E. Coli: Don’t Blame the Sprouts!

One hundred thousand E. coli can dance on the head of a pin; it may only take 50 to make you sick enough to die. Benign E. coli are everywhere, even in your own pink gut right now, and all E. coli can live on (or in) things as different as sprouts, burgers, and water. But if you were able to trace back far enough, their reservoir is most likely the gut of a mammal: a goat, a sheep, a deer, even a majestic elk or a dog. They’re most often associated with cows.

The dangerous E. coli are called STEC (Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli, for the name of their horrific poison, and pronounced ess-teck). STEC usually migrate to food through direct or indirect contact with the contents of the animal’s intestinal tract: dung, not to put too fine a point on it. Whether the growth or even origin of STEC—which have only been associated with human illness for 30 years—could have resulted in part from feeding cattle grain (as opposed to their natural grass), or was aided by industrial agriculture’s unnecessary reliance on prophylactic antibiotics (a shameful story, but one that must wait), may never be known.

What is known is that if you keep STEC out of beef you partially solve the problem, and if you keep manure off other foods you partially solve the problem, too. It isn’t easy, and it’s never going to be foolproof, but these are the steps to take. If you’re the cattle industry, you’d rather blame the whole thing on sprouts that were “somehow” contaminated. (Ban sprouts! No one really likes them anyway.) But blaming the sprouts is like blaming your nose for a virus-containing sneeze: That STEC came from somewhere, and in its history is an animal’s gut.

Because they’re grown in a warm, moist, gut-like environment, sprouts are an excellent vehicle for maintaining and maybe even reproducing STEC (indeed, so excellent that the Centers for Disease Control un-recommends them), but their involvement may never be proven.

Still, it’s likely that when thousands of people were sickened by E. coli in Germany this year, they had eaten 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 kind we must do our best to prevent, the kind that’s magnified by combining huge lots of food from dozens of different sources and handling them all together. Remember, 50 STEC are enough to make you sick; one head of lettuce with a few hundred thousand bacteria, tossed together with a few tons of uncontaminated greens, then sold in thousands of packages, can mess up a lot of people.

Outbreaks of the deadly kinds of STEC—there are at least seven really toxic strains—are common enough. But these outbreaks are the tip of the iceberg; there are tens of thousands of “sporadic” cases from STEC every year in the United States alone, most of them unreported but no less deadly for that.

Although the U.S. has a pretty good track record when it comes to identifying and fighting STEC—thanks to much struggle on the part of lawyers and public health officials, and sound thinking in the U.S.D.A. and F.D.A.—we’re falling way behind in preventing outbreaks like the current one, and we are even further behind in preventing the sporadic ones, those that get no headlines, remain unreported, and probably comprise the majority of cases. As is so common these days, a lack of funding and political will is the root of the problem.

The STEC that caused the infamous Jack in the Box outbreak of 1993 is formally called E. coli O157:H7. The U.S. has zero tolerance for that STEC, because in 1994—against the predictable protests of the meat industry—O157 was labeled an “adulterant,” which means that any food in which it’s discovered is recalled; happens all the time, though sometimes too late. There are, as I said, other STEC just as murderous, and we have a much more lenient policy about their presence in food: they’re unregulated. Their presence in food is, legally speaking, just fine.

To slow the deadly effects of STEC, we need more and better basic and applied research to identify them and test for them. We also need more testing of water used for irrigation and washing; reduced animal intrusions; alert farmworkers (an aside: people tend to be more alert if they’re more valued and less overworked and underpaid); and increased testing before people get sick and better reporting when they do get sick. (Less cow manure would help, but that isn’t about to happen.) All of these steps take money.

Even more important, we need to immediately acknowledge that O157 is not the only deadly STEC out there (non-O157 STEC has been found in up to 6 percent of a random sampling of meat, and not just hamburger), an acknowledgment that—of course—the meat industry is unwilling to make. And we need to declare those other STEC as “adulterants” and get them out of the food supply to the best of our ability. The two agencies that can act on this are the U.S.D.A. and F.D.A., and both are hamstrung by budget policy (the F.D.A. needs more money for inspection; the House wants to give it less) and, of course, by the meat lobby and its allies.

Public health—arguably among the most important reasons for society’s existence in the first place—has somehow become a “liberal” cause and therefore unfashionable. But if the origin of these illnesses were bio-terrorism, money would be no object and even politics might be shunted aside. The fact is that a huge and powerful lobby would rather see a few thousand annual underreported deaths and the occasional high-visibility outbreak than submit to further regulation and smaller profits. Especially if that outbreak is a world away. But next time it might not be.

JUNE 7, 2011