Daniel B. Cohen is the owner of Maccabee Seed Co., an agricultural research-and-development and consulting company in Davis California.
Our process of framing and regulating produce food safety is upside down and backwards.Human pathogens constantly flow from urban environments and animal production into farm environments, contaminating water and soil, and finding a home in wildlife. Then we ask farmers to deliver pathogen-free fruits and vegetables.Produce is increasingly sold as centrally processed fresh-cut products, diced fruits and cut salads in...
I am interested in how major foodborne outbreaks and their investigations are interpreted and analyzed: to prevent future outbreaks, minimize the harm from outbreaks that occur, and frame the debates on regulating food safety on farms.When I was asked by a small organic farmer in California what the implications were of the 2011 O104:H4 European outbreak, I said it could...
Food safety issues and worries about food safety rose to a high level last year among farmers. The owner of one of the original small organic farms in my county asked me what lessons could be learned from the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak in Europe, but then came E. coli O157:H7 on strawberries in Oregon, Listeria on cantaloupes in Colorado...
The O104:H4 serotype has an unusual clinical pattern for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) pathogens, including bloody diarrhea in adults followed by a high conversion rate to adult hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) or to severe non-HUS enterohemorrhagic symptoms in adults.There is another STEC group that parallels the unusual pattern of the current outbreak in Germany. It as characterized by a...
What are the lessons learned so far from the O104:H4 outbreak?German medical and public health authorities are burdened by the equivalent of more than 10 normal years worth of case loads occurring in a single month, the continuing need for secondary infection prevention, the outbreak source investigation and perhaps other issues as well. Despite this, a major study conducted as...
As of Tuesday, the toll in the outbreak of E. coli O104:H4 in Germany was 3,697 illnesses, 856 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) and 40 deaths.Major Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) outbreaks in the past have been transformative events for epidemiology and approaches to food safety. An hour-long conversation last Thursday with Dr. Robert V. Tauxe, deputy director, Division...
"I watched my friends get sick, just melt away, and die in hours." A senior, returning to our college from Nepal in 1968, after participating in a 5 year program allowing students a year abroad. His education included what we now would describe as post traumatic stress. Many readers will recognize the disease course of cholera, the toxin-mediated imbalanced loss...
I have been following the outbreak in Germany rather intensively for sustainable agriculture groups and local organic farmers, because of my past work on E. coli O157:H7 and spinach for CAFF (the Community Alliance with Family Farmers).This is the moment when there may be a breakthrough in the epidemiology and investigation of the origins of the outbreak.So far the outbreak,...
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Maccabee Seed Co.
