Friday, June 03, 2011

Don't Eat That Fresh Salad

The world is turning out to be a smaller and yet smaller place as time shoves us further into the future. We are so amazingly interconnected through trade and commerce and universal financial systems, along with the sharing by governments of the wealth of data that national health institutions and their scientists working in infectious disease laboratories discover.

Any trip to the local supermarket confirms just how linked we are through the trade in agricultural products.

Presumably, food grown in countries that understand the fundamental need of hygienic practises are held to be safe for the consumer whether they live in the country where the produce originates or half a world away where the produce is shipped to; in-season for the country of production, and out-of-season in the receiving country.

Sometimes it seen to be more economically viable to import certain crops than to ship intra-country. And even best-practise agri-business sometimes errs when contaminated liquid manure is spread on fields, clearing out winter barns, and running into the water table, and from there streams and water systems, along with bacteria-vulnerable crops. Not to speak of farm workers packing food for export and not observing hygienic practises.

And sometimes, because trade routes are so variable and confusing and trying to figure out all the manifest shipping documentation listing export and import data it becomes difficult to trace exactly where certain products originated, where they transited, where they entered a country with enough accuracy to pinpoint dubious sources of contention.

Germany has been the latest site of the discovery of a highly infectious, new strain of E.coli bacteria that has caused hundreds of serious infections leading to kidney malfunction and over a dozen deaths. German authorities pointed the finger of blame at contaminated cucumbers shipped from Spain - until it became evident that the cucumbers, shown to host the bacteria, had been contaminated within Germany.

So far this dangerous strain of bacteria has surfaced in Austria, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Britain - and the United States. In all cases those who were affected by the E.coli bacteria had travelled to Germany where they ate fresh produce that had been contaminated.

Fingering Spain as the locus of the outbreak and contamination has cost Spain, already in deep financial straits, with the heaviest unemployment statistics in the EU, dearly. Even though the claim has been retracted by Germany and they have apologized for slandering Spanish produce, the damage has been done; Spanish exporters have lost hundreds of millions in weekly sales and tens of thousands of workers may be out of work.

The Netherlands too has been caught up in this vortex of blame and fear and lost sales. Russia has banned imports of vegetables from Germany and Spain because of fear of the infected produce, and has gone on to ban produce from the entirety of the European Union. All over Europe people are avoiding fresh vegetables; tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers. Farmers have had to destroy their crops and with that their working capital.

Microbiologists have come to the conclusion that this new E.coli bacterium is a combination of two earlier strains and it appears to be highly resistant to several classes of antibiotics. Just as swine flu and bird flu and SARS and other exotic, newly-identified diseases have surfaced around the world because of easy transmission with easier international travel, this smaller world we live in seems destined to complicate our lives in ways never imagined.

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posted by Pieface @ Friday, June 03, 2011

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