Slashdot Mirror
Technology Vs. E.coli Outbreaks
jcatcw writes "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found the patterns of illness in both of the recent E. coli outbreaks — packaged spinach and Taco Bell — using PulseNet, which uses a customized version of BioNumerics to conduct comparisons and analysis of samples in a SQL Server database. PulseNet holds the DNA fingerprints provided by pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). It operates at a national level and can link small, localized cases in a nationwide pattern. 'We can now see the connections you would not have seen before, which has revolutionized the world of food safety,' according to John Besser, clinical laboratory manager at the Minnesota Department of Health and a member of the Association of Public Health Laboratories."
The point is that individual cases and the associated behaviors can be aligned and collated to trace the source of an outbreak. It is revolutionary in that many fewer people are getting sick.
There is no way to stop the spread of a disease directly with a database, but this system was fast and accurate enough to track down the source before the outbreak became something more like an epidemic. Taco Bell is so popular that this could have added up to hundreds of thousands of cases before someone realized the source.
FairTax baby!
You have obviously not eaten at taco bell very often. Horrible diarrhea comes even without the food poisoning.
The spinach contamination a few months ago was traced to a field about 30 miles from where I live. The speculation is that some wild pigs (boars) were snacking on some spinach in the field and and an infected pig took a dump. It's probably not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last. Shit happens.
I think a bigger problem is how so much clean spinach was destroyed as a result. The pig probably ruined a few heads of spinach. Those few heads got mixed in with a bunch of clean spinach as the spinach was pre-packaged. So that one pig's dump killed more people than would have died a few years ago if they had eaten head spinach. We could irradiate the packaged produce to clean the spinach further than its current 3 wash cycle but some people won't eat irradiated food. Even still, there's probably a variety of bug out there that would survive x-raying. If you eat spinach from a head of spinach, you run the risk of not cleaning it sufficiently as well as dealing with the multiple number of hands that have touched it between the field and your mouth. Never mind intentional contamination like the Tylenol killer came up with or the zealots in Oregon who contaminated a salad bar so voter turnout would be low.
In short, there's no way to guarantee that every piece of food that goes into your mouth is benign. With techniques such as the one described in the article, we'll hear of more people dying from contaminated food than we otherwise would have. People will panic, food will be destroyed, lawyers will sue and we'll plod along eating slightly more expensive food as a result. Will we be any better off? Probably not.
In fact, we may be worse off. As people demand more safety, government power will grow. We won't be safer, but the government will be larger which means we'll all be the poorer.