Food Safety on the Farm

  • The government isn't requiring farms comply with its safety rules yet, but some grocery chains and food distributors are. (Photo courtesy of These Days in French Life CC-2.0)

More than year ago peanut butter made in the southern U.S. sickened hundreds of people and killed as many as nine.
The outbreak set off a scramble to make food safer and the impacts are starting to be felt on the farm.
But it’s not clear how much the push for “food safety” will change anything.
Peter Payette reports.

Transcript

More than year ago peanut butter made in the southern U.S. sickened hundreds of people and killed as many as nine.
The outbreak set off a scramble to make food safer and the impacts are starting to be felt on the farm.

But it’s not clear how much the push for “food safety” will change anything.
Peter Payette reports.

The government is not requiring farms comply with its safety rules yet, but some grocery chains and food distributors are.

Chris Alpers runs two farms in northern Michigan that grow both cherries and apples.
He figures he’ll spend $7,000 getting them certified.
When asked if that will make his fruit any safer he pauses.

“That’s a hard one to answer. I don’t think we’ve had any issues in the past, nor would we if we continue the way we are currently doing things. But I guess the possibility is there that something could happen so certain things they are requiring us to do might make the fruit a little safer I suppose.”

In fact, nobody has ever heard of this region’s main crop making anyone sick.
It’s hard to imagine tart cherries being a little safer.
They grow well off the ground. They’re not picked by hand and are soaked in water on the way to be processed.
Nevertheless, growers along the coast of Lake Michigan will line up this summer to pay inspectors ninety-two dollars an hour to make sure they’re following a list of rules.

These include things like making sure workers only water drink in the orchard and that they wash their hands properly.
Nobody complains the rules are unreasonable.
But Dave Edmondson says they’re impractical.

“They want me to sign a piece of paper that this is going to happen every single day. I can’t guarantee that!”

Edmondson says he’s happy to run his farm according to the new rules but there are limits.

“It’s like the Indy 500 come harvest time. You have to focus on the movement of the fruit and taking care of it.”

There’s also concern in this region about what new rules might do to the growing number of small farms.
There’s a trend here of farmers growing food to sell locally rather than for processing or to ship cross-country.
There’s even a distributor that supplies area restaurants, schools and grocers with local food.
That company, Cherry Capital Foods, is not requiring its farms be certified.

The manager Evan Smith says he doesn’t want to see the local food movement killed with new costs and paperwork.
Smith says they visit farms they work with and he thinks small farms selling to neighbors are not the problem.

“That’s not to say it can’t be better but I’m not sure we’re going to see a significant change in the amount of food-borne illnesses or a decrease in those because quite frankly we’re not seeing that occur right now.”

Still the dangers of a tomato or spinach leaf making someone sick are real.

That’s why Don Coe says it will be better if everyone tries show their farms are clean and safe.
Coe owns a winery and is a Michigan agriculture commissioner.
He says one illness caused by a small farm selling locally would smear the movement.

“That’s my concern, is that we have to have an acceptable level of compliance with good food handling systems. We have to back it up with some kind of inspection service. It doesn’t have to be as rigid as foods going into the major food channels.”

The U.S. Congress might soon decide who needs to pass what sort of safety tests.
Under legislation now pending a farmer selling a few bags of spinach at a farmers market could be subject to the same standards as huge processing plant.

For The Environment Report, I’m Peter Payette.

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The Great Vaccination Debate

  • There are parts of the country where up to 20% of families are saying ‘no’ to vaccines. (Photo by Bill Branson, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

Babies and young children get a lot more vaccines today than they did ten years ago. To most parents, it’s a chance to protect their children from more diseases. But there are pockets of places where lots of people are opting out of vaccines. Julie Grant reports that it has the Centers for Disease Control concerned:

Transcript

Babies and young children get a lot more vaccines today than they did ten years ago. To most parents, it’s a chance to protect their children from more diseases. But there are pockets of places where lots of people are opting out of vaccines. Julie Grant reports that it has the Centers for Disease Control concerned:

Heather Waltz has a five month old daughter. Most Americans her age have already started a series of vaccinations – to prevent everything from Hepatitis B, to Diphtheria, to Polio.

But Waltz’s little girl isn’t going to get those shots. Her mom worries they could cause things like autism, juvenile diabetes and even cancer.

