Spinach E. Coli "smoking gun" found: DOLE.

with the greens. Including Earth Bound Farms Organic. :(

Natural Selection Foods LLC said in a statement that it was cooperating with federal and state health officials to identify the source of the contamination and had stopped shipping all fresh spinach products. They are sold under many brand names, including Earthbound Farm, Dole, Green Harvest, Natural Selection Foods, Rave Spinach, Ready Pac and Trader Joe's.

http://cbs2chicago.com/seenon/topstories_story_257194253.html



Consumer Update on e. coli Investigation
Wednesday, September 20, 2006

http://www.ebfarm.com/press/SpinachUpdates/


Earlier today, the New Mexico Department of Health announced a link to e coli O157 in an opened, leftover bag of spinach from a case patient. The product was conventional spinach, packed in our facility. The strain matched the outbreak strain.
This news confirms our decision to go out early with our voluntary recall. Natural Selection Foods is a company built on doing the right thing. In this situation, protecting the public health even before we had much information, was the right thing to do.
The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and California Department of Health Services (CDHS) investigators were in our facility on Friday taking environmental samples from our processing facility for testing. At the same time as the government inspectors, scientists from an independent, third-party laboratory did identical sampling and testing. It is important to note that we don?t have the results back from FDA and CDHS. However on Monday, we got the results from the independent scientists, and those test results were all clean.

Edit to add: Yep.

FDA Issues Warning on Dole Bagged Salad Mixes
October 4, 2005


Thinking of opening a bagged salad for dinner? Better check the date…

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is telling consumers to throw out packages of Dole lettuce mix that may be linked to an outbreak of E. coli in 11 people. The worrisome bags are Dole's Classic Romaine and American Blend salads with a use-by date of Sept. 23, 2005, and a production code beginning with B250. Also included is Dole's Greener Selection, with a use-by date of Sept. 22 and the same production code.

http://www.supermarketguru.com/page.cfm/16395

We had to buy back all the organic spinach and mixed greens at our co-op that were sold during that time frame. I had eaten some just a few days prior to the recall but threw away the new containter I had just bought.

I hope they get to the end of this.

The point of forensics is to find a perp. And for the lawyers and lawsuits that's important. They now have another corporation to target.

But, the point of epidemiology isn't lawsuits it's protecting public health.

There are many more questions that need to be answered, and knowing those answers, there may be regulatory, code enforcement, processing and growing changes needed to reduce the risk of this happening again. Because we really don't want this or events with similar products happening again if we can figure out a handful of changes to prevent it.

I'm sure subsequent tests could determine this.

I think these .gov food creeps move pretty slow when it has to do with a mad cow.

Spinach from CA, ban it all fast.

However, one word out is that the soil is contaminated and that the bacteria have been taken up by the roots and are within the plants, which would explain why washing in the field didn't kill it.

One thing that might have been done is spreading fresh, poorly composted manure. This is done in Asia routinely, which is why only cooked or cured foods are consumed there.

In any case, spinach salad should be off the menu. Cooking will kill the bacteria, and it doesn't have to be long cooking. 15 seconds at 160 degrees will kill E.coli.

E.coli is one of those facts of life. Our guts are loaded with it. There are only a few strains that cause disease, however, and those are rare. Testing for E. coli contamination is easier than testing for viruses like the Hep. A virus, so it's used as an indicator of fecal contamination, whether animal or human.

(If I had a kid under 5, raw veggies would be off the menu for a while. The young and the old are most susceptible to serious E. coli infections)