E Coli

[cowman]

How is it that we now hear about E Coli so much? A big scare down in the States this week. Was it always there and just never got reported? If not why?
I would suggest it is your average packinghouse worker that could be the problem as well as the scale of a modern packinghouse.
When I was a young man I worked in a fairly large state of the art packing house. The employees were, to a man, farm boys from Alberta and Sask.
Nowadays go in a packing house and it looks like the United Nations! And I'm sorry if this sounds rascist but these people just were never raised to be very clean or know how to use soap and water.
The poor wages and working conditions doesn't attract anyone but immigrants. And yet have meat prices gone down? And aren't the packers still crying poverty? Well someone benifitted and I don't think it was the livestock producer or the consumer, so who is left?

[dalek]

I think years ago there were still enough people living on farms and hygiene levels were different enough that most people were ALWAYS exposed to some low level of these things, (although some of the E. Colis are new)so there was a resistance built up. Now people have such a fear of dirt and bacteria with all the antibacterial soaps etc. that it takes a lot less exposure to get them sick because they don't have the resistance. That's my unscientific theory anyway

[ValueChainFX]

The packing plants of the day run some pretty fine programs for food safe product. However, it always makes me think when we hear time and time again about these finds after some company has come out with some "Jimmy dazzeler" machine that detects and destroys this "outbreak". In the last couple of years there have been several new wonders that have hit the market.

I think education and training both in the plants and beyond is an important factor! However, we can always make things better but careful how you say "We can make things better!" cause they may just try to reach into the producers pocket agin for another check off!! Go figure?

The poor packers and the poor retails couldn't pay for this come on guys! We all know the producer is the place to get easy money!

The day is coming soon where if we are paying all the check offs for our product that we will need to take back control. I am counting the days til this happens!

[cakadu]

Some of what is happening with e-coli is that we are getting better at detecting it than we have been in the past. A couple of years ago I heard Michael Stiles - professor emeritus at U of A - and he's been studying food borne pathogens for his whole career. He said then that what we knew about e-coli was just the tip of the iceberg and as the testing gets more sophisticated, we will find out more.

Part of it is the fact that cows were never meant to eat grain and with the amount that is fed to them in the feedlots, it builds up the levels of e-coli and this is where some of the problems can occur.

Sheer volumes running through a packing plant in a day would also contribute to the problems, I'm sure.

We hear more about everything these days, so it could just be that it is newsworthy, so it is reported.

There are likely a number of reasons for the increase. What is more alarming to me though is the recall that is still not all that great. Take the most recent recall by a major grocery chain for example. The beef patties were made on April 24th and they are just recalling them now. What are the chances that those patties are still around? Despite our best efforts, we're still not up enough on recalls. That is what concerns me more.