“I think the jury’s still out, as far as what the research says. But there is enough anecdotal sort of stuff to make me aware and decide that, really, right at this point, vaccinating wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

Waltz is among a small, but growing number of parents who are becoming skeptical of vaccines.

Lance Rodewald is director of immunization services at the Centers for Disease Control.

He says more than 90% of American children are vaccinated. But there are parts of the country where up to 20% of families are saying ‘no’ to vaccines.

“And that’s getting to a rate of lack of protection of children that really can be a fertile ground for the spreading of diseases like measles. And we actually saw that last year.”

In one case last year, Rodewald says a child who wasn’t vaccinated caught the measles in Switzerland and brought it back to Arizona.

“The parents didn’t realize that the child had measles – brought him to the pediatricians office where there were babies that were too young to be vaccinated that got measles. And then that particular outbreak went through four generations of spread, from child to child to child to child before it was able to be contained.”

Measles can cause more than just a nasty rash. In rare cases, it can lead to death. Measles still causes 200,000 deaths around the world. But it’s been almost eradicated in the U.S. because of vaccines.

Rodewald says many parents are concerned about vaccines today because of a ten-year old scientific article that linked the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella to autism. Rodewald says the science in that article proved to be wrong.

“The authors withdrew their names from the article. But this particular study set off a whole series of concerns about vaccines and autism that, to this day, is still talked about.”

Rodewald says many studies have been done and found no association, no cause and effect, between vaccines and autism.

It’s tough for parents to wade through all the information that’s out there these days. And there are so many vaccines to try to understand. Back in the mid-1990s, children were given 6 vaccines. Today, they’re supposed to get more than twice that many.

Mother Heather Waltz tries to keep up with it all and says she still plans to avoid vaccines.

Waltz: “For every bit of research and every article I find sort of helping me support my point, there’s a million other bits of research and articles saying that I’m a bad parent, or saying that I’m somehow damaging the health of the entire United States by not vaccinating my child. Just this idea that she could be a measles monster and just running around and infecting her classmates with measles or something like that, and that would be a terrible thing.”

Grant: “What do you think when you see that?”

Waltz: “It doesn’t make logical sense to me. Because to me, if you have 30 kids in a classroom, and my one isn’t vaccinated, wouldn’t my child be the one at risk? Not the public’s.”

But even if Waltz’s daughter doesn’t get vaccinated, she’ll probably be safe from these diseases. With so many other kids getting inoculations, most of the U.S. is not fertile ground for them to regain traction.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Swine Flu and Factory Farms: Any Connection?

  • It’s not uncommon for influenza viruses to be exchanged between pigs and humans (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)

The current swine flu outbreak was first detected in a region of Mexico with large confined animal feeding operations – factory farms. Many environmentalists wonder if there’s a connection. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The current swine flu outbreak was first detected in a region of Mexico with large confined animal feeding operations – factory farms. Many environmentalists wonder if there’s a connection. Lester Graham reports:

A US government brochure indicates it’s not uncommon for influenza viruses to be exchanged between pigs and humans.

Mark Wilson is a professor of epidemeology at the University of Michigan. He says factory farms can make that exchange easier.

“The combination of animals being confined in close quarters as well as the large number of animals is likely to lead to more transmission of infectious agents among them. And as people – workers – are in contact with these animals, the possibility of transmission from those animals to those workers is increased. Absolutely.”

But, Wilson says it’s anyone’s guess whether this strain of swine flu began at a factory farm.

“Completely unknown at this point.”

Health officials from Mexico and the US Centers for Disease Control are investigating the source of the virus.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham

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The Peanut Butter Panic

  • There’s a chance that potentially-contaminated food is still sitting on store shelves, and maybe in your pantry (Source: Gene.Arboit at Wikimedia Commons)

Hundreds of products with peanuts or peanut-butter have been yanked from
store shelves. That’s because of an outbreak of salmonella poisoning. Kyle
Norris has the latest on the outbreak:

Transcript

Hundreds of products with peanuts or peanut-butter have been yanked from
store shelves. That’s because of an outbreak of salmonella poisoning. Kyle
Norris has the latest on the outbreak:

We know the products include cookies, crackers, snack bars, cakes, candies,
ice cream—even pet foods are affected. And there’s a chance that
potentially-contaminated food is still sitting on store shelves. And maybe in
your pantry.

