Pathogens to go

As more and more people take their meals already prepared ("ready to eat" or RTE) from supermarkets and delicatessens, so will more and more people take their pathogens the same way. It's not that the kitchens that prepare RTE food are more dangerous than home kitchens. On the contrary, they are probably safer, as there is a strong incentive to use good food preparation hygiene. Indeed in the past most foodborne infection came from improperly prepared and cooked food in the home. Now, however, with so many meals either eaten or prepared outside the home, this is changing. And while the practices of the RTE kitchens is on average better than their at-home counterparts, when something goes wrong it goes wrong for a lot of people at once. The RTE kitchen is on the end of a long lever:

Cold meat from a supermarket delicatessen has been linked to an outbreak of E.coli food poisoning in Scotland that has left one person dead and two more seriously ill in hospital.

A 66-year-old disabled woman died yesterday morning in the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, and her 72-year-old husband remains gravely unwell in Glasgow's Victoria Infirmary after contracting the E.coli O157 infection, which is believed to involve two Morrisons stores in Paisley, Renfrewshire.

An 86-year-old woman also from the Paisley area is recovering at home, as is another family, comprising a woman aged 45, a man aged 46, and their 23-year-old daughter. A 71-year-old woman is being treated at the Royal Alexandra in Paisley. (TimesOnline)

E. coli is a normal inhabitant of the intestinal tracts of warmblooded animals, including humans, but it exists in several different strains, one of which, the O157 strain, is capable of producing a very nasty toxin that causes fever, bloody diarrhea and kidney damage. It is this strain that is responsible for the five cases with one death in Scotland. The largest O157 foodborne outbreak was also in the UK, resulting in the deaths of 21 elderly people in Wishaw, Lanarkshire in 1996. The O157 strain is also notorious in the US as the Jack-in-the-Box bug that killed several toddlers after their parents took them to a fast food outlet some years ago.

Outside of the virulence of O157, there is nothing special about this episode. It is emblematic of the long chains of food production that now characterize the majority of meals in the industrialized nations of the world. The huge industrial farms that produce the food maximize their output with chemicals additives and pesticides, the long travel times from these farms to the market shelf require the use of preservatives, and the numerous steps from growing, harvesting, transportation to retailing provide multiple and ample opportunities for contamination along the way, including the penultimate one of preparation just prior to purchase and consumption of ready-to-eat food.

Morrison's shares fell 4.9% on the news.