How Dangerous is E. Coli?

Last fall after the second E. Coli on lettuce breakout, I wrote to the editor at the NYTimes with whom I work, suggesting that they address a specific angle of the issue: are the risks from E. Coli increasing, and are we likely to see a rise in illnesses.  With the two recent cases, Taco Bell in New York and Taco John’s in Iowa, and earlier ones this fall arising from sources outside the cattle industry where it had originally been dominant, it would seem yes.

Ground beef used to be the main cause of outbreaks.  After the September outbreak I spoke with Richard Vergili, who teaches food safety at the CIA.  What he said was, in effect, this is a Pandora’s Box situation, one that’s worse than what’s generally being reported, especially, Vergilli said, if you buy into the fact that deer now carry the bactreria. “What makes this scary is that it’s so virulent," he said, and, "It’s the price we pay for wanting cheap food,…one more nail in the coffin of the small farmer."

Marc Siegel, a medical doctor, noted recently in Salon that a director at the CDC believes the recent outbreak in New York was caused by deer droppings.  It’s been known that deer carried the bug but not whether these deer caused incidents of food contamination.

“Dr. Robert Tauxe—a medical epidemiologist and the deputy director of the Division of Foodborne, Bacterial, and Mycotic diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—says it’s likely that the outbreak has spread through the droppings of deer that dance unchecked across California spinach fields,” Dr. Siegel writes.

“This is a wakeup call for the food industry. Inadequate surveillance and easily contaminated crops—and, perhaps, an overabundance of deer—are factors that promote the creation and perpetuation of superbugs like the one that is currently riding our spinach.”

The bacteria have been found in most common animals.  Last fall it contaminated water supplies used for irrigation.  In Ontario an e. coli-contaminated water supply killed several people.  In Ohio, kids who went to a county fair got sick not from bacteria carried by animals or in the water but from airborne E. Coli.  Bacteria procreate at amazingly quick rates and this bug seem to be generating increasingly resilient forms of itself.

I don’t think that the four instances over the past four months are coincidental but rather an expression of greater quantities of the bacteria in the environment and we’re likely to see more.

How dangerous is it?  I don’t know—the CDC doesn’t seem to be making guesses. (I called them, and they said they were busy and couldn’t talk to me unless I was working on a story, which I’m not; I wish Dr. Siegel would keep calling.)

On the one hand, probably it’s not too dangerous because it’s not spread from human to human like a virus.  On the other hand, we’ve got to do something about it because it does kill people.  I’d like more journalists who are covering E. Coli to ask what kind of risk analysis the government is doing and what are we doing to prevent future outbreaks so that young kids don’t wind up in the ICU for going to a county fair, and so we don’t have to boil our salads and cook our burgers to 160 degrees.