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CDC: Do Not Eat Any Romaine Lettuce Until Further Notice (wired.com)
Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out an unusually strong statement telling Americans to toss any romaine lettuce in any form: whole, chopped, pre-bagged into Caesar salads, combined into spring mix, and so on. The warning covered not just homes but retailers and restaurants, and came with a recommendation to empty any fridge where romaine has been stored, and wash it out with soap and warm water. From a report: The CDC said it was making the recommendation to not eat, serve or sell any romaine lettuce because 32 people in 11 states, plus 18 people in Ontario and Quebec, have been made ill by E. coli O157:H7, which causes very serious illness because it produces a toxin that destroys cells lining the intestines and kidneys. The patients are all infected with the same strain, based on genetic fingerprinting, and the only thing they have in common is that they all ate romaine.
But, the CDC said, "no common grower, supplier, distributor, or brand of romaine lettuce has been identified." The agency isn't usually so sweeping in its statements, but with a holiday coming -- one that's centered around eating and that takes people offline into the real world of airports and cars and dinner tables -- it warned against all romaine until the threat can be better defined. The Food and Drug Administration, which does have the power to compel foods to be recalled, is investigating, along with health departments in the 11 states where people have gotten sick.
But, the CDC said, "no common grower, supplier, distributor, or brand of romaine lettuce has been identified." The agency isn't usually so sweeping in its statements, but with a holiday coming -- one that's centered around eating and that takes people offline into the real world of airports and cars and dinner tables -- it warned against all romaine until the threat can be better defined. The Food and Drug Administration, which does have the power to compel foods to be recalled, is investigating, along with health departments in the 11 states where people have gotten sick.
I read no other news, so I messed this when it came out two days ago. So I ate romaine lettuce and now I am shitting my pants.
Can someone tell me why I only hear this kind of "E. Coli scare" only in developed countries?
If you have limited means of growing produce, you wouldn't want to waste it on crunchy water.
Undeveloped countries don't have the infrastructure to monitor these types of things because they are undeveloped.
Also, developed countries have far more developed food safety standards because they are developed.
Really, the big clue on this is your own use of the word "developed".
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Sad.
Because nobody gives a fuck why someone in Africa croaks.
People die on this continent by the thousands, daily, from avoidable diseases, from wars that nobody know about because they ain't even worth a ticker message on CNN, from mining the metals we need for our next cellphone that we use for a year, if that, and a million other things.
And nobody, literally nobody, gives a fuck.
You are still wondering why these people try to escape that hellhole? I don't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you want it done the other way, you support the multinational that will gladly provide an environment that will manage to be both carcinogenic and contagious at the same time. Their rank and file may not be able to afford to eat what they produce... not that they'd actually want to.
Factory-farming and large-scale food production are the problem.
Eating should never be centralized; keep it local.
... the organic momo's that believe they will never die by eating only organic ?
E-Coli is organic.. 100%...
There are plenty of organic things that will kill ya..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
... in Germany a few years back. The so called EHEC scandal. (Can't recall if EHEC is the pathogen out the disease it causes). It wasn't pretty. For weeks the republic was frantically tracking down the source and found it in a farm that had basically used raw sewage to fertilize grown sprouts. A few people died a painful death iirc. Don't know if anybody went to jail. This is sort of a borderline case in which dumb Farmers can actually kill people. I don't know if they changed some growing regulations or something after that.
Bottom line: don't think the CDC is exaggerating, this could likely be serious.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's not crunchy water to blame, it is migrant farm workers not being given bathroom breaks and so taking shits in the fields instead. "transmission occurs through fecal contamination of food and water supplies" --Wikipedia
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Can someone tell me why I only hear this kind of "E. Coli scare" only in developed countries?
Maybe the local folks in under developed countries have more of an acquired or natural immunity to nasty critters in the water that would make a lot of developed country folks get the backdoor trots?
This is why some of the critters that Europeans schlepped into the New World wreaked havoc among the natives.
Jarod Diamond covered diseases as being one of the things that a civilization needs to conquer another in a book titled, "Guns, Germans and Steel" .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Jarod Diamond covered diseases as being one of the things that a civilization needs to conquer another in a book titled, "Guns, Germs and Steel" .
FTFY. But your original was unintentionally funny.
I cannot recommend Diamond's book ighly enough. It was a long, but very enlightening read for me. For the TL/DR crowd: his thesis is that the rise and dominance of European civilization was primarily a fluke of geography that allowed its inhabitants to cultivate crops and form specializations in society earlier than other parts of the world.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I cannot recommend Diamond's book highly enough.
Doh, irony. I correct someone else's typo, then make one of my own. Sorry.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
> [CDC] isn't usually so sweeping in its statements, but with a holiday coming...
Seriously? If (like me) you were wondering whether that clanger came from the CDC itself or the vapid press (Wired in this case), it's the latter.
No, Wired did not make it up. The alert really is from the CDC.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
"migrant farm workers" likely aren't the major source of contamination. Think bird shit, coyote shit, rabbit shit. There's no water treatment for field water - so the water coming out of the sprinklers is pulled straight out of the ditch/river which may be contaminated by the feedlot upstream. All of which are sources of "fecal contamination".
And the worms ate into his brain.
Spinach is always cooked in India, and we have so many kinds of spinach too. There are uncooked foods in Indian cuisine, the chutneys, raitha, kosumari ... but usually they manage to avoid contamination. Now I have lost all immunity. I avoid uncooked foods in all restaurants there.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Can someone tell me why I only hear this kind of "E. Coli scare" only in developed countries?
Maybe the local folks in under developed countries have more of an acquired or natural immunity to nasty critters in the water that would make a lot of developed country folks get the backdoor trots?
Having lived in a third world country where people do not know basic rules of sanitation, I can promise you that this is not the case. They have all kinds of illnesses that they blame on being outside when it rains rather than the really disgusting water they should have filtered and then added a little bleach to. I've spent a lot of time hanging out with the people in their little shanty towns and they're constantly sick.
Well, that put a quick end to the vegans' gloating over the ground turkey salmonella, now didn't it?
pfft, plenty of small producers also have sold contaminated product, not just veggies but small egg producers
so get off your high horse, you might even be part of the problem someday
Yes, they did. It was an exceptionally bad year. But I notice nobody was lining up to be the target in a sneezing contest.
Since it;'s not a big deal for people to not eat one particular variety of lettuce, it seems like a perfectly reasonable precaution.
Undeveloped countries don't have the infrastructure to monitor these types of things because they are undeveloped.
... and when it is measured it is sky high. Childhood diarrhea in poor countries is one of the world's leading causes of death, killing more than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined.
32 sick people wouldn't make the news in Africa or India because it is insignificant compared to the thousands of kids dying everyday.
Actually American support for Irish terrorism was all a huge misunderstanding. People thought they were paying into their tax-deferred retirement plans.
Although not always possible, stuff like this is a great reason to buy from local farms when possible, it may cost a bit more but with stuff like the Romaine issue happening every now and again, it's a bit of extra insurance...
Not sure if buying "Organic" would really mean local though, so that's probably not good enough without knowing where it really came from.
Those of you living in warm places should look into growing lettuce in your own pots, it works really well and is not fussy to keep alive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley