By: Dr. Charles Benbrook, Chief Scientist, The Organic Center

Over 950 people have now gotten sick from Salmonella-tainted tomatoes, or peppers, or salsa, or who knows what.  The media have been so focused, and maybe weary of the tomato story, that a huge outbreak of E. coli O157 in processed beef products has gone largely unnoticed.  

What started out in early June as a modest recall of 531,707 pounds of beef processed by Nebraska Beef Ltd., has become a 5.3 million pound recall.  Over 40 confirmed cases of illness in Michigan and Ohio have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control.  Twenty-two people have been hospitalized, and one person has contracted the sometimes deadly complication hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).  

The number of sick people associated with the Nebraska Beef contamination episode is sure to grow much larger because of the extraordinarily high current ratio of people hospitalized to total number of cases – 22 out of 41, or nearly 50%.  

Despite intense scientific focus on understanding the genesis of E. coli O157 and Salmonella, the many amazing steps and major investments by companies to keep these pathogens out of meat and produce, and the near constant red-alert status from FDA and CDC, the problem seems to be getting worse.  The tomatoes-or-whatever-Salmonella outbreak may prove to be the worst such outbreak in history by virtually every measure.

Perhaps changes are afoot in the food system that have fundamentally tilted the playing field in favor of these bacterial pathogens, and we had better look under some forbidden rocks if we want to reduce the frequency of illness, and human suffering associated with these major contamination episodes.

Mixing fresh produce from multiple locations in repacking sheds makes disease outbreak epidemiology extremely difficult.  Maybe it also makes disease outbreak prevention more difficult?  Is it time to rethink how produce moves from the farm to consumers, with the interests of public health driving the outcome, instead of shaving a few cents off of the way we move a case of tomatoes from Mexico, through Florida, to Boston?

Without a livestock market for the byproducts of ethanol production, the economics of corn-based ethanol goes up in smoke, and the net energy contribution goes from maybe barely positive to unspeakably disastrous, given how much taxpayers have invested in this “solution.”  But what about emerging evidence that E. coli O157 and mycotoxins are finding ways into the distillers grain byproducts of ethanol production that are fed to livestock?  Has anyone factored those costs into the net “benefit” assessment of corn-based ethanol?

The next time you see one of those sickening videos of a spent dairy cow being lifted with a front end loader, or shocked with electricity, or worse, so she can stagger onto the kill floor, think about what put her there.  

This can be, and sometimes is, one of the costs of pushing a dairy herd to produce 28,000 pounds of milk per year or more by feeding a ration so high in grain and energy, and lacking in forages and fiber, that the acid in her digestive system eats through her gut wall, creating an inside passage for bacteria that will then, in turn, challenge the best food safety systems.   

That cow gets into such run-down condition in part because of the effectiveness of the drugs that keep her producing, and bacterial counts down in her milk, despite the stresses she is under and the gradual breakdown of her body and organ systems.  

And last, think E. coli O157.  The increase in risk of E. coli O157 shedding by stressed out, sick dairy animals is well proven and may explain much of the recent increase in human cases.  The more E.coli O157 shed by stressed cattle, the more pressure on all our preventive systems and food safety technologies, from the spinach and tomato and pepper fields of the Salinas Valley and Florida, to the slaughterhouses of Nebraska.

One of the unrecognized benefits of a growing organic farming and food industry in America is that there is now close to a critical mass of people working to prevent the conditions that give rise to food safety problems.  The conventional food system and conventional farmers have accomplished much in increasing production and lowering food costs, but they have sometimes not paid enough attention to the food safety costs of doing business.  

Organic farmers and food companies do not have all the answers, and face some unique food safety problems of their own, but at least they are consciously pursuing a fundamentally different path where plant and animal health comes first, and higher production second.  

I am not alone among scientists who are convinced this is inherently the right approach to produce safe, nutritious food.  My gut sense is the big breakthroughs in advancing food safety are going to come from prevention, not better detection or more powerful chemical washes, or radiation.  

For this reason, the forces pushing and pulling organic production systems and approaches into the mainstream of the food system may do so at a pace and to a degree unimaginable a few years ago.

Note: Originally published in the July 2008 edition of The Scoop, a free monthly e-newsletter published by The Organic Center. To subscribe, visit www.organic-center.org.