Trip Tip a Day

Simply put - in the U.S. we are looking for 0157:H7   (Shiga Toxin producing E. coli)   as a marker for food contamination. HOWEVER, there are six non-1057 STEC (Shiga Toxin producing E. coli) that we NEED to be looking for.   Here, in the interest of informing and not overwhelming you are 2 very important paragraphs from Food Safety News, http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/06/a-us-response-to-the-european-e-coli-outbreak/ "In fact, numbers released this week by the Centers for Disease Control show that the United States has about the  same number of non-O157 STECs as O157:H7 STEC . This means that it is time to change the way we handle these deadly pathogens. In 1994, Mike Taylor declared E. coli O157:H7 to be  an adulterant in meat  and poultry products when he was Undersecretary of Food Safety at USDA. In recent years, USDA has repeatedly been asked to address this and declare the "Big Six" non-O157 STECs to be adulterants as well, but ...

June 7, 2011 Germany's terrific scientists at the Robert Koch Institute appear hampered by a bureaucratic maze that does not exist in health care crisis management in the USA. Der Spiegel Online states "The country (Germany), they say, is surprisingly ill-equipped to handle outbreaks on this scale because of its complex bureaucratic structures and regionally fragmented division of responsibilities. Experts say Germany's alert system is  rudimentary compared to those in other developed nations. " http://www.rki.de/cln_144/nn_217400/EN/Home/EHEC__O104__H4,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/EHEC_O104_H4.pdf "While news of a potentially deadly outbreak can take up to two weeks to reach top German health authorities, other developed nations such as the United States and Japan, have instituted early warning mechanisms." http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,766969,00.html CDC updates statement: http://www.cdc.gov...