Infections

Today's Washington Post has an article about the antibiotic-resistant infections sweeping the nations' hospitals. This made me think of Steve Gilliard of the News Blog, who has suffered a relapse in his fight to get out of the hospital and get well. He was already weak from serious kidney and heart problems; now he has a system-wide infection and can only be visited by people in what his friend Jen calls "bunnysuits". Steve was the first 'big' blogger ever to link to this site, so we have a special place in our heart for him and pray for his recovery.

It also made me think about a factor not mentioned in the article, Big Food's aggressive use of antibiotics in the production of meat. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 70% -- seventy percent! -- of the antibiotics used in this country are used on animals being fattened for slaughter:

It is livestock producers, however, who use the vast majority of antibiotics produced in the United States. An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs produced in this country are used for nontherapeutic purposes such as accelerating animal growth and compensating for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on large-scale confinement facilities known as "factory farms." This translates to about 25 million pounds of antibiotics and related drugs fed every year to livestock for nontherapeutic purposes—almost eight times the amount given to humans to treat disease.

Another reason to become a vegetarian.


1999 Guardian (uk) series: Antibiotics in our food

Time: Playing Chicken With Our Antibiotics
Overtreatment is creating dangerously resistant germs (2002)

Center for Science in the Public Interest: Antibiotic Resistance Project

Eat Locally

Looks like a factory to me. Without a union. {Original caption: Fields of greens in California near Natural Selection Foods, which has been implicated in the outbreak.} (Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)
E coli in spinach? Weird, huh? It's all about the corporate farming. It's cheaper to feed cows grain than let them graze on open fields. On their crappy diet, lowering acidity in their stomachs, E coli flourishes. Instead of taking up space on land that can be turned into McMansions, cows are penned cheek to jowl in feedlots, which generate huge amounts of manure: poop. Poop is left in great open ponds that flood when it rains, sending E coli out into the world. So now even your spinach is suspect.

DailyKos: The Poop on Spinach

Starting a few decades ago, Americans outsmarted Mother Nature. We switched our cows' diets from grass and hay to grain. Eating grain isn't particularly good for the cows, but together with antibiotics and hormones, we can house them in feedlots, fatten them up, and slaughter them quicker than if we had let them graze at their own speed in a pasture. Mother Nature, it would seem, is anti-business.

The new diet changed the acidity in cows' digestive tracts and the close living quarters led to a lot of cows and a lot of poop living side by side. That's when the new strain of E. coli, O157:H7, came on the scene. When cows eat grass, the acidity in their digestive tracts usually kills the bacteria, but grain fed cows' tummies do not.

So the mere fact that E. coli O157:H7 got into the water at all is a result of our need for cheap feedlot beef - and one could take it a step further in exploring the interconnectedness of the food system, because cheap feedlot beef is possible due to cheap corn, soy, oilseed, and other commodities, subsidized by government policies that encourage high production and rock bottom prices. Those policies hurt the farmers who produce the commodities (corn, soy, wheat, etc), but they provide an incentive to anyone who wants to use the commodities as cheap inputs for their products - such as feedlot beef.

So many cows in such a small space contaminated the water that presumably flooded the spinach fields. This was the 20th such epidemic linked to lettuce and spinach from Monterey County in the past decade. The outbreaks have caused over 400 sicknesses and 2 deaths. The current epidemic was also felt economically by everyone from growers to farm workers, truckers, packagers, restaurants, grocers, and more.

The LA Times gives us the scope of the problem, without ever mentioning the important connection between corporate farming methods (grain vs. grazing) and its contribution to the E coli outbreaks:

LATimes: E. Coli Pervades Harvest Area
Salinas Valley waterways are known to carry the bacteria that poisoned at least 145 people and killed one who ate tainted spinach.

Better Living (?) Through Chemistry

From unknownnews.org, this article summarizes my feelings about eating organic food. Nice idea, but when you get down to it, does it make much of a difference?

Don't eat this, don't eat that!

Our world is totally contaminated.

Our foods -- all of them -- have toxins in them on them. Even the organic foods are contaminated, because the soil is contaminated, and the water. Organic veggies have antibiotics in them, and how do you think it got there? Fertilizer from cows with growth hormones and antibiotics produces plants with antibiotics in them. Even if the farmer gets organic raised cow poop for his garden, farms upstream have runoff, rivers have sewer dumps, and the rain falls on farms and cities, and the runoff from chemical-contaminated rains fill the rivers and water the fields.

The food containers, air, water, all these are infused with chemicals and pollutants and they are inside us too. Each of us carries a heavy "chemical load" before we are even born. None of us are "pure" and chemical free.

You can try to eliminate some of the toxins from your life, but it's futile. For poor folks it's almost impossible. Stress kills, bad food, sugar, sucrose, mercury in vaccines ... We are seeing three-headed toads and other animal mutations, fish are changing sex. I know the wild animals eat organic foods and don't shop at supermarkets or drink Coke, yet they are mutating. What happens to them is going to be happening to us.

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For me the answer is to not fret every waking moment over what I eat or don't eat. As for "food safety," in this age that is a relative term, so be reasonable but not phobic.

I will die. My quality of life will go downhill, because decay, entropy, and dissolution is the pattern of what life over time becomes in this world.

I can preoccupy myself endlessly questioning which additives, allergens, foods, or chemicals hurt me the most, and avoid them. You can find out what hurts you the most, and avoid that. When it changes avoid the new irritants. It's endless paranoia for you and endless profits for certain markets.