WELLTON, Arizona — A medical mystery hides in the cultivated rows of this farming community's biggest winter crop.
Leafy green heads of romaine lettuce poke through the soil and bring to the surface renewed fears of a deadly pathogen that ravaged the industry in 2018.
E. coli outbreaks tied to romaine ended the past three growing seasons in Arizona and California with food-safety alerts, nationwide case counts, hospitalizations and abandoned product.
Attempts by public health officials to trace the bacterial infections to a single source in these E. coli outbreaks have proved mostly unsuccessful — and sometimes misleading.
With no definitive answers, the first shipments of romaine from the new growing season in Yuma landed on store shelves this month. They carry new consumer labels meant to reassure: This lettuce was grown in unaffected fields. It is safe.
So far.
More here
DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
6 comments:
It's because the migrant workers are taking craps in the fields. Port-A-Johns are provided but pickers are paid by how much them pick not by the hour. Sometimes the toilets can be 1/2 mi away or more. Since being paid the way they are time is truly money.
The democrats exploiting migrant workers is causing another public health issue.
Epidemiologists are looking in the wrong places? How about some DNA comparisons of the soil contaminants with the workers in the fields, just for starters.
Many of these fields are irrigated with the clean, pure water from sewage treatment plants. You know, these plants where the officials say this water is clean enough to drink. I believe I read somewhere it says human waste and food sources were not to get mixed in with one another.
The pickers swim in and, defecate in the irrigation ponds. Then the pond (and poop) water gets sprayed on the plants.
The illegals they hire to work in the fields are relieving themselves in the fields and the water they use to irrigate them.
They know the cause. They are just keeping quiet about it so as to keep the illegals responsible for it, out of the public spotlight.
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