Food Can Kill

Food safety consistently ranks as one of the public’s top three concerns about food, so I’m just going to assume it’s important to you. After all, who wants to spend their time regurgitating food in the bathroom? I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine in Tennessee with quite a unique perspective as a doctor that who hears misinformation from patients daily. Samantha E. McLerran, MD, is a mom of three and understands food safety from both sides of the food plate because she’s also a beef farmer.

Food safety is a broad and potentially explosive topic.  Food safety affects every level of society and every person because we all eat. When I sat down to write, I immediately leapt to my medical roots. Nothing I thought could be more thrilling than a couple of hundred words on food pathogens like E. coli and Salmonella. Yeah, right… my seven year old just rolled her eyes at me and left the room.

“We all eat” is where I started this journey, a statement of an obvious fact. Therefore, food and its safe growth, handling, and processing should be a vital concern of any society. And I will further state that as a society has more and more time and economic resources, they spend more of those assets on food and food development.

When you only get paid $1 for your days work and you spend 50 cents to 75 cents of that dollar on food, you are not going to argue about whether or not it was locally grown and hormone free. If you live in that level of poverty, you don’t care if it was produced with biotechnology or from a cloned sheep. You will just be happy to have food there to feed your family so you don’t have to listen to your children be hungry and possibly watch them starve to death. You do care that it is sanitary and you hope that it does not carry disease.

Our family is learning about how different farms operate in different parts of the world. One can see how a person’s society base influences their perceptions on food safety. Giardia is not a big concern here in the Upper Cumberland (Tennessee), but in third world countries this internal pathogen (stool carried) is a viable threat to your health.

As I read up on statistics and information, I realized Americans are blessed and have no idea on the true impact of the words “food safety.” For the most part, the potential food pathogens that we deal with only make us sick. The CDC estimates that 1 in 6 US citizens will deal with some form of a food borne pathogen each year, with Nor virus being the most common (a.k.a. stomach virus). The hope I, through continued efforts at all levels of the food production chain, preventing these food-borne illnesses with best practice management practices. 5 million Americans could be prevented from being ill each year if we could decrease the illness load by just 10%. If just one case of E. coli O157 could be prevented, it is estimated the savings could be upwards of several million dollars.

However, there are only 31 known food-borne pathogens which account for 20% of all food-borne illness; the other 80% is caused by unknown or unspecified pathogens. This presents two unique concerns: from a food production standpoint, how do we prevent that which we don’t know makes people sick; and then from a medical standpoint, how do we treat what we can’t identify?

Beyond these standard food pathogen concerns, we now have to deal with antimicrobial resistance. It is estimated that some strains of Salmonella, Shigella, and some strains of E. coli are rapidly becoming resistant to the antibiotics that are normally used to treat them. These aren’t antibiotics from the farm—the resistance is from the people taking them for colds when they don’t need them because colds are caused by viruses.

As an American beef producer, home-cookin’ mom to three children, and a family practitioner in a small town, I have seen all aspects of food safety. This is a real issue in my day-to-day life from our safe handling practices and animal identification efforts on the farm for ease of tracking of our products, to teaching my kids that you don’t cut up raw meat and veggies on the same board and we always wash our hands.

The hardest part as a doctor to a patient’s family—and the reason this issue will never go away for agriculturists—is that sometimes food-borne pathogens kill. When they or their loved one is ill, I often have little to offer but time, antibiotics, prayer, and a diagnosis of a pathogen that they have only heard about on the news. As the above percentages show, the 31 known food-borne pathogens account for around 88% of all food-borne-illness-related hospitalizations and deaths. However, that fact is of little comfort to the 12% of Americans that face the unspecified pathogens each year.

My bottom line: Wash your hands after handling raw meat, eat in restaurants you trust, respect the work done by American farmers to bring you one of the safest food-delivery systems on Earth, and don’t be quick to blame if there is an outbreak of illness. Sensationalism sells news, but it is not always the truth.

Sensationalism should not trump science!

Samantha raises a good point about the practicality of food safety measures throughout the agrifood system. We have scientific protocol to thank for that safety. It may not be perfect, but we live with an entirely different set of concerns than those in developing countries.

Want to know more about how to connect the people and science of farm and food? Learn more through No More Food Fights!  or visit www.causematters.com.