Bird Flu - Stomaching Emerging Disease

According to the executive editor of Meat Processing magazine, “Nearly every food consumers buy in supermarkets and order in restaurants can be eaten with certainty for its safety—except for meat and poultry products.”1013

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the overwhelming majority of the 9 billion chickens raised each year are stocked in densities between 10 and 20 birds per square yard,1016 ,1017 unable even to stretch their wings.1018 Under this avian carpet is a fecal carpet of filth most of the birds spend their lives upon.1019

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Combined with the stress associated with overcrowding and poor water quality, it is not hard to imagine how the factory farming methods associated with the so-called “Blue Revolution” expansion of fish farming in the 1980s1023 resulted in the emergence of another zoonotic disease.1024

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Medical researchers at the University of Minnesota published a clue to the mystery in the April 2005 issue of the Journal of Infectious Disease. Taking more than 1,000 food samples from multiple retail markets, they found evidence of fecal contamination in 69% of the pork and beef and 92% of the poultry samples as evidenced by E. coli contamination. More surprising was that more than 80% of the E. coli they recovered from beef, pork, and poultry were resistant to one or more antibiotics, and greater than half of the samples of poultry bacteria “were resistant to >5 drugs!”

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Campylobacter is a spiral-shaped poultry bacteria1053 that corkscrews its way into the lining of the intestine “with a speed that cannot be matched by other bacteria.”1054 Just as H. pylori bacteria has been linked to stomach cancer, Campylobacter, according to a 2004 report in the New England Journal of Medicine, may trigger cancer as well, a rare lymphoma of the intestines.1055 Campylobacter, not even proven to cause human illness until the 1970s,1056 is now the suspected cause of up to 25% of cases of irritable bowel syndrome1057 and is currently the number-one bacterial cause of food poisoning, sickening millions of Americans every year.1058

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Veterinarian and academician David Waltner-Toews writes in his book Food, Sex, and Salmonella, “The most serious problems [with foodborne disease] invariably come back to the willingness of pureblooded capitalists to take risks with other people’s lives.”1064

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