Beef recall during holiday weekend
New Mexican's may want to request their burgers well-done during this holiday weekend's barbecue festivities.
Kroger has announced a voluntary recall of ground beef in its New Mexico Smith's and City Market stores due to an E Coli scare which has has harmed 40 people in Michigan and Ohio. The recall comes after a nation-wide recall by Nebraska Beef, Ltd, "expanding a recall announced earlier this week to include all 5.3 million pounds of meat it produced for ground beef between May 16 and June 26." Although none of the tainted meat has been found in New Mexico, Kroger is taking precautionary measures because of its distribution of Nebraska Beef, ground beef products.
According to the FDA:
The illness is characterized by severe cramping (abdominal pain) and diarrhea which is initially watery but becomes grossly bloody. Occasionally vomiting occurs. Fever is either low-grade or absent. The illness is usually self-limited and lasts for an average of 8 days. Some individuals exhibit watery diarrhea only.
This is not the first time that Nebraska Beef has been in the news regarding the sanitation of its beef products. In 2003, a District Federal Judge struck down an effort by the Agriculture Department to shut down Nebraska Beef for repeated violations of sanitary practices. According to the New York Times:
A court ruling last week in Nebraska has dealt a devastating blow to the nation's program for policing meat safety. It calls into question the government's authority to shut down meat plants for repeatedly violating sanitary standards designed to combat bacterial contamination and outbreaks of food-borne illness.
Judge Joseph Bataillon of the Federal District Court rebuffed an Agriculture Department effort to shut down the operations of Nebraska Beef, an Omaha slaughterhouse with numerous citations for violating standard sanitary operating procedures. The plant was chosen for special scrutiny after the discovery last year of deadly E. coli bacteria in ground beef produced by a Nebraska Beef customer. In granting a temporary restraining ordering blocking the closure, the judge elevated the economic interests of a local employer over public health while questioning the government's power to act under current law.
Much of the meet in ground beef comes from grain-fed cattle. Some studies have attributed grain-fed cattle to higher instances of E Coli infection. According to a 1998 Cornell University report:
"Most bacteria are killed by the acid of stomach juice, but E. coli from grain-fed cattle are resistant to strong acids," explains James B. Russell, a USDA microbiologist and faculty member of the Cornell Section of Microbiology. "When people eat foods contaminated with acid-resistant E. coli -- including pathogenic strains like O157:H7 -- the chance of getting sick increases."...
In studies performed at Cornell, beef cattle fed grain-based rations typical of commercial feedlots had 1 million acid-resistant E. coli, per gram of feces, and dairy cattle fed only 60 percent grain also had high numbers of acid-resistant bacteria. In each case, the high counts could be explained by grain fermentation in the intestines.
By comparison, cattle fed hay or grass had only acid-sensitive E. coli, and these bacteria were destroyed by an "acid shock" that mimicked the human stomach, the microbiologists report in Science.
With grass being cattle's natural diet, grain-fed cattle are very prone to illness, a fact that explains an ongoing business partnership between large-scale cattle ranching and the pharmaceutical industry. Over 70% of the antibiotics in the U.S. market are consumed in commercial cattle production.
Along with preventing disease, low-dose antibiotics administered to livestock has been shown to increase the speed at which they reach maturity for slaughter. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year:
Low doses of antibiotics in animal feeds have been shown to boost the speed of food-to-muscle conversion by 5 percent, and can prevent the spread of disease in the tight quarters of modern factory farms.
But as early as 1963, British researchers tied the emergence of drug-resistant strains of salmonella in humans to antibiotics fed to cattle. Among the drugs routinely found in animal feed are erythromycin, penicillin and streptomycin. Critics warn that the use of antibiotics in feed at low dosages helps to breed resistant bacteria in the gut of farm animals - threatening the future of these drugs for use in animals or humans.
While bugers and dogs on the grille typically define our patriotic holiday ingestion, this 4th I'll be displaying my American stripes with a slice of apple pie... and a veggie burger.
Comments:
Posted 07/06/2008 19:35 with
Interesting point about grain-fed cattle and e. coli in the intestine, Benito. I hadn’t heard any of that before. Do you know why Americans eat so much grain-fnished cattle? Because we like it better. If you looked at a piece of grain-finished beef (almost all cattle are fed grass and finished on grain) next to a piece of grass-fed beef you could see that the grain-finished meat is much fattier. And despite what our doctors tell us about eating leaner meats, fat equals flavor, and we can’t get enough of that fatty beef.
Also, I eat steaks medium rare, but I ALWAYS order my burgers medium, precisely because of the risk of e. coli. Why is it always ground beef that’s getting tainted with e. coli? Because contamination on the surface of a steak or roast will be killed by direct heat on the grill, in the pan or in the oven. But contamination on the surface of a piece of meat that is GROUND before being cooked spreads that danger throughout the meat. Cooking may kill e. coli on the surface of a burger, but not inside.
Posted 07/08/2008 11:43 with
Thanks for the input Gwyneth. I would most likely concur with the statement that the vast majority of the public like fatty beef that comes from grain-fed cows, however, I’m confident that the market didn’t switch to this form of production because of the public’s taste nuances. The market changed for mass production, efficiency and the bottom line and the public’s perception of what was expected when eating meat changed along with it. Same could be said for MSG as well as high fructose corn syrup. I don’t think American’s prefer their bread with high fructose corn syrup, it just happens to be what’s substituted for traditional sugar and brown sugar in 90% of the breads on the market.
It’s also important to note that force feeding an animal something that it was not made to digest can be perceived as cruel. A cow would die from the grain feeding if antibiotics were not added to its feed and the animal is slaughtered when it is at its largest and sickest… right before it would die naturally. Since we all pay money to subsidize the feeding process, I think its important for people to know that they are eating very sick animals at nearly every meal containing beef. I say that not as a proselytizing vegan or vegetarian, but as someone who loves beef and finds the common manufacturing process of it quite disturbing.