So many people were intrigued by the story of how 10year-old Lauren Herzog might have become ill from E.coli, that I thought it useful to explore another story about E.coli. This is the story of the E.coli outbreak that sickened 71 Taco Bell customers earlier this month, some of them quite seriously, and it is presented by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Earlier in the week, Taco Bell announced in a full-page newspaper ad in the New York Times and on its web site (under "Latest News") that the CDC has declared the recent E.coli outbreak over. “It’s safe to eat at Taco Bell,” said the ad.
What the ad and the Taco Bell web site don’t say is that the CDC still hasn’t been able to determine where the bad E.coli originated. When you read through the CDC’s latest press update (from Dec. 14, which it says is its last announcement), you learn that investigators haven’t actually determined anything for sure. They think that while the E.coli most likely originated with the shredded lettuce, it could also have been the cheddar cheese, or the ground beef. The onions that were once suspected have been cleared…except at a Nassau County Taco Bell, where some onions turned out to contain E.coli…but not the E.coli that has made people sick.
As I read through the release, I began to think about Lady Macbeth’s hallucination scene in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, where she declares, “Out, damn spot.” Like Lady Macbeth, we are just beginning to realize the complexity of our food-chain problems and that the people in charge are running around chasing mirages.
Taco Bell said it fired its lettuce supplier for the Northeast, though it was never implicated for sure. Before that, it fired its onion supplier, without having found E.coli.
I suppose that somewhere in this process, I expected the CDC and Taco Bell to somehow come up with a way to blame raw milk. Or maybe I should just be patient–it could be coming.
The frustration is such that The Wall Street Journal in a Dec. 18 editorial declared that the solution is simple: irradiate all our food. It’s interesting that the WSJ editorial quoted the CDC’s research I described in my previous post, but only about the number of people who are hospitalized or die. It conveniently neglected to mention the truly amazing statistic of 76 million becoming sick each year. I suspect that the WSJ didn’t want to confront the awesome proportions of the problem.
In today’s issue, WSJ readers commented, and the paper actually printed some letters pointing out the dangers of irradiation.
Maybe the CDC should just examine its own research about how so many people get sick, and most of the illnesses are never tracked down. This issue isn’t going away, and the Establishment clearly doesn’t want to look more deeply than "solutions" like irradiation and NAIS. That black market in food that some of you have alluded to may be closer than we think.
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