E. Coli the gift that keeps on giving…

Bad news for those in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada; your cheese has been contaminated; contaminated with E. coli.  For those in those five states, Cosco is recalling their Gouda cheese from Bravo Farms as twenty five people have become ill.  Symptoms include bloody diarrhea, stomach cramps, and in extreme cases kidney failure. It can be so bad, that the CDC has included some strains as a bioterrorist agent. What?

With those horrible symptoms, I was left wondering what exactly E.Coli is. E.Coli is a bacteria form the manure of cows, sheep, pigs, deer and chickens. Okay, it can be found in the intestines of the freshly butchered meat. When companies are not careful, they can cross contaminate and somehow it gets into the products we consume. In the case of cheese, it was found that the cheese was raw milk and had not been properly pasteurized.

So we need to wonder what we plan to do to take care of the food we eat. With so many e.coli outbreaks recently, there seems to be a lax in the way our food is handled. While only 25 were diagnosed with E.Coli that doesn’t include those who never went to the doctors, and only showed symptoms. I think that lately we have stopped caring where our food is coming from and too many mistakes are slipping through.

http://www.ota.com/organic/foodsafety/ecoli.html
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/05/cheese.warning/index.html?hpt=Sbin
http://www.about-ecoli.com/ (for more info on recent e.coli outbreaks look on the right hand of this site)