BN about slaughterhouse : yes it is dirty, but as the number of food poisoning going on, you have a better chance in the first world to get a salmonella poisoning from products with milks or from salad.
That is what i wanted to say before checking my fact
bad me.
Then I tryed to do some fact checking, but I am not getting any more info than this :
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol5no5/mead.htm
and this :
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/f/food_poisoning/stats.htm
So I am not so sure, except that I would try to avoid some type of sea food
.
But frankly you are killing animals. I do not expect that to be CLEAN as opposed to pull a legumes out of the soil and washing it.
No, killing animals can't be expected to be clean. But safety practices could probably improve, for one thing.
One reason vegetables can give people food poisoning is because the manure used to add nutrients to the soil sometimes contains the bacteria that causes it.
I did some research on food poisoning in vegetable products. I discovered it's more common than I thought. (I first posted this stuff in another thread.) Anyone who worries about this stuff too much will conclude we're all doomed!
I'd be very surprised if it turned out that people were actually
more likely to get food poisoning from vegetables than from meat; but it seems food poisoning from non-meat sources happens more often than I assumed:
I discovered that melons are a common source of food poisoning.
I had a look for information on what could cause food poisoning from melons. I first found
this article about a pesticide that wasn't registered for use with melons that was found in some and that caused severe illness in some people.
I found another article, mainly about cantaloupes, called
Melons are found to be cause of food poisoning.
Cantaloupe melons have been identified as a common source of food poisoning.
Scientists who studied records in the US and Canada identified almost one large outbreak caused by cantaloupes every year over a 30-year period, leaving 1,615 people ill, 57 in hospital and two dead.
I find it quite disconcerting that nice wholesome vegetarian fare could do that to people. But animals are implicated somewhere.
The article goes on to advise:
It is believed that the problem lies in the rough skin of the cantaloupe being hard to clean, meaning that bacteria on the outside can contaminate the flesh when it is cut open. Consumers should avoid melons with blemishes and scrub them with a brush under cold water.
There's a bit more advice in this article called
Avoid Food Poisoning with Melon
The article tells us that food poisoning from salmonella and other bacteria has been linked to melons, and if you cut right through the melon without washing and scrubbing the outside first, the bacteria can be sliced into the fruit.
They also add: be sure to refrigerate cut melon. Cut melon can be left out for up to 4 hours; after that, it should be discarded.
And here's another article.
Honduran Melons Contaminated with Salmonella
So far 59 people have been sickened from 16 states and Canada.* 14 had to be hospitalized. The Salmonella Litchfield strain was found to be the likely source of the bacterial contamination.
Salmonella is a bacterium that usually lives in the intestinal tract of animals.* Food can become contaminated when it comes in contact with waste water or workers who don’t wash their hands.
Yuck.
Still, farm animals aren't all to blame.
I found an article just as disconcerting as the last one:
Salmonella and E. coli bacteria found in “ready-to-eat” seeds.
Oh no!
Still, at least it's only a small percentage.
Seeds, such as sesame, sunflower, pumpkin and poppy, are frequently eaten as snack foods or incorporated into meals without further cooking. The study was therefore undertaken to explore the microbiological safety of these products as they would be eaten by consumers.
Between October 2007 and March 2008, 3735 samples of ready-to-eat seeds of different varieties were collected from retail premises including supermarkets, health food shops, convenience shops and market stalls. Overall, 98% were of a satisfactory or acceptable quality in microbiological terms, but 0.6% of samples were found to be unsafe due to the presence of Salmonella, which renders food unfit for human consumption. A further 1.5% were found to contain unsatisfactory levels of E. coli, which is an indicator of poor hygiene. ...
"When seed crops are grown they can be exposed to a wide range of bacteria from many sources including soil, manure, irrigation water, wild birds and animals. Seeds may also become contaminated during the drying process. The risk of human illness can be reduced for ready-to-eat seeds by hygienic manufacturing practices in the field, during harvesting and during processing of seeds."
I suppose that's how salmonella gets onto vegetables and nuts and things as well.
From an article called
How does salmonella get into peanut butter? And can you kill it once it's there?
How does salmonella get into peanut butter?
Feces from some animal is a strong possibility. A leak in the roof, for example, caused one of the early outbreaks. How salmonella got into the water that was on the roof, no one knows for sure. Maybe birds, for instance, which accumulate around peanut butter processing plants.
And it gets worse!
