E.coli bacteria

When it comes to beef, everybody worries

About the same thing, which is e.coli bacteria.

When I was a kid, I remember everybody here in the US freaking out about the Jack in the. Box outbreak. Jack in the Box is the less successful younger brother of McDonald's — another fast food chain born of a mid-20th century Southern California hamburger stand. In 1993, hundreds of customers in the Pacific Northwest got sick from E. coli and four little kids died. Unimaginable for those families. But as public health crises go, this was really just a blip on the radar.

That same year in the United States, more than 1,200 kids under 13 died in car crashes, for example. Half as many American kids die in crashes these days because cars have gotten a lot safer. Has beef gotten safer since 1993? Small as it was, the Jack in the Box outbreak really freaked people out and led to massive changes in the US food system that have been mirrored in other countries. Has it worked? That's a very hard question to answer. Certainly, you don't seem to hear very often about people getting E. coli. Compare it to norovirus, the number one foodborne illness. More than five million cases estimated every year here in the US and nearly a thousand deaths.

I've had norovirus, I know tons of people who've had norovirus. In contrast, there's only about a quarter million estimated E. coli cases a year in the US and about a hundred deaths. That's a problem for sure, but it was only the other day that for the first time in my life, I actually met someone who had a real case of E. coli. It was years ago. She was just a little kid when it happened. Coincidentally, she grew up to be a food microbiologist here at the University of Georgia Extension — Dr.

Carla Schwan, director of the National. Center for Home Food Preservation. We just talked to her about pickling. This is her lab. This piece of equipment is called a stomacher. It's exactly what it sounds like. "All the bacteria — let's say if you have a lettuce and you need to extract all the bacteria that might be present on the crevices of lettuce ". Leafy vegetables also a major carrier of E.

coli — lots of little crevices where bacteria can hide. Plus we usually eat them raw. " and what this machine does, it's basically going to smack that sample very quickly.

Once you're done, you're going to have

A very not appealing sample that has been smacked and all your bacteria are going to be hopefully in that liquid.".

Dr. Schwan actually did her graduate research on E. coli at Kansas State — poetic justice considering E. Coli almost killed her when she was 12.

"Rural Brazil, 3,000 people was the total size of my home city. And nobody knew what was going on, so they took me to a bigger city. They did bunch of tests and they finally realized I had Shiga toxin-producing E. coli.". Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. That is key. Most Escherichia coli bacteria are harmless.

They're probably in your gut right now actually helping — they make vitamin K2 for you. E. coli are among the many gut microorganisms with which all warm-blooded animals have a mutualistic relationship. That includes birds who poop on crops, and that's one of many reasons why E. coli are found in pretty much any food that comes from a farm, not just meat. And that's not bad, because we actually need bacteria in our bodies. If you could use a few more beneficial microorganisms in your gut, consider taking Synbiotic+ from.

I want to emphasize now even more

Than i usually do that the ad is now over.

E.coli strains are just fine.

Some of them maybe cause some gastroenteritis or maybe a UTI. In babies, they can be a cause of bacterial meningitis, that's more serious. And then there's Shiga toxin-producing E. coli named after the Japanese bacteriologist. Kiyoshi Shiga. In 1897, he discovered the bacteria that causes dysentery. The genus.

Shigella is therefore named after Dr. Shiga, as is the toxin they produce. In 1977, Canadian researchers found the same toxin produced by a particular line of E. coli. Then in 1982, the year I was born, there was an outbreak. Dateline: Oak Brook, Illinois, corporate headquarters of McDonald's. Dozens of people who ate at McDonald's locations in Michigan and Oregon ended up in the hospital with severe diarrhea. "There is absolutely no basis of concern about the company's future performance," read a corporate statement.

Oh, thank goodness, I was so worried. Let's see. Here's a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control. "Because they ate at peak hours, there may have been a large number of frozen patties on the grill and [those patties] may have reduced the heat of the grill below the proper temperature." Soon after, the CDC analyzed stool samples from some of the patients and they identified "a rare Escherichia coli serotype." That's a strain, or a particular family line within the species.