Matthew Boulton is an associate professor of epidemiology. He’s at the
University of Michigan School of Public Health. He says the testing of the
Georgia facility that made these peanut-butter products shows there are
flaws in the food safety system.

“I think one of the big problems is this divide we have between the folks who do the
regulation and the folks responsible for human health. Sometimes you don’t have good
communication between those two groups and it’s really critical if you’re going to get a
handle on insuring a safe food supply.”

Boulton says this peanut-butter scare could go on for a few weeks. Or a few
months.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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15th ANNIVERSARY OF WATER CRISIS

  • Dr. Ian Gilson and nurse Mary Busalacchi treated several of the AIDS patients who died during the cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee. (Photo by Erin Toner)

Fifteen years ago, 400,000
people got sick and more than 100 died
from contaminated drinking water. It’s
still the biggest outbreak of waterborne
disease ever in the United States. It
happened because a parasite got into the
water supply in Milwaukee. Since then,
there have been major changes in water
systems across the nation. Erin Toner
reports:

Transcript

Fifteen years ago, 400,000
people got sick and more than 100 died
from contaminated drinking water. It’s
still the biggest outbreak of waterborne
disease ever in the United States. It
happened because a parasite got into the
water supply in Milwaukee. Since then,
there have been major changes in water
systems across the nation. Erin Toner
reports:

Dr. Ian Gilson has been treating AIDS patients for 25 years. He says in all that time,
nothing’s been as bad as 1993 when Milwaukee’s drinking water was contaminated with
a parasite called cryptosporidium.

“We began to get reports of some of our patients having diarrhea that didn’t stop and we
had patients with weird stuff like an ulcer that was not related to acid, severe gall bladder
disease without stones. Ultimately by the time it was called a waterborne epidemic we
knew we had a big problem on our hands.”

Healthy people who drank the water, or brushed their teeth with it, or ate food that was
washed in it, had severe vomiting and diarrhea. But people with weak immune systems,
like those HIV with AIDS, couldn’t fight the parasite. And there weren’t good AIDS
drugs back then, so the patients just deteriorated.

“I distinctly remember several patients saying if you can’t get me over this let’s just be
done with this. One guy who was suffering terribly, we couldn’t seem to get him enough
morphine. And I ordered what I thought was a fatal dose of morphine because I thought
that was the only thing that was going to help him. And it actually relieved his pain.”

When it was all over, cryptosporidium killed 103 people with HIV and AIDS. Even after
15 years, the source of the parasite is still a mystery.

“The cause is not known and may never be known. There does not seem to be any
obvious explanation.”

Carrie Lewis is superintendent of Milwaukee Water Works. She says at the time of the
outbreak, the city pumped in water through an intake pipe about a mile off shore in Lake
Michigan.

The prevailing theory is that sewage overflows contaminated water in the bay, and that
the water was pushed toward the intake pipe and entered the treatment plant.

Lewis doesn’t buy it.

She says if human sewage was the source, people would have had to be sick to excrete
the parasite, and there’s no evidence of that. Some also speculate that cow manure
contaminated area rivers, but Lewis says regular testing in the watershed rarely finds
traces of cryptosporidium.

Lewis says she has no clue what happened, and she’s OK with that. She says what’s
important is what’s changed since then. Lewis says water testing at the time of the
outbreak amounted to taking a couple of samples a day – and that was considered good.

“Today we have hundreds of instruments testing the water every single second for all
sorts of different parameters, so the 15 years that’s gone by it’s a lifetime.”

The cryptosporidium outbreak so damaged Milwaukee’s psyche that people were willing
to do just about anything to make the water safe again. The city spent $90 million to
extend the intake pipe farther out in Lake Michigan. The filters at purification plants were
updated. And now the water is treated with ozone, which kills cryptosporidium.

What happened in Milwaukee caused changes around the country.

New federal regulations required water systems to test for the parasite and safeguard
against it. A drug was licensed to treat the disease.

Michael Beach is associate director for healthy water at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. He says today people should have a lot of confidence when they turn on
their tap.

“Those types of outbreaks have virtually disappeared from the tracking system.”

Many water experts say municipal drinking water in this country is now the safest in the
world. They say the legacy of the Milwaukee outbreak is that water utilities are no longer
just managing a system of pipes and water mains – they’re in the business of protecting
public health.

