I ate lunch already

[LeftyMom]

5. Of course it is.

E Coli lives in intestinal tracts. The particular virulent strain involved comes from the highly acidic digestive tracts of grain (usually corn) fed cattle. It was readily apparent it came from cow shit.

[kestrel91316]

7. Animals DO poop onto the ground, silly. Humans are the only animal that

poops into fresh drinking water and then after "treatment" pours it back into somebody else's water.

[Psephos]

14. Not to be a contrarian, but so do fish. :-)

Nearly all Earth's water is in a constant state of recycling and natural "treatment." It's the untreated water I worry about.

And the yellow snow. :-)

Peace.

[kestrel91316]

19. Hey, yellow snow is no big deal either. Urine is sterile when it

comes out (unless there's a UTI going on).

I'm more afraid of what will happen as we kill off all the microbes in our natural environments with the "antibacterial" handsoaps with triclosan. THAT ought to scare people.

[Psephos]

32. You're so right about the triclosan

Meanwhile, sterile or not, I think I'll leave the yellow snow alone. ;-)

Congratulations on your cool career, btw.

Peace.

[sandnsea]

9. Uh yeah, organic fertilizer

I'm sure you just didn't think that post through.

[no_hypocrisy]

10. Truth be told, I expected the DNA report to come back as

excretia from homo sapiens.

[kiahzero]

11. Fertilizer. (n/t)

[meganmonkey]

12. LOL

You need to go spend some time on a farm.

Our food comes from poop. Mostly it isn't tainted with E Coli, but there is poop everywhere. Fertilizer? Probably used to be poop. Even if you use purely synthetic chemicals, unless you can figure out how to make sure the deer and the bunnies and the birds don't poop on your farm, you can't avoid it.

Poop makes the world go 'round :shrug:

[kestrel91316]

13. I guess I'm weird. I don't have major herbivore poop phobia

like some. Cow manure in reasonable amounts is not a bad smell (especially compared to human poop). And we vets get used to doing rectal exams on cows in school (horses too), with a plastic sleeve on of course, so it's not a big deal to me. Only recently with the industrial agricultural practices of factory farming has cow poop become a source of death by E. coli O157H7.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

15. heh

e. coli's been killing people since the invention of agriculture, and probably long before that.

Frankly, I'm willing to bet there's a lot of factory farming that's safer than small family farms.

Two kids in Washington state just got e. coli by drinking un-pasteurized milk from a family farm.

Honestly, who the fuck drinks un-pasteurized milk?

[kestrel91316]

20. Nah. Normal Escherichia coli, the nonshigatoxic strain, is

ubiquitous. You find it in everybody's trash cans (when grown in a petri dish it has a characteristic dirty trash can smell). We have a great deal of resistance to it because is is quite literally A PART OF OUR BODIES. It is a commensal organism and as such not a killer.

STEC, aka E. coli O157H7 is a new kid on the block. It's normal E. coli that swiped the toxin gene from Shigella (as certain bacteria are inclined to do).

In microbiology, the presence of nonpathogenic E. coli is used as an indicator of fecal contamination, and therefore possible presence of Salmonella (a cause of food poisoning). With the emergence of STEC, it is also considered an indicator of possible STEC. But normal E. coli is our friend. If you try to eliminate it from the gastrointestinal tract of its host, you will KILL the host. The E. coli keeps harmful bacteria (like Clostridium) at bay, and is essential to our lives.

[Buzz Clik]

16. My girlfriend in college was working part time on a dairy farm.

She had the 5 am shift for milking. One day she had trouble with one of the machines and didn't have time to shower before class. The stank of cow dung had so penetrated ever pore and fiber that she damn near cleared the room.

[meganmonkey]

23. Heh. I lived/worked on a farm for a couple years

My first 6 months or so I worked on the dairy part of it. I lived in a little stone house/room about 20 feet from the barn.

One time a friend and I decided to go out to the civilized world to a real bar/restaurant. We showered and scrubbed, and we wore our sacred-shoes-which-never-touched-the-ground-at-the-farm, and nicer clothes that we kept seperate from all of our work clothes...

We thought we were super-clean and spiffy and fresh and normal.

That was, until we actually sat down at the restaurant, surrounded by smells of food and perfume and whatever else you smell in a place like that.

And we got a big whiff of....us. And by the looks on their faces, so did everyone around us. Whooops!

There's nothing you can do, when you're surroudned by poo, you smell like poo too...

[kestrel91316]

29. Dairy and feedlot cattle being fed silage and lots of grain have

especially nasty poop. And it's runny. Grass-fed, not so much, just nice grass-smelling cow pies.

