The 2008 US Salmonella Outbreak

Updated August 23:

Most of my American readers have heard of this outbreak. For those who want to read up on the details of it, this Wikipedia article covers the main points. The outbreak has now been located in a farm growing Serrano and Jalapeño peppers in Mexico, where it was found in water used to irrigate the field and in the field itself.

In discussion on Mexico-hostile web forums, it was stated over and over that the reason for the outbreak was that Mexico allows raw sewage to run into the fields of its farms. I sort of doubt that that is true, but it sent me off on a quest to find out what Salmonella is and how Salmonellosis is transmitted.

Non-typhoidal Salmonella is a bacterium that when transmitted to humans, can cause Salmonellosis. This disease often manifests as a gastrointestinal illness. The disease is most common in raw eggs and raw milk. It is killed by pasteurization and irradiation.

You can also get it from handling reptiles, something I like to do. I especially like to catch snakes and play with them, and I even handle dead and dying snakes, but I always wash my hands afterwards.

You can also get it from cat feces, so you need to wash your hands if you handle and of that stuff. In general, humans seem to get this illness from either handling animals or from exposure to their feces. In humans, it's typically caused by exposure to chicken and cow manure. You can also get it by handling cows, chickens and chicks. I'm not really sure how it gets into raw eggs.

Anyway, in all my travels around the web, including the CDC site where they discussed the outbreak, it never said how the Salmonella was thought to have gotten onto the farm. The best theory that I could come up with was that it had gotten into the water and from there onto the farm via contamination of the water with cow manure from nearby dairy or ranching operations.

We had a similar outbreak of E. Coli 0157:H7 food-borne illness in California a while ago. It was traced to cow manure that had gotten into the water used to irrigate a spinach farm in Salinas. Salmonellosis, like E. Coli 0157:H7, does not appear to a human sewage-transmitted illness.

There is similar confusion over E. Coli 0157:H7. On nativist bulletin boards, people rail against the slaughterhouses for hiring illegal aliens and say that all of the E. Coli outbreaks in US meat (there have been some) are because illegal aliens are not washing their hands enough at the plants. Once again, the nativists are trying to a food-borne illness to Hispanics and raw sewage or poor personal cleanliness.

E. Coli 0157:H7 comes from cows , from cow manure, to be specific. I assume that the contamination of beef with E. Coli 0157:H7 occurs when cow manure gets into beef. I'm not wild about illegal aliens in slaughterhouses, but they aren't causing any E.Coli outbreaks.

Anyone knowledge about this stuff is welcome to chime in.

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