[Penner]

FDA officials stressed that the bacteria had not been isolated in products sold by Natural Selection Foods but that the link was established by patient accounts of what they had eaten before becoming ill.

The victim's son identified her Friday night as Marion Graff, 77, of Manitowoc, who died of kidney failure on Sept. 7.

"We're trying to get to the bottom of this and figure out what happened. Everybody is terribly concerned," said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

This is BS. CA has the highest food quality standards in the nation.

Vegetables are washed numerous times during processing to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

This sounds similar to the incident in Arizona, where the "victim" spilled coffee on herself and sued the company who provided the coffee.

Be careful, organic food is not automatically safer --the use of untreated cow manure in the industry is good source of E. coli which can cause this type of problem.

Maybe that's how it's done in Australia.

But that's not how it's done in California.

[Aussiebabe]

You are wrong.

[KarinG1]

Well, they certainly seem to have done something wrong.

[tiki]

I just heard a report on Fox and was realizing the financial devastation that this is going to cause. Farmers who had harvested, have paid the growing costs, the harvesting costs and in some cases the processing costs for what is now trash. Much of the product in the fields that is ready for harvest probably won't be harvested now and will just have to be disked under.

There has been an ongoing investigation to identify the source of some contaminated lettuce for 2 years and the Fox reporter said that he had talked to some farmer and they said they were very concerned because the food supply was a matter of national security. That makes me pause just a moment and wonder.

I have read threads on FR that kicked around how terrorists could mess with our food supply and most of them were ludicrous but this is worth some serious thought. E-coli isn't something you can see, grow it in a lab, carry it in a plastic bag in your pocket and keep your hands saturated with it as you pick. Or even go to the field and spray it on soon before harvesting. I just think it is worth a thought anyway.

[tiki]

I've had some time to think about what I posted and I think that that is a very unlikely scenario but it is still worth thinking about.