In one of the largest meat recalls in U.S. history, this week the food giant Cargill ordered the recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey. The recall comes after at least one person has died of Salmonella, and another 76 have fallen ill. The turkey products were traced to Cargill’s processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Salmonella outbreak involves a strain of the bacteria known as Salmonella Heidelberg, which is resistant to many commonly prescribed antibiotics.
Although it was announced this week, the outbreak began in March. According to the CDC, Salmonella cases then spiked in May and early June. Three thousand people die a year from food poisoning in the United States; 50 million people get sick. Food safety advocates say this latest outbreak shows how budget cuts have hampered the ability of federal and state health agencies to effectively protect public health.
US seeing some of the most extreme heat this country has known. Is there any relation between food poisoning, meat, and how it’s kept, and extreme weather?
It’s become kind of a, a conventional wisdom or this assumption in people that work on food safety that there’s a recall every summer. There was a big recall last summer. It was the really massive egg recall. Other summers, it’s been produce. So, there is, a lot of people talking about, why do we see more of this in the summer? There’s some questions about, is it the types of food we eat in the summer? Do we eat more hamburgers? Do we eat more ground turkey and ground beef, which might be likely suspects for a problem like this? Is it that, the animals have more pathogens in them when the weather gets warmer? Or is it handling? When you’re taking food home from the grocery store, if it gets warm and, it gets above kind of the safe temperatures you’re supposed to keep things in, bacteria could regrow. So it’s probably a combination of all those things, but it’s something we really should be looking more into. When you’re talking about how to protect yourself from these products, thorough cooking is the best, really, tool that consumers have. So, for ground turkey, using a meat thermometer and, making sure you cook it to 165 degrees is the best thing that you can do, at the end of the line.
The Salmonella, Salmonella Heidelberg, a particularly antibiotic-resistant strain. What about animals injected with antibiotics?
The majority of, antibiotics in this country are actually used to raise livestock. They’re not used to treat sick people. And they’re actually used to promote the growth of livestock. They’re not necessarily used to treat them when they’re ill. They’re used to make them grow faster and deal with the tough environments they’re living in, on large factory farms.
And so, because of that, we’ve kind of created a situation that’s a really ideal environment for the bacteria to become resistant to the antibiotics, and we’re starting to see more and more problems, now we’re seeing more and more bacteria popping up in food recalls, where they don’t respond to antibiotics. And this is just the latest example of that. So lots of folks working in the public health arena, in the medical community, are very worried about why we are creating such ideal conditions where bacteria can learn to beat these drugs. And we don’t necessarily have new ones. Antibiotics are a really important resource. We shouldn’t necessarily be using them in this way that makes them ineffective.
In US 3,000 people die a year of food poisoning. That’s more than eight people a day. Fifty million people take ill every year because of food poisoning. That’s 137,000 people a day.
[Corporate and Tea party dont like regulations]
when someone gets sick from food, lots of healthy—you know, healthy folks with good immune systems just kind of ride it out at home. They don’t feel well. They get through it. Not everybody even goes to a doctor. So, right there, you’ve lost a bunch of people that you’re not going to track. You know, you have to get sick enough to go to the doctor. The doctor has to tell the local health department. They have to tell the state health department. They have to tell the federal government. All of that takes time. And then you need the folks on the ground to go investigate and go ask questions about “What did you eat? Do you have any left? Can we test it?” And that’s what took so long in this case. And when you start to lose those front-line folks in, like, state health departments, it’s going to take longer to do that.
So we don’t have solid information. A lot of the information we have is a sample, and then there’s some extrapolation that happens from that. And there are some studies that have said, for every person that makes it into the system and gets counted as being sick, that up to 35 or 40 people might not have gotten counted, because they just kind of toughed it out at home.
democracynow.org
In the United States, federal officials have acknowledged knowing about the dangerous bacteria found in turkey produced by the food giant Cargill well before this month’s massive recall. In one of the largest meat recalls in U.S. history, Cargill recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey after at least one person died from Salmonella, and another 76 people fell ill from turkey products traced to Cargill’s processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it discovered a dangerous form of Salmonella in Cargill’s turkey at least once last year and four times this year, but did not push for a recall until the outbreak occurred. The USDA cited agency rules that do not hold Salmonella as a dangerous contaminant in meat, unless that meat results in illness or death.
Those who freedom in market dont care about public health. They want to reduce the governement for the corporate superpower. There are telling lies. There must be a democratic government to inspect and control everything in the society. But its not required for the stone age period. Those who propagate small government ideology is from stone age.