[Buzz Clik]

39. Yeah, that's a good point.

One cannot really judge natural things when put in unnatural conditions.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

18. Sharp-pencil corporate farming seems to be the proximate cause here

Why has this kind of contamination become commonplace only during the past few years?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From http://www.time.com/time/health/printout/0,8816,1535476,00.html :

"Friday, Sep. 15, 2006

How Ready-to-Eat Spinach Is Only Part of the E. Coli Problem

A food safety expert says it likely came from processing the produce right in the fields, a practice that's become much more common

By ALICE PARK

"When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning to consumers on Thursday about E. coli contamination in bagged spinach, it didn't come as a surprise to Michael Doyle.... the director of food safety at the University of Georgia says that outbreaks like this one will only continue if produce manufacturers don't change their practices.

E. coli 0157 is a particularly nasty strain of the E. coli that lives and thrives in our digestive tract. Animals such as cows tolerate 0157 far better than people, and often shed the bacteria in their feces. The bacteria can then infect crops such as lettuce, spinach, onions, or even apples when contaminated manure is used as fertilizer, or when contaminated water is used to irrigate fields. Most recently, E. coli 0157 found in bagged salads packaged by Dole sickened over two dozen people in 2005.

These outbreaks, warns Doyle, are an inevitable by-product of the way that many fruit and vegetable manufacturers have streamlined their production „ and cut costs „ by doing some of the processing of their ready-to-eat produce right in the fields, and not in the more controlled atmosphere of a factory. He sees it as a dangerous practice that could contribute to contamination. "Two to three years ago, I was asked to go out and view what was going on in the fields when there was an outbreak associated with a fast food restaurant chain from their cut-up lettuce," he told TIME." Every company at the time was using the same concept to process head lettuce „ they would core the lettuce in the field, remove the outside leaves, and put it in chlorinated water. The goal is to reduce costs, because you don't have to take the waste from the factory and bring it back to the field. The problem is, they are working out in the dirt. There are so many different ways that E. coli can get into the food this way."

The FDA's director of Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Dr. Robert Brackett, recognizes the riskiness of such processing in the field, and sent a warning letter to the California growers that had provided the contaminated lettuce in last year's outbreak, noting that "claims that 'we cannot take action until we know the cause' are unacceptable." "

[SoCalDem]

24. How did our ancestors manage to survive?

Remember ...in "olden times", farmers used manure as fertilizer.. Farmers fed cattle the crop stubble and let them graze on pastures...used their manure to grow more crops...it was a CYCLE...it didn't used to kill people..

what has changed it since then??


As recently as the 70's, people routinely used manure as fertilizer.. When we lived in NM, I had a 40' x 40' garden, and the first thing we did every planting season, was to ask the guy we bought sides of beef from, to truck in some manure for us.. he brought it in and rototilled the ground for us..:shrug:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

25. By having ten to twenty kids per family.

Plenty of whom didn't survive to adulthood.

[Subdivisions]

26. Eeeewwwwww!

You are right though...why is that?

I said "eeeewwwww" because reading that is like reading what is in hot dogs. It's too much information! lol.

[trotsky]

27. In the "olden times" they didn't have the same deadly strains of E. coli.

Raw beef & hamburger used to be a delicacy. Steak Tartar.

Our overuse of antibiotics and feeding of grains and corn have led to new strains of E. coli that now make eating undercooked meat a real danger.

[SoCalDem]

28. BINGO... (better living through chemistry)

NOT !!!

[Gwerlain]

31. Errrmmm, most "chemical" or "inorganic" fertilizers...

come from rocks; limestone, for instance. And the bulk of the ones that don't are made with ammonia. Now, ammonia is an extremely simple molecule: NH3. And there's no way to tell the difference between ammonia made by the Haber process and ammonia that is "naturally occurring." Same with ammonium nitrate; though most of it is now made from this ammonia, it once was isolated from guano; this was common until the 1950s in America (and I mean the two continents, not the US). Note as well that seabird guano (which is common in the Caribbean) contains several compounds that are used in "chemical" fertilizers: urea, ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and phosphates are commonly present. It was mined for this purpose until much of it ran out, and this mining was responsible for considerable environmental damage, particularly to the seabirds' nesting sites. This is still a problem today, though less than it once was.