An article called
Raw tomatoes cause salmonella outbreak elaborates on the causes:
... But news of widespread food-poisoning outbreaks and bacterial contamination have become a familiar refrain in North America in recent years. In 2006, hundreds of people fell ill and some died after eating spinach that was tainted with E. coli bacteria. That same year, a Toronto couple were paralyzed after drinking carrot juice that was contaminated with a botulism toxin. In March, Canadian health officials had to launch a major recall of cantaloupe tainted with salmonella after dozens became ill in Canada and the United States. ...
Fresh produce has always been vulnerable to bacterial contamination, in part because it's grown outside and may come into contact with animals in the field or contaminated fertilizer, or be tainted by unsanitary handling.
Those weaknesses have been amplified in the past few decades by the explosion of industrial-sized farms and the proliferation of dominant companies who supply a large portion of the product available on store shelves. Those changes mean that instead of being confined to one area, contaminated products may be spread across the continent very quickly. In addition, it is often difficult for companies and health officials to determine the source of the outbreak and where the product was distributed, meaning that more consumers may be put at risk because the contaminated goods could remain on sale longer. ...
The issue of food traceability - knowing the current location of a product as well as where it came from and who handled it along the way - is one of the key elements to responding effectively to food contamination and preventing the spread of an outbreak. However, even though the food system has evolved into a global entity, officials have not developed effective systems to track the movement of food and minimize the damage of potential contamination, said Sylvain Charlebois, a marketing professor at the University of Regina. ...
And this sounds quite unpleasant! From an opinion piece called
PR debacle for HFCS: Care for some mercury with your oatmeal?
After one set of scientists found mercury — yes, everyone’s favorite brain-impairing element — in almost half of commercial HFCS, another bunch of scientists decided to get specific and tested 55 common consumer products that use HFCS. And guess what? Almost a third of them contain mercury.
How did the heavy metal get in there? In making HFCS — that “natural” sweetener, as the Corn Refiners Associaton likes to call it — caustic soda is one ingredient used to separate corn starch from the corn kernel. Apparently most caustic soda for years has been produced in industrial chlorine (chlor-alkali) plants, where it can be contaminated with mercury that it passes on to the HFCS, and then to consumers.
... At the top of the list: Quaker Oatmeal to Go, Jack Daniel’s Barbecue Sauce from Heinz, Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup, Kraft Original Barbecue Sauce, and Nutri-Grain Strawberry Cereal Bars. That’s all bad enough, especially considering no level of mercury is considered safe and that it’s especially toxic to growing brains — that is, the brains of the people consuming the highest levels of HFCS (children) and the brains of babies in utero. (See the figures in the report.) Worse: People at the FDA and USDA knew about the presence of mercury in HFCS and did nothing about it.
I looked for confirmatory information.
A journal article describing the study findings about mercury is online here.
Mercury cell chlor-alkali products are used to produce thousands of other products including food ingredients such as citric acid, sodium benzoate, and high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is used in food products to enhance shelf life. A pilot study was conducted to determine if high fructose corn syrup contains mercury, a toxic metal historically used as an anti-microbial. High fructose corn syrup samples were collected from three different manufacturers and analyzed for total mercury. The samples were found to contain levels of mercury ranging from below a detection limit of 0.005 to 0.570 micrograms mercury per gram of high fructose corn syrup. Average daily consumption of high fructose corn syrup is about 50 grams per person in the United States. With respect to total mercury exposure, it may be necessary to account for this source of mercury in the diet of children and sensitive populations. ...
The FDA does analyze some foods for mercury through the ongoing surveillance program known as the Total Diet Study (TDS). The TDS, however, does not test all foods for mercury. Mercury is routinely detected by the TDS in fish, liver, and poultry because farmers routinely use fishmeal and/or fish oil as feed for certain livestock to include chickens, swine, dairy cows, and farmed fish. Animals that are fed fishmeal can bioconcentrate monomethyl mercury in protein
matrices that are then passed on to the consumer in the fat components of derived foods [15]. A list of the foods that were recently tested for total mercury along with the results of the analyses may be found at the FDA website [16]. In 2003, FDA tested 48 foods for mercury during the TDS and of those only three may have contained HFCS. Average daily US consumption of HFCS for the year 2007 was approximately 49.8 g per person according to the US Department of Agriculture website [17]. High-end consumers of beverages sweetened with HFCS could easily be ingesting more HFCS than the average person.
Yep, we're all doomed, clearly!
