There's an interesting article in the Oct. National
Geographic about the disease relationships between humans and other
animals.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2007 11:46
AM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] e-coli and
starlings
The following is a post I recently posted to the yahoo group,
"crunchyearthmommies," where I am having a somewhat heated debate with
some vegan breastfeeding women. It originated from a discussion on milk
causing breast cancer; and when I posted that there was no breast cancer
in my family, and we grew up on raw milk, and my perceptions of the
implications of this; the vegan onslaught began. I am trying very hard to
stick to the facts, sound research, and to dispel responses changing my
slant to mean other things. I had not intended it to be a discussion on
veganism vs. eating meat; and have stuck to that - I only disagreed with
the idea that all milk causes breast cancer. But some angry people just
don't want to argue fair. This post was an attempt to address some
misconceptions regarding e-coli, and I thought some of you here might be
interested in it. My intent is to educate some women who breastfeed (as I
do) regarding their misconceptions about e-coli; whether or not they are
vegans. I thought it pertained to soil health because it is focused on a
couple of very recent studies (from Cornell and from OSU) about how e-coli
makes it into our food.
---------------------------------
While
we're talking e-coli here, I have done some extensive reading on it and
other pathogens over the past 2 years, particularly in relationship to raw
milk. I have an insatiable curiosity about the bugs in food that make us
ill; and the bugs that make us well. I'm a nurse, and I like to make
cheese, so bacteria interests me intensely.
There are many strains of
e-coli. Only a few make people sick. The ones that most commonly make
people sick are found in the feces of grain-fed cows. The grain increases
the bacterial resistance to stomach acids, causing it to thrive while
healthier e-coli's die off. (There is a lot to be said for keeping a
healthy diet and healthy rumen). According to a recent article published by
Cornell University, when cows are changed to a grass-fed diet, within
2 weeks, the infectious e-coli strain disappears from their
feces.
Another post mentioned that spinach in California was
contaminated with e-coli from a nearby farm. But when I looked up the
information, the researchers never did figure out how the manure from the
cow farm got into the spinach field, which was over a mile away and not in
the run-off from the farm. There was no evidence to suggest the cows
had made it into the field. They suspected wild hogs of transferring
the e-coli to the spinach field from the farm.
Following is an
article published in Ohio Farmer this month:
Scientists Link Wild Birds
to E-Coli Contamination Sept. 26, 2007
In order to help minimize
foodborne illnesses throughout the country, scientists at Ohio State
University are gathering data about the role wild birds play in E. coli
contamination on farms. The goal is to design effective pre-harvest control
strategies.
Jeff LeJeune, a microbiologist and veterinary scientist
with the university's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development
Center (OARDC) in Wooster, leads the groundbreaking study,
which concentrates on an invasive nuisance bird whose impact on
the propagation of disease-causing pathogens has not been
determined: European starlings.
There's strong evidence that these
birds harbor E. coli and other dangerous organisms such as Salmonella and
Campylobacter, and that they contribute to the spread of pathogens between
farms. Studies have found that E. coli O157-H7 strains isolated from
European starlings are the same as strains found on dairy farms in
close geographical proximity.
"This is the first study about the
relationship between European starlings and food safety," says LeJeune. "We
need to know how much these birds are contributing to infection on farms to
see if management strategies to reduce their numbers or restrict access
to livestock-feeding areas are warranted. If you can prevent
infection on the farm, you'll positively impact food safety
downstream."
Cattle are an important foodborne route of human infection
with E. coli via contaminated ground beef and raw milk, and manure is
an important environmental source of contamination, which is why we
are concentrating our study on dairy farms. This research will also
be important to find out whether starlings are contributing to
the spread of E. coli on vegetable fields as they fly between
dairy farms.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), E. coli O157:H7 (one of hundreds of strains of the
bacterium Escherichia coli) causes an estimated 73,000 cases of infection
and 61 deaths in the United States each year. Most of these cases
are associated with eating undercooked ground beef, but a growing
number of recent E. coli-related outbreaks and recalls have involved
fresh vegetables - including the California spinach outbreak that
sickened 199 people and killed three last
year.
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