Chances That All Ground Beef Is From the Same Cow
On Monday, a meat-packing firm recalled one.eight one thousand thousand pounds of footing beefiness considering of possible contamination from a deadly strain of Eastward. coli. And so far, the beefiness, which had been shipped out beyond the country, has been linked to 11 illnesses in 4 states.
So how did that East. coli spread so widely and then rapidly before anyone caught it? 1.viii one thousand thousand pounds of beef is, after all, a potential vii.2 one thousand thousand quarter-pounder burgers. That's thousands upon thousands of cows.
Investigations are still underway about what exactly went on at this particular meat-packing operation, Detroit-based Wolverine Packing Company. It'south still as well early on to say what specifically caused this outbreak.
But it's inappreciably the starting time time a contamination this large has occurred in the United States — in contempo decades, they've become surprisingly common. In 2011, for instance, cantaloupes withListeria monocytogenes leaner spread beyond 28 states and killed 33 people. And since 2013, an antibiotic-resistant strain of Salmonella on raw chicken has sickened 524 people (and counting) across 25 states.
And E. coli is a trouble, as well. Ever since a deadly outbreak in 1994, the USDA has banned the sale of ground beefiness containing the unsafe O157:H7 E. coli strain. Just thousands of Americans still cease up in the infirmary each yr because of the pathogen.
So what's driving these massive food-contamination outbreaks? One possibility is that inspectors are but getting better at detecting and tracking cases when they do occur. Merely many experts argue these large outbreaks are one unintended side effect of the centralization of the food manufacture.
"Because of the consolidation in the industry, a single found can crusade much more widespread illnesses and contamination problems than may take been the case twoscore years agone," Erik Olson, Senior Strategic Director for Health and Food at the Natural Resource Defense Council, told me.
Basically, when i little thing goes wrong today, it can affect far more food.
The downsides of centralization
There's no question that The states agronomical production has been consolidated into fewer and fewer businesses. Since the 1950s, the industrialization of agronomics has allowed large companies to accept advantage of economies of scale — producing meat, produce, and grains at lower prices and outcompeting smaller businesses.
According to the US Department of Agriculture'southward well-nigh recent survey in 2012, most 4 percent of farms in the US are now producing 66 percent of f arm products, by valu e.
That'southward particularly true for meat. Simply four companies slaughter 80 pct of cattle in the U.s.a.. (The meat-packing visitor involved in the electric current recall isn't one of those large four, however.) And three companies control half of America's craven, according to Christopher Leonard'southward new volume The Meat Racket.
That industry concentration has, in turn, led to more meat being slaughtered and candy in larger, centralized facilities — since it's more than efficient that way. And that, in turn, can make it easier for contagion to spread more than widely.
Accept beef slaughtering every bit an case. Us red meat production in 2013 was 37 percent college than it was in 1970, according to the USDA. Yet the number of slaughterhouses has fallen sharply, from x,000 in 1967 to three,000 in 2010. More and more cows are being slaughtered in fewer and fewer slaughterhouses:
Denny, RCH. "Betwixt the Farm and the Farmer's Market: Slaughterhouses, Regulations, and Alternative Food Networks" 2012 via Heinrich Böll Foundation/Friends of the Earth Europe "Meat Atlas" 2014.
That means that a single contamination incident — say, a feces-contaminated hide touching a cow carcass — can end up spreading to thousands of animals throughout an associates line.
This is particularly true for ground meat, which is by and large made up of meat scraps from many unlike animals. And meat grinders can spread bacteria to the within of a hamburger patty — where the microbes may not get cooked up hot enough to exist killed.
Put it all together, and once a problematic microbe enters the nutrient organization, it tin hands spread far and broad. Equally The New York Times painstakingly documented in a 2009 story about a different recall, a simple frozen burger can accept beefiness from several different companies, from different states, and fifty-fifty from unlike countries. (Mixing meat in this mode cuts costs by well-nigh 25 percent, the Times reported.)
Several research papers suggest that centralized product and large-scale distribution could be leading to more frequent and broader outbreaks. A contempo review of multi-country outbreaks co-authored by CDC infectious diseases proficient Jeremy Sobel points out that these dynamics in the chicken manufacture may have contributed to more cases ofSalmonella enteritidis, which tin also cause illness.
The same dynamics apply to the cattle industry: "This concentration of production and the nature of processing methods result in the commingling of meat form many carcasses and, consequently, increased risk of cross-contamination," Sobel and his co-authors write. "Because large volumes of ground beef are funneled through a limited number of processing facilities, the introduction of E. coli O157:H7 tin lead to large volumes of potentially contaminated meat."
And oversight can exist express
For its part, the USDA doesn't accept all that much power in its oversight of meat production. For example, companies aren't required to test every lot for East. coli O157:H7. And at that place aren't rules for acceptable levels ofSalmonella in chicken parts.
What's more, co-ordinate to the ruling of the Supreme Beef v. USDA example in 2001, the USDA cannot shut an operation down considering of repeated failedSalmonella tests. For case, drug-resistant Salmonella outbreaks linked to Foster Farms Make chicken have been going on for more than a year and sickened 524 people in reported cases (and upwardly to 15,000 in unreported ones). Simply the affected plants proceed to operate.
Now, a crucial caveat here: information technology's still also early to know exactly what went on in the current outbreak. Meat could have come to the Detroit packing facility already contaminated — or it could have gotten contaminated during processing.
A spokesperson for the Wolverine Packing Company said that it tests all of its products and none had been tested positive for E. coli , co-ordinate to local news site Mlive.com. Many of those who got sick were eating undercooked hamburgers, which certainly didn't help things, either.
For now, the USDA is standing to investigate and is encouraging anybody — as always — to cook their burgers to an internal temperature of 160°F.
Further Reading:
- People's republic of china's ascension is making your burger more than expensive.
- The New York Times investigates the many origins of a burger that paralyzed a trip the light fantastic toe instructor in 2009.
- Anatomy of a burger, New York Times infographic from the same story
- "The Meat Racket," a book by Christopher Leonard almost the consolidation of meat industries in the US
- CDC'due south tips on how to avoid getting sick from ground beef
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Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/21/5735352/how-one-contaminated-cow-can-infect-millions-of-pounds-of-hamburgers