NEW YORK TIMES – Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.
Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.
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That’s Capitalism !!! PROFITS OVER PEOPLE’S SAFETY !!! Wins EVERY TIME !!! Then when DISASTER STRIKES, the Corporations DENY, DENY, DENY !!! Corporations and GOD-LESS CAPITALISM are no friend of Humanity !!!
damn, for how long would she be paralyzed? or she got no chance? Its a shame, as young as she is. Doesn’t look bad either.
Bet the hamburger was raw inside. Properly cooked food would have prevented the problem.
Right on, #4. Hamburger should always be cooked to 160 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle.
It is nearly impossible to completely avoid contamination the surface of the meat when gutting a critter, especially cattle. Intestines tend to leak and the fecal matter touches the surface of the meat, contaminating it with e-coli and a host of other bacteria. Ground beef is made of numerous cuts of beef with multiple surfaces, all of which are potentially contaminated. If the surface of a steak has e-coli, cooking immediately kills the pathogen and the center of the cut is not contaminated, therefore you can eat a rare steak with no danger of infection. A rare hamburger can contain numerous bits of contaminated surface within the interior of the patty.
Ground beef should really be irradiated if the meat originates from a factory slaughter house. A professional butcher who slaughters in-house is usually highly skilled and will not allow meat that may have been contaminated (the stuff near the intestines) to be ground for hamburger. They will use that meat for sausages that will be fully cooked and smoked. They also don’t put lips and butts in their homemade hot dogs.
#1, you’re somewhat correct about how it’s all about the bottom line. However, these factory slaughterhouses give the consumers what they want, the cheapest meat they can buy and this is the end result. Go to a reputable butcher who takes the time to properly gut the animal to avoid contamination and who is selective about the cuts in the ground beef, but you’ll pay more.
Over-cook everything that gets cooked. Tastes
like crap but you will be way healthier. Won’t
stop botulism or mad-cow but just about everything
else.
Uffdah!
Cursor_
I think we should stop all this government regulation of meat safety.
After all, private industry will protect us against unsafe foods, won’t they?
#4 said, “Intestines tend to leak and the fecal matter touches the surface of the meat…”
This is why I insist my cows have an enema before I’ll have sex with them.
Mama didn’t follow proper food preparation rules. Sorry about that but you always cook meat until it is done and make a point to avoid cross contamination.
Ya know, nobody ever heard of E.coli before the 1980s. Then suddenly there was the incident at a Jack in the Box. And now it’s treated as a normal part of modern life. Bullsh*t. It thing the strain got loose from some secret bioweapons lab. They’ve been using E.coli for years, as an experimental organism to play god with. It wouldn’t surprise me that a batch went down the drain, one day. And some cows lapped it up, downstream.
Anyway, the solution is simple. Do the same thing they did to eliminate Small Pox, world wide. And if everyone just quit eating ground beef for a few months. The industry would go into overdrive to solve the problem. Of course this won’t stop the US military from force feeding the troops with ground beef. They’ll single-handedly come to the industry’s defense and salvation, if nobody else does. “Soldier, you eat that cow burger or it’s a Court Martial for you!” And you can bet that “military beef” will be billed to the taxpayer at quadruple the cost.
Our local Target store is now selling ground beef, cheaper than anywhere else. But who the hell knows where is comes from? And what it might be laced with? I’m gonna try to convince my family unit to abstain from ground beef, for a time. Anyone could make their own with most Food Processors. But it would be healthier and cheaper, in the long run, to make less use of beef all together.
#10
You sound scared. You know you have e.coli in you right now don’t you? You also have many many other bacterias and stuff in your system. Sure they may not be the dangerous ones but they are still e.coli
#1, #7 Looks like someone else besides me is ridiculing the libertarians. 🙂
Seriously, they’d say this is OK. We don’t need those silly regulations about safe food. It’s the automagical mysterious super duper invisible hand of capitalism at work. All this woman has to do is user her meager life savings to sue some huge corporation (whichever one she can find, if she can) that has lots of expensive lawyers. Totally fair battle there. Not.
And then, if enough people die or are paralyzed by this tainted food coming from wherever it’s coming from, somehow, magically, if enough poor people sue this company (that we still don’t know which one it is) then that company will eventually be forced to stop producing tainted food. Somehow. And all those people up to then who were killed or hurt by this tainted food… enjoy your freedom from burdensome government regulation, suckers.
Or:
1. We figure out what it takes to make safe food.
2. We require that American food manufacturers follow those standards.
See? No dying or suing necessary.
What most people don’t realize is the Department of Agriculture regulates meat production and preparation. Yup, the very same people helping the meat industry to maximize their efficiency is also in charge of seeing that they do so in clean environments.
Just because it was stamped USDA Inspected does not mean it is wholesome, not contaminated, or even what it claims to be. It only means the inspector had some ink for his stamp pad that day.
Well dang, the libertarians are shy today… nary a one come out to explain how people dying from tainted food is a good thing.
#15, Phydeau,
Well of course it is. Dead people can’t complain about the lack of health care or squander their precious taxes on things they should be responsible for.
The present meat inspection method is known as “poke and sniff”. Yep, just visual inspection and a sniff test.
No advanced chemical test strips, no bio lab checks, and hardly any inspectors. These are the gifts the GOP gave us. They even wanted to make all meat inspection voluntary, done by the meat companies themselves.
yeah that would have worked great.