Stephanie Smith ate a hamburger her mother had grilled for her and soon after came down with aches and cramps which she put up with that first day. Then she got diarrhoea which soon turned bloody. Then came convulsions that became so frequent and so violent the doctors had to put her in a chemically induced coma.
Nine weeks later the doctors brought her out of the coma. Now she could not walk. The affliction had left her paralysed.
Minnesota officials traced the cause back to the hamburger she had eaten on that fateful day.
Stephanie still can’t believe what happened to her just from eating a hamburger. But this was no ordinary hamburger. The ground beef in the hamburger was contaminated with the E. coli pathogen. You see eating ground beef is a gamble. The risk is slight, but for those who run out of luck the consequences can be devastating, even fatal.
Ground beef used for frozen hamburgers can be a dicey product. You never know what part of the animal went into it. Sometimes one parcel of hamburger meat can be an amalgam of meats sourced from different parts of cows and even different slaughterhouses. Some of the meat can even contain faeces.
In America in the last three years ground beef seems to be the culprit for 16 outbreaks of food poisoning with the recall of beef from thousands of retail outlets in 41 states.
E. coli is extremely virulent. It takes only a few cells to lay you low. And the pathogen is resistant to the heat from cooking.
Read the New York Times article.
Posted by Lin Stone on October 4, 2009 at 9:53 pm
What a tastefully short article. Where others are stealing everything the letter of the law will permit from the New York Times article, your post takes the barest essentials and deals with them in such a way as to make your reassuring post be of immense good use to those wondering if they should panic and throw every package of meat in the house out of the freezer and into the trash compacter.
For your readers I offer the following observations.
When a giant retailer begins processing its own ground beef that decision may not make it any better.The company I have bought my meat from for 19 years started its own plant. Over a period of 3 years the quality became progressively worse. The adding of water for weight brought the reason for less quality to my attention; the plant was adding blood to the water added into the process. The last batch I cooked from that company had to be drained 3 times. It took two pounds from the first company to equal one pound of the local processing plant that I used.
If you think that just switching to a local processing plant will solve all your problems, think again. We had deer meat processed at another local processor and it came back packaged with a fat dose of beef blood in it. When I asked why they had done that they responded that American people have acquired a taste for beef blood in their meat.
I haven’t.
Again, your post is well done, tastefully done. As I look at the list of recent posts I am fascinated by the titles. You have a good handle on what makes great news.
Lin Stone.
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