Unchained in America

I just read an article in The New York Times about vaccines to prevent E coli in in cattle. The vaccines aren’t for people like you and me. They’re for cows. Well . . . actually . . . the vaccines aren’t really for cows. They’re for people like you and me. It’s just that the cows are the ones that get the injections.

I guess if you don’t like injections, that’s good news. But if you’re concerned about food safety, that’s bad news.

Our Beef with E Coli

Beef becomes contaminated with E coli in two ways.  In the first way, feces on the skin of cattle contaminate meat on the cattle being killed and cut up in the slaughter house.  How do feces get on the skin of cattle? In the industrial feedlot, where they’re forced to mill around in pools of their own feces during their stay in there while they’re waiting (unknowlingly) to be sent to the slaughter house to be killed.

In the second way, workers inside the slaughter house have trouble keeping up with the fast pace of killing. Sometimes a worker might slice through a cow’s intestines by accident, spewing its feces on meat. Ugh!

Vaccines for E Coli

Instead of addressing the problem of feed lots and slaughter houses, scientists at pharmaceutical companies have developed vaccines to prevent cattle from getting E coli. Two companies — Epitopix in Minnesota and Bioniche Life Sciences in Canada — have developed vaccines.  Epitopix’s vaccine was approved by the U.S. Agriclture Department, which is letting the company sell the vaccine at the same time that it’s testing the vaccine. Bioniche Life Sciences’ vaccine was approved in Canada. The company is waiting for approval in the U.S.

Cargill, the slaughter house that processes the largest amount of ground beef in the country, is coordinating and paying for a large-scale study to test Epitopix’s vaccine.

Originally, the Agriculture Department established a high standard for approving Epitopix’s vaccine. But the company complained, so the Agriculture Department lowered its standard to one the company could meet pretty easily.

The Solution Not Wanted

What the New York Times article doesn’t mention is that a solution already exists for preventing E coli:  stop raising cows industrially. Before the 1970s — when the Nixon administration industrialized the raising and slaughtering of cattle — E coli wasn’t a problem.

During the Nixon administration, the government encouraged farmers to raise more corn than they could sell. As a result, farmers and feedlot owners began feeding corn to cattle.  Because a cow’s digestive system was made to digest grass — not corn — farmers and feedlot owners had to begin giving their cows antibiotics to prevent them from dying.

The corn diet not only resulted in cows on drugs, but also resulted in cows producing extremely fat meat — which resulted in increased health problems — such as heart disease — in the people who ate the beef. (The meat in the grass-fed cattle contained less fat, and the fat wasn’t as bad for people.)

The ground beef we buy at the grocery store consists of trim — smaller pieces of meat that normally would be considered waste. (Artificial filler also goes into the ground beef, too.) The trim comes from all over the country and from other parts of the world. The pound of ground beef you buy at the grocery store could be made up of trim from any number of U.S. and foreign companies.

The people who raise and slaughter the cows we eat — such as Cargill — don’t want to go to the expense of tracking where all the trim that goes into their ground beef comes from.  Some companies also refuse to test their ground beef for E coli because it might actually be discovered, which would prevent them from selling it.

E Coli Vaccine and Chicken Feces

One statement in the article I found particularly appalling:

Dr. Kent McClure, general counsel of the Animal Health Institute, a pharmaceutical industry group, said that while the review [of the Epitopix vaccine]took longer than he would have liked, the new legal clarity could pave the way for other food safety vaccines.

One possibility, he said, was a vaccine for campylobacter, a bacterium that infects poultry without making them sick, but which causes millions of cases of food poisoning each year.

I looked up campylobacter infections on the Internet. The bacterium lives in the intestines of a lot of wild and domestic animals — including chickens. So the bacterium also is in the animals’ feces. For the industrial farmers who raise thousands and thousands of chickens, the bacterium becomes a “people problem” when the feces in their chicken contaminate food or meat.

As it turns out, chicken feces is a source of income to chicken farmers.

According to a recent Los Angeles Times article (October 31, 2009),  industrial farmers sell their poultry litter — including chicken “feces, spilled chicken feed, feathers and poultry farm detritus” — to the feedlot owners to feed their cattle. Between 1 to 2 million tons of it a year.

No wonder people are getting sick from chicken feces!

The Los Angeles Times article also says that a “coalition of food and consumer groups” asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to put a stop to the practice of feeding chicken waste to cattle.  Coalition members include Consumers Union and the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

One of the world’s largest consumers of beef also also wants the practice stopped:  McDonald’s Corp.

E Coli Vaccines for Animals — the Great Cop-Out

My take from reading the New York Times article is that the Industrial farmers, feedlot owners, and processors (such as Cargill) want to use vaccines as a substitute to actually dealing with the causes of food safety. If they inject E coli vaccine in their calves, they won’t have to worry about dealing with the problem of their unsanitary feedlots and the frantic pace of slaughter and processing in their slaughter houses.

The industrial chicken farmers want an E colin vaccine so they won’t have to deal with the problems in their own chicken yards, too. And they can continue selling their chickens’ feces and other waste to the feedlot owners, who can continue giving them to their cattle to eat as food. Yum, yum!

The industrial food producers want their vaccines to they can continue their business as usual.

The pharmaceutical companies want the vaccines, too.  Just think of the millions upon millions of cows and chickens that will need shots each and every year! The pharmaceutical companies stand to make billions of dollars from vaccines.

Locally Grown Meat — Safer and Healthier

Personally, I don’t have to worry about the ground beef I eat. I know where it comes from because I buy my meat locally. The ground beef comes from a single cow. I know where on the cow the meat came from, the date the cow was killed, and there the cow was processed. I also know that the cow lived the way nature intended — on grass — that the cow was slaughtered humanely. The fact that the cow had E coli in its intestines isn’t an issue or a potential health problem. E colin in a cow’s intestines is normal. It only becomes a problem in industrialized farming.

I also know that the beef — and other kinds of locally bought meat and poultry — I buy and eat is more healthy for me than the meat and poultry people buy at most grocery stores.

If you’re interested in learning more about how and why the way we raise and slaughter our cows and chickens has put us at risk, you should read:

• Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
• Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

So what do you think? Will you feel safer or more comfortable knowing that the beef or chicken you ate was given a vaccine against E coli?

Do you think that the vaccine is a cop-out to addressing the problem of our food safety and our tainted meat?

Tags: E coli, food safety, ground beef

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.