It makes the same family of toxins responsible for dysentery and by extension it's responsible for the deaths of Henry V and half of the other historical figures you've ever read about. Turns out a medieval siege is not a great place to find clean drinking water. Maybe try not conquering other people's countries. Anyway, this newly discovered, deadlier E.

coli probably came to us from the guts of ruminants like cattle, which are not bothered by the Shiga toxin. Therefore, they make an excellent host for the bacteria. It's actually bad for the bacteria if they kill their host or provoke a really strong immune response from the host. So in that sense, we humans were bad hosts to the Shiga toxin-producing. E. coli "A receptor in our intestines in our system that is called Gb3 receptor and that's where it attaches and that's why we get sick. On the other hand, cattle, which is the major reservoir of E. coli, they do not have that receptor.".

But we do.

And via that receptor, the Shiga toxin

Is able to get into the cells, particularly the cells in the lining of our smaller blood vessels.

And once inside our cells, the toxin inhibits protein synthesis, and so the cells start to die, our blood vessels hemorrhage. "The worst-case scenario, it can shut down your kidneys. So it produces hemolytic uremic syndrome, HUS. And when that happens, a lot of times you die, unfortunately. And so I was able to survive, so I'm here today.". But she was on dialysis for weeks, just like 21 of the kids affected by the Jack in the.

Box outbreak. Those are the immediate hazards of Shiga toxin. Then there are the lasting ones. "Now my microbiome is more limited and I don't have as much diversity because of that event. And fast-forward, now I have an autoimmune disease that is in your gut, again.". She has Crohn's disease, and she can't say for sure if it was the E. coli that caused it, but it definitely could have. So now you're probably thinking, How does this happen? How can I stop it from happening? "When I got sick with E.

coli, I was traveling with my dad and my dad was an Extension person as well back in Brazil. And when I didn't have school, he would take me with him to go to the different field days and all of that. And so I would travel with him. And. I remember that day, we shared a burger. Of course, the burgers in Brazil are very different from the US. They're very big. They're full of stuff.

We shared a burger. He ate half and I ate half and he didn't get sick, I got super sick.". Hardly surprising. It's always kids and old people — people whose immune systems are not strong enough to fight off the infection. E. coli might have evolved the Shiga toxin to combat our immune response that usually kills them. Like most events in evolutionary biology, that's kind of a chicken and egg problem, but it's definitely true that when people get the really bad E. coli, doctors will often not prescribe antibiotics.

"When bacteria feel threatened, they go in survival mode. And part of the survival mode is producing toxin.". And that might make you sicker.

Dr.Schwan got real sick, regardless.

It's totally standard that the infection got the kid and not the adult, and it's totally standard that it came from a burger. Cattle will have live E. coli on their hides and in their digestive tracts.

If either of those come into contact with the muscle tissue during slaughter, then the surface of the meat can be contaminated. That does not stop Dr. Schwan from eating rare steaks. She does it all the time. So do I. "A steak is different than ground beef because a steak, you have the full muscle. It is intact. And so if you have bacteria, that bacteria's going to be on the surface of the steak.

And when you are cooking that steak, even if it's on the surface, you are killing that bacteria that is on the surface. It is not going to be inside down because it's an intact muscle. Ground beef is different because now you're grinding that steak and you're introducing that bacteria that was in the surface to the inside.". Yeah, the outside is on the inside, which is why I basically never risk a rare burger. It helps that I don't really like rare burgers. In response to the Jack in the Box outbreak, the U.S. government raised their recommended internal temperature target for burgers. It's now 160ºF/71ºC.

With carryover, that should be more than enough to kill E. coli. And then there's all the regulations governing waste water and runoff from farms. That's probably a big source of E. coli contamination in non-meat foods. There's regulations for the slaughterhouse too. "So USDA regulates all of that. And they do an amazing job at having regulations in places and inspectors on site on every single facility.".

It's crazy. A government inspector will literally go through all of the entrails, sift through the entrails. It looks like they're trying to tell the future, which I suppose in a way they are. Because what they're looking for is any perforation, any cut or prick that could have released the contents of the digestive system and contaminated the meat because if they find a little cut in the entrails, they know the meat might be bad, so they pull the meat off the line. Have these things made everybody safer? No one knows for sure. Every year there's an outbreak or two like this one linked to lettuce in 2019. But outside of those isolated events, you're really only talking about a handful of actually documented cases. And it's hard to draw statistically significant conclusions from such tiny numbers.

But maybe that itself is an indication of success. Still wash your veggies that you plan to eat raw, cook your ground meat all the way through and generally try to avoid cross-contamination. Oh also, it's not recommended to eat raw flour anymore because there's an E. coli risk there. That's one that we'll talk about another day...