For The Environment Report, I’m Erin Toner.

Related Links

Online Map of Wildlife Diseases

  • Dr. Robert McLean works on a West Nile disease project at the National WIldlife Health Center with a Carolina Chickadee (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

There’s a new online map for tracking
wildlife diseases that threaten animals and
people. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

There’s a new online map for tracking
wildlife diseases that threaten animals and
people. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Diseases such as West Nile Virus, Chronic Wasting Disease, Avian Flu, and
others are now often in the news. A website partly developed by the US
Geological Survey aims to track reports of the disease outbreaks around the
world.

Veterinarian Josh Dein leads the project. He says he hopes both health care
professionals and the general public use the online map.

“One of the things you can do is say ‘what’s happening in my neighborhood,
what’s happening in my state, my country?’ And maybe I’m traveling to
someplace else. Maybe I want to look to see what’s happening somewhere else.”

Dein says the map also allows people to narrow their search to specific countries, types of
disease and affected species.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Mysterious Disappearing Bees

  • Brownish-orange bumps on the backs of these bees are Varroa jacobsoni mites, a possible cause of CCD. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Millions of honeybees across the country are dying
mysteriously. Entire hives or colonies of bees are
collapsing. Scientists say it’s some new threat. They’re scrambling to find answers.
As Bob Allen reports, bees are crucial in pollinating billions of dollars worth
of crops every spring:

Transcript

Millions of honeybees across the country are dying
mysteriously. Entire hives or colonies of bees are
collapsing. Scientists say it’s some new threat. They’re scrambling to find answers.
As Bob Allen reports, bees are crucial in pollinating billions of dollars worth
of crops every spring:


That fresh crisp apple you bite into for lunch comes from
a bee pollinating an apple blossom, but honeybees in the
U.S. are under tremendous stress. A new threat is
devastating them. It can wipe out entire colonies.


There’s plenty of honey still left in the hives to feed
the bees, but the bees have vanished. Scientists are
baffled. They’re calling it “Colony Collapse Disorder.”


Dennis van Englesdorp is bee inspector for the state of
Pennsylvania. He says the disorder first showed up in his
state last fall. But it’s now threatening the entire
beekeeping industry:


“We could not sustain the level of loss we’re seeing this
year several years in a row. And there are crops that are
90 to 100% reliant on honeybees for pollination. You need
bees for apples. And if you don’t have bees you don’t have
apples.”


A research team at Penn State University has given
themselves until fall to come up with some answers.


On a hilly farm in northern Michigan, Julius Kolarik raises
apples, cherries and honeybees. It’s a sunny day with the
temperature nudging near 50 degrees:


“So, no, it’s a beautiful day for bees. Makes you feel
good when you see bees flying. Makes me feel good
(laughs).”


This is the first time Kolarik has checked his bee yard
since fall. He uses his hive tool to pry the top off each
three-foot high colony to see how the bees are doing:


“We can see that they’re alive and that’s the main thing.”


It used to be considered an embarrassment if a beekeeper lost more
than 10% or so of his bees annually, but things have
gotten a lot tougher in recent years.


Parasitic mites have infested honeybees just about
everywhere. They’ve weakened the bees and left them
vulnerable to diseases and that’s meant annual losses
double what they used to be.


Now on top of that, there’s this new disorder. But Julius
Kolarik is not so sure how new it is. He’s been
raising honeybees since he was a kid:


“We’ve seen some of the same symptoms, so uh, through the
years. Even before we finally said that we have mites, uh.
We were getting unexplained losses. But now it’s come back
again. ‘Cause other years guys have lost whole yards but
left one or two hives.”


Bee researchers say previous outbreaks of colony collapse
were isolated incidents. This time it’s spread across the
country.


Tom McCormick’s small beekeeping operation supplies honey
to local markets in western Pennsylvania. That is, it did
until two years ago. That’s when he says collapsing
disorder killed half his colonies, so he bought more bees
to replace them. They did OK last year, but this spring
he’s looking at an 80% loss:


“To me it doesn’t make sense to go buy more bees and throw
them right back into the same situation without any idea
what the cause is.”


