The Spinach Trap
The Spinach Trap
As I read the headline, I thought it had to be a prank. As Children Suffer, Parents Agonize Over Spinach read like something that would get a copy editor fired. I had heard about the nationwide spinach recall but assumed it was just one of those things where you'd throw up for a day and then feel better in the morning. The idea that children would suffer through such agony and die because their parents fed them that supervegetable, spinach, was beyond my immediate comprehension. Now, I realize that this is yet another deadly example of what happens when government is run by those who wish to destroy it.
When I first read the headline, I thought about poor Popeye and how Bluto was going to kick his ass all around town. Once again, I had failed to realize just how broken our system of government is. FEMA failed to do its job despite explicit law stating that it was to take charge in an event like Hurricane Katrina. We depend on government to keep us safe in modern society and the Bush Administration is doing its best to break that sacred trust forever.
We expect police to keep enough order in the streets to prevent the sort of disorder depicted in "A Clockwork Orange." We expect our government to have disaster plans in place in case a hurricane struck a vulnerable area. We expect our government to inspect our food and drugs to make sure that they are safe. We expect the entire process of growing through packaging our food to be inspected to prevent contamination. We expect our mines to be as safe as they can be for workers who already toil under some of the worst conditions in the nation. The government is supposed to enforce compliance through a system of inspection and penalties.
This administration has failed to carry out any of its most solemn duties. People are dying from eating what's supposed to be one of the healthiest vegetables. Miners in West Virginia have been dying. New Orleans is still in ruins more than a year after the hurricane. Our government has placed the proverbial foxes in charge of the henhouse. When inspectors are allowed to do their jobs, the fines they levy are reduced to affordable levels. Often, the companies do not pay them at all. People die when government fails to do its job and the Republicans are out to make government fail.
What about that reference to "A Clockwork Orange" that you probably thought was silly hyperbole. The Iraqis are going through a whole lot of the "ole ultraviolence." We took away the tyrannic glue that held a concoction of warring factions together. The result was predictable and predicted by many outside the administration. That could very well be where we are headed unless we change the party in charge as soon as Constitutionally possible.
The problem comes when there aren't easy regulatory answers. Discussing it with my emergency physician housemate, we agreed Popeye is safe because he eats canned spinach, and the heat of canning will kill the problem organism, Escherichia coli, serotype H175:07.
I've looked through the detailed investigation of several other E. coli outbreaks, and they weren't easy. More often than not, there was one batch of something -- usually beef -- that contained the specific strain, and it contaminated the grinder or some other kind of processing equipment, which passed it on.
E. coli is normally a harmless organism in the intestine, but public health people test for "coliform counts", which aren't even specific for the class of organism -- and without getting into lots of detail, that's actually smart. The generic class of "coliforms" is a good reference point for the amount of fecal contamination in water.
The problem is that you could have a safe level of coliforms, but within that level is a decidedly not safe level of H157:O7. There isn't a simple screening test for its presence. What is the point of diminishing returns for testing for particular strains of bacteria, when they frequently mutate? I don't have a simple answer, but it is possible it's less an issue of inadequate inspection, as not having cost-effective tools to do continuous monitoring. An alternative, which is a sensitive subject for many people, is to go to radiation sterilization of raw food, and not try for detection of low thresholds.
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Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
September 24, 2006 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
If the big agriculture companies had enough financial incentive, they would come up with a solution. We could all look at the solution and decide whether it is better or worse than the initial problem. Just don't ask me to absolve the Bush Administration of anything until someone has given me definite proof that they haven't fouled up. They've driven the concept of trust into the ground and left a crater that may take decades to clean up.
Of course, I'm not just talking spinach there.
John
For more go to my online journal.
September 24, 2006 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Correction of typo in the first line, correct later. The type of E. coli in question her is H157:07, not H175:O7.
September 24, 2006 7:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not talking politics, but bacteriology. What would constitute proof they haven't fouled up?
I mentioned at least one alternative: 100% radiation sterilization of raw foods. Without knowing the costs, that would probably solve the specific problem, with a caveat. I am adequately convinced of the safety of food irradiation that I'd have no objection to having it done.
The only caveat is that there is substantial opinion among epidemiologists that the marketing of disinfectants in almost anything imaginable is reducing natural immunity. Chemical disinfection is more likely to be a threat to what is termed "herd immunity" than irradiation, but irradiation might be. Let me try to work through the kind of calculations involved.
A standard measure of the contagion power of an organism is the ID50: the number of organisms required to produce clinical infection in 50% of the population. Hypothetically, let's say that's 1000 E. coliH157:O7, in a person with a normal immune system. Let's also say that a lesser number, hypothetically 50, will trigger an immune response that protects against the organism, so perhaps the ID50 in the population exposed moves up to 5000.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that irradiation is 100% effective on commercial goods. Now, someone eats a tomato or cucumber out of their home garden, and that has 2000 of the organisms on it. If they haven't had the low-level exposure, they contract the disease.
Now, I do fault the Administration in cutting funds to the Centers for Disease Control. Sewage and water treatment, however, are generally local responsibilities. Just to get across that these are complex ideas, water treatment historically used chlorine for disinfection.
In WWI, when the Germans launched the first poison gas attack, they used 160 tons of chlorine against 8000 yards of front line. Chlorine is shipped around the US in tank cars containing 90 or 55 tons. Many water treatment facilities keep either tank cars, or chlorine tanks, on site. These are very nasty terrorist targets.
There is a much safer replacement for chlorine, the family of chloramines. There is a cost to convert plants to use it. In addition, the first large-scale use had unexpected consequences.
Chloramines turn out to be very good rust removers. In cities whose water pipes were ceramic, this was no problem. In the first city that used chloramines and had older cast-iron pipes, it turned out that in many cases, the rust was holding the pipes together. Pipes blew all over the city.
I believe that safeguarding industrial chemicals, including chlorine, is a much higher national security concern than, for example, national ballistic missile defense. As you can see, however, trying to reduce chlorine risk by going to chloramines is going to be a real problem for the cities with iron pipes.
Again, there's politics, but there are things where there are no simple scientific answers.
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Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
September 24, 2006 4:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
You may be talking bacteriology but I'm talking politics. This spinach thing might be the one thing going wrong that has nothing to do with the Bush Administration. Then again, had Bush not spent all our money on tax cuts and wars of choice, there might be a better answer.
The point of this entry was that there seems to be a lot going on that could be prevented by better government. There is a definite connection between lax mine safety inspections and dead miners. There is a terribly clear connection between the number of dead US soldiers and Bush's war of choice. There is a likely connection between our refusal to commit to Kyoto and the horrors of Katrina. Therefore, I find it more likely than not that Bush and his cronies either caused this outbreak or made it worse.
I lack the scientific background to make a more sound argument here. That's something I have in common with regulators under this Administration!
John
For more go to my online journal.
September 24, 2006 7:36 PM | Reply | Permalink