The primary reason for eating organic vegetables and fruits is to avoid the pesticides; the fertilizer issues are negligable or even immaterial, unless "non-organic" fertilizers are misused, and the soil composition is ignored (which can happen if a large agricultural company is involved; after all, who was it didn't do maintenance on that pipeline unp in Alaska? Talk about crapping in your own nest...), which can result in erosion and destruction of good farmland. In addition, concentrated fertilizer (and this includes "organic" fertilizers!) can get into the environment and cause various sorts of problems. But if you've ever driven by a field that's just been sprayed with methyl bromide, a common fungicide, and another time driven by a freshly-fertilized field, perhaps even the same one, you won't have any questions about which one's the real problem.

I have found, however, that you have to be prepared to accept a certain amount of spoilage; i.e., apples with worms, etc. I expect that the farmer who uses organic methods has more in-field spoilage as well; so this acts along with the more expensive methodology to increase the price. It's a price I'm willing to pay, but then again I've got the money. I don't think that poor people here in the US, much less African or Asian poor, should be exposed to a bunch of chemicals I won't eat. The crime of it all is that they don't have much choice.

Now, organic or not, when the hell is someone going to start growing tomatoes that taste like something other than cardboard??? 'Cause friends, I've had plenty of organic square tomatoes, and they're no better than the square non-organic tomatoes. Something happened to the seed stock, and no one apparently gets any that's better. They look great; but they taste like cardboard.

[SoCalDem]

34. Our vegetable garden was fantastic UNTIL one morning when I HEARD

a weird clicking noise.. went out on the patio and saw it MOVING.. we had been invaded by chinch bugs (eeew)..They ate their way through a lot of the garden..but what we did harvest was magnificent.. wonderful juicy tomatoes, more green beans than any family should have to endure, watermelons crawling all over the yard (who knew they were so prolific, cucumbers by the grocery sack-ful..

I had to give up the garden too early because we killed 3 rattlesnakes in the yard within a week, and I was afraid to go into the garden after that (I was never a good "weeder") :scared:

[Gwerlain]

40. My parents...

both have green thumbs. I enjoyed excellent home-grown produce through much of my childhood. We always had better strawberries than you could buy at the supermarket, and I still remember those tomatoes. And the peaches? To die for. No kidding. You had to take a shower after you ate one. Or wear a rain slicker.

One of my retirement goals is to become somewhere near as good at it as they were. I've grown the giant zucchini that tried to invade the house (would you believe leaves three feet across???) and several times had excellent luck with crookneck squash (I like summer squash, but the autumn varieties are simply not food by my definition).

Of course, there were drawbacks- I still tell the story of the time my Dad used a broomstick to punch holes around the apple tree, then filled them with fertilizer and watered hell out of it. We got sacks- and I don't mean five or ten, I mean like twenty-five or thirty full-sized paper grocery bags chock-full- of apples off that thing. We later concluded that it was grown from a commercial strain of apple trees. We had applesauce. Apple butter. Apple cobbler. Baked apples. The freezer was full of frozen applesauce which we ate for the next two years. We gave apples and applesauce and apple butter to all the neighbors until they didn't want any more. We ate apples, and more apples. I've never gotten over it. Luckily, I still like apple butter and applesauce; but I just can't scrape up any enthusiasm for just plain apples any more.

Snakes in a garden!

Sorry. Just couldn't resist.

Now that's some pest problem.

[SoCalDem]

41. The first snake was "found" by my son , who was two..

That was the first time I ever actively killed anything.. I was terrified, but I whacked it with a rake, and flipped it over the stone wall.. We all went inside (my boys were playing outside when they came across it..boys were 2, 3 & 7) After that, I made them stay inside for weeks.. :)

after that snake, we had another one on the side of the house (my son still has the rattles...7 chambers..)

and one on the stone wall..

our neighbors had one on their patio, right by the sliding door, and another one coiled around their mailbox post..

It was a very snake-y September..

[AngryAmish]

38. I get heirloom tomatoes at the local farmer's market

I'm not sold on the whole organic thing but I do like to eat tasty things. The quality of heirloom tomatoes is clearly superior. I'm lucky be cause there is twice a week an organic farmers market nearby. It just tastes better. However it is more expensive generally and the people who shop there are unbearably smug.

[AngryAmish]

36. They had shockingly low life expectancy as a whole

[warrens]

30. That's probably not what happened

It was probably used as fertilizer or infected ground water, then was sucked up by the spinach and lettuce. It seems odd that they would isolate one ranch, though. That's not that much cow poop. I wonder if there's a large cattle feeding operation nearby. They have major cow poop problems, and if they were composting it, it could drain into the ground water easily.

[KansDem]

33. Well, now my kids have a reason to REALLY not like it! (eom)