McCormick says two of his beekeeping friends have been
totally wiped out. And they’ve been seeing more than one
thing going on in their hives:


“One, we see hives full of honey and no bees. Totally
gone. We see other situations where we have a nice large
cluster of bees with honey all surrounding them and the
bees dead.”


When he reported this two years ago, he says, state
officials ignored him. Pennsylvania state beekeeper Dennis van Englesdorp admits
he thought McCormick had a serious mite problem at first.


But now researchers at Penn
State are checking other possible
environmental stresses that could be killing honeybees.
van Englesdorp says pinpointing the cause can be just
as difficult with bees as it is with humans:


“You can get a heart attack if you don’t eat well, if you
drink too much, if you smoke, you’re genetically disposed
to a heart attack. It could be one of those factors. It
could be a lot of those factors combining together.”


For this year, he says, the disorder means the number of honeybee colonies will be lower,
but he expects there to be enough to meet pollination
demands.


For The Environment Report, I’m Bob Allen.

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New Chronic Wasting Disease Worries

Officials say a new outbreak of Chronic Wasting Disease
could erupt after a fence was cut at an infected hunting preserve in Wisconsin. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Christina Shockley
reports:

Transcript

Officials say a new outbreak of Chronic Wasting Disease could erupt after a fence was cut at an
infected hunting preserve in Wisconsin. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Christina
Shockley reports:

Authorities say someone intentionally cut a hole in a perimeter fence at the preserve in central
Wisconsin. They say tracks indicate deer had gone in and out of the area through the hole…
before the owner saw it and notified the Department of Natural Resources.


Alan Crossley is with the Wisconsin DNR. He says officials shot deer around the preserve to try
to limit the chance the disease would spread to wild deer.


“We have to try to assess whether any deer escaped from that shooting pen. Then we’re going to
be meeting to talk about okay, should we try to do any additional shooting of deer in a larger area
around that pen.”


Crossley says it’s now even more important to monitor deer near the preserve in the years ahead.
He says it will take time to determine how their overall efforts to combat the disease are working.


So far, CWD has been found in the wild in ten states, including Wisconsin, New York and
Illinois.


For the GLRC, I’m Christina Shockley.

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Farmers Watch for Soybean Rust

  • Soybean rust spreads quickly and easily, and Midwest farmers are worried that the disease may spread upward from the South. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

All eyes are on the south right now for signs of a potentially
devastating fungus that attacks soybeans. A serious outbreak there could
bring soybean rust to the Midwest where most of the nation’s soybeans
are grown. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton
reports:

Transcript

All eyes are on the south right now for signs of a potentially
devastating fungus that attacks soybeans. A serious outbreak there could
bring soybean rust to the Midwest – where most of the nation’s soybeans are
grown. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports:


Soybean rust spores are carried on wind currents, so it is easily spread.
So far this year, only Georgia has had a small outbreak.


Ray Hammerschmidt is a plant pathologist at Michigan State University. He
says every step is being taken to protect soybean crops, including dotting
the Midwest with what are called sentinel plots.


“And once a week, starting in a few weeks, each of these plots will be scouted very intensively, looking at at least a hundred plants, looking for any signs or symptoms of the disease.”


Advance warnings will allow farmers to apply fungicide to their crops as
soon as possible. Soybean rust can’t overwinter in the cold north.
So if southern states have good luck – or do a good job treating it – it’s less
likely to make it here.


For the GLRC, I’m Tracy Samilton.

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Preventing a Dangerous Microbe in Drinking Water

The EPA wants communities to do more to protect drinking water from a harmful microorganism. That could mean several changes for cities around the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

The EPA wants communities to do more to protect
drinking water from a harmful microorganism. That could mean
several changes for cities around the Great Lakes. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Ten years ago, a Cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee led to
the deaths of more than 100 people who had weakened immune
systems. The outbreak sickened 400,000 other people.


Since that time, Milwaukee has made 100 million dollars in water treatment plant
improvements. Milwaukee waterworks superintendent Carrie Lewis
says the EPA’s plan to make all drinking water treatment
systems monitor and guard against the microbe means some
cities face new construction at their water treatment buildings.


“Because one doesn’t easily add more barriers to
organisms like Cryptosporidium without adding more physical plant
to the water treatment plants.”


Lewis expects some cities to debate the cost and benefits of the
rule package.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Chuck
Quirmbach reporting.

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