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Are Plastic Bag Bans Making People Sick?
theodp writes "A paper by Wharton's Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright suggested that San Francisco's eco-friendly ban on plastic bags might actually be killing people. Klick and Wright found that food-borne illnesses in San Francisco increased 46% after the bag ban went into effect in 2007, with no such uptick in neighboring counties. Most likely, the authors concluded, this was due to the fact that people were putting their food into dirty reusable bags and not washing them afterward. But Tomas Aragon, an epidemiologist at UC Berkeley and health officer for the city of San Francisco, begs to differ, arguing that in order to establish a link between the bag ban and illnesses, the authors would have to show that the same people who are using reusable bags are also the ones getting sick. Aragon offers an alternative hypothesis for the recent rise in deaths related to intestinal infections, noting that a large portion of the cases in San Francisco involve C. difficile enterocolitis, a disease that's often coded as food-borne illness in hospitals which has become more common in lots of places since 2005, all around the U.S., Canada, and Europe (for yet-unexplained reasons). 'The increase in San Francisco,' he suggests, 'probably reflects this international increase.'"
A "bag" of woven metal could take advantage of the oligodynamic effect. Problem solved.
Those things are about as dishwasher friendly as a cat with a scratching post. My question is why aren't they using paper bags? Those things are far better than any reusable bag I've ever had. On the plus side, they're multipurpose as well as 100/% recyclable.
Most supermarkets round here (and most in Europe) have two kinds of reusable bag -- one that's sold for between 10-50p (depending on taxes), and is essentially a thicker plastic bag with better handles, like one you might get from a luxury clothes shop.
The other kind is £1 or more, and made from some kind of durable plastic sheeting. It's not possible to screw these up into a ball, and they last pretty much forever.
(Paper bags, if used only once, can be worse for the environment as they're heavier, so the transport cost is greater.)
http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/plastic-bag-levy-nets-166m-in-10-years-185605.html http://www.hpsc.ie/hpsc/A-Z/Gastroenteric/Clostridiumdifficile/CdifficileSurveillance/CdifficileEnhancedSurveillance/Reports/File,13565,en.pdf Shows a rise in C Diff in the last 2 years, but long after introduction of plastic bag levy. Also shows that most cases are still sourced as Hospital based infections. Seriously... both are the first links on a Google search. Lack of sources is hardly a defense for you snarky comment and bout of laziness.
San Fran has a fairly low incidence of people bathing regularly.
At least that's what my nose told me the last time I was there.
Well joking aside, something that people are forgetting is that California and their wonderful love of all things organic and of course there are plenty of idiots who do organic gardening with unpurified human waste. So cross contamination would be very easy to pick up that way, I seem to remember that there was a huge outbreak of e.coli in europe regarding brussel sprouts a few years back linked to exactly that.
When you get contamination into a plastic bag that's not cleaned, or sterilized, you're cross contaminating everything else you put in there as well. The ministry of health here in Ontario put out a similar warning after a small outbreak. I think it was 15 or 25 ill linked to a reusable bag and a dinner party, I'll have to see if I can find the release on it. It was back 6ish years ago.
Om, nomnomnom...