Major Beef Recall

by Natasha Chart

categories: Food Safety, Health, Indigenous Rights

Published May 22, 2009 @ 04:46AM PT

These complaints about food safety just never get old. I guess it's more work for me, but look, I'd just rather live in a country where this kind of thing wasn't a running story.

From Leila Atassi at the Plain Dealer, via Ellinorianne on DailyKos, who provides a link to the USDA list of affected products:

.... A 7-year-old Cleveland girl died Sunday from an E. coli infection that local health officials say could be linked to a massive ground-beef recall issued Thursday from an Illinois-based company.

Health officials did not identify the girl or provide details of the circumstances that led to her death. But Cleveland Health Director Matthew Carroll said the case might be the latest in a cluster of E. coli infections traced to Valley Meats LLC of Coal Valley, Ill.

The company pulled nearly 100,000 pounds of hamburger patties Thursday after a U.S. Department of Agriculture investigation confirmed that three Cleveland-area residents were infected by eating the same tainted ground beef. ...

There's also currently a beef recall from a Houston-area store, and in New York, a recall of Alex & George (A&G) brand beef patties.

As the article about the New York recall notes, the strain E. coli 0157:H7 is a particularly dangerous variety of a very common gut bacteria in humans and animals. There's evidence that cows kept on pasture have less to negligible traces of this strain compared to cows kept indoors. And as a bovine literature review demonstrates (pdf), in general, feeding cows barley, corn or distillers grains seems to increase the presence of E. coli 0157:H7 as opposed to forage grass feeding which tends to reduce that bacterial population for reasons that aren't yet clear. (Giving the animals probiotics and adding a modest amount of citrus peel to their diet seems to help, also.)

We're not at "largest beef recall in history" territory yet, as we were last year, (and more on that later today), but the cows mostly have sick gut bacteria for the same reasons people are sick in this country: too much sugar (grain feed for cows is the equivalent of humans eating table sugar by the spoonful) in all our diets, too much meat in ours.

If consumption could be curbed to where factory feedlots weren't seen as a business necessity anymore, it'd be healthier for everyone. I know there are people who will say, well, it was just one kid and thank goodness she didn't starve to death. The same excuse gets trotted out when you point to people with cancer or birth defects from pesticide poisoning.

And if it's you, or your kid, that always just sounds like bunk. It should sound like bunk to all of us.

'You can't kill people with your product' shouldn't be considered an unreasonable restriction on doing business, yeah?

(Photo credit: elecnix on Flickr.)