Czech Republic, Poland, and Spain, more than 70 percent of egg-laying flocks are infected with Salmonella. With the exception of the Nordic countries (which have all but eradicated the disease in animals), other industrialized countries have lower, but still substantial, levels of contamination. In washing the eggs, people remove not only the visible dirt but also the less visible protective layer that the hen has secreted over her baby’s shell. The invisible bacteria are left intact and ready to invade through the pores of the egg, which they do as the shell dries.
Salmonella in cattle may move from the rural backwoods of intestinal living to adopt suburban lifestyles in lymph nodes. Even people can carry the organisms without being sick. Mary Malone, the infamous cook called Typhoid Mary, was one of many such people who have spread infections without themselves being sick. How we deal with such people (or animals) raises all the great questions of private rights versus public good that are at the heart of public health. Should people be quarantined? Cautioned? Charged with mischief?
A few bacteria do not usually cause much of a problem. What brings the masses out into the streets, however, is stress. Crowding the chickens or pigs together, and piling them into trucks to go to the slaughterhouse, brings Salmonella into the bracing, rebellious air, infiltrating feathers, splotching skin, and multiplying and filling the earth. If animals are not contaminated before they get into the truck to go to slaughter, they probably are afterward. Various studies find significant degrees of contamination in retail meats in Canada, the United States, and Europe (with the exception of the Nordic countries). Even if the prevalence gets down to, say, 1 percent, you, as a consumer, don’t know which 1 percent that is.
With all the scalds and disinfectants in modern packing plants, a lot of bacteria on the chickens do meet their end at the slaughterhouse. But with the crowds out full force, there are always a few million to spare, and bacteria love to multiply. Some of those millions get siphoned off into the meat by-products and from there get into the animal feeds and go back to the quiet life on the farm. The rest of them head off to the bright city lights, weddings, family reunions, papal visits, hospitals, and nursing homes.
From the point of view of the bacteria, bigger is better; the more intensive and large scale the livestock operations, the more extensive and devastating the foodborne disease, as well as the ecological problems. Salmonella in the family cow no longer need to content themselves with recycling through the same boring small family but get a free ride across the country and around the world. The notion of bacteria coming through in the eggs really only becomes frightening when one considers that a few major companies supply all the source birds for the egg industry. Monocultures and world trade are tailor-made for bacterial survival: the economies of scale are the economics of pandemics.
Another way to help the Salmonella along at the farm is to feed the animals antibiotics, which kill off the other neighborhood bacteria. The hardy and often drug-resistant Salmonella, never being ones to waste an opportunity, move into the homes we have cleaned out with our preemptive public safety measures. This tactic also works at home; you can sometimes lure a latent case of salmonellosis out of the closet by taking penicillin. Because of the massive amounts of antibiotics used in both people and animals, some people fear that drug-resistant Salmonella might take over the world. Drug-resistant bacteria, however, are adapted to live in a drug-filled environment, and if we cut back on our profligate antibiotic use, they would not give us problems.
If the bacteria can almost count on a quiet home on the farm, opportunities to spread from animal to animal abound on the truck to market. Even more opportunities arise at slaughter, and they most certainly can look forward to sloppiness in the kitchen. The counter becomes contaminated with bacteria when the turkey is put down there for dressing. Those that accompany the bird into the oven usually get killed off, but a healthy population lurks on the counter and repopulates it. If the counter is not contaminated, then your hands, or the knives, are. (What do you do about that itch on your scalp just before you handle the dinner? Just a little scratch won’t hurt, will it?) It is best, from a bacterial point of view, if you let the meat sit on the counter for a while, just to incubate.
Salmonella get turned on by that sort of warm, moist situation. They tumble over themselves in incestuous delight, doubling their populations every half hour or so. Other bacteria are even speedier. E. coli, a common gut bacterium, doubles every fifteen to twenty minutes, and Clostridium perfringens, which tends to favor meaty gravies and causes a passing diarrhea, is a copulatory sprinter at an eight. to ten-minute doubling time. I am told by a microbiologist colleague that, with unlimited food and ideal warmth, one cell could multiply to a colony of clones four thousand times the mass of the earth in twenty-four hours. Fortunately, the cells run out of food before they reach that size.
If poultry are a haven for Salmonella, hamburgers are heaven for a veritable menagerie of bacteria. Bacteria generally sit on the surface of meat, which includes the turkey’s armpits but not the heart of a steak. When we make hamburger, we take the surface bacteria and integrate them into the larger community of meat. Hamburgers, then, are really just cases of diarrhea and vomiting waiting for stomachs to happen, unless you cook them, and cook them well. Some of America’s finest foodborne disease outbreaks have been tracked back to hamburgers.
Like most of us, Salmonella prefer temperatures that are warm but not hot and will survive freezing but not boiling. They abhor the caustic wit of bleach and the acidic tongue of tomato juice, but they are adaptable enough to make a go of it in the most soiled of environments.
Hopelessness in the face of universal pollution is sometimes used as an argument by polluters to continue polluting; in the case of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, however, the situation is not at all hopeless. Bacteria can change rapidly; the same characteristics that allow them to develop antimicrobial resistance will also lead them to drop much of that resistance. Not burdened with rules of socially acceptable reproductive behavior, they can evolve and adapt as quickly to a drug-free life as they have to drugs. If Solomon had advised us to go to the bacteria, where quick, guiltless, cooperative change is the watchword, instead of to the ants, where regimented war prevails, who knows what the shape of human civilization might be today? The short of it is: things will get better if we change our ways.
Countries such as Sweden and Denmark have been systematic and aggressive in addressing Salmonella problems. Through a mixture of legal requirements and commercial inducements, Salmonella has been reduced and all but eradicated on farms, at slaughterhouses, and in the human population in these countries. So improvements are possible, but they are going to take some realistic, complex, systems thinking, firm commitments, and perhaps some deep cultural changes. For some of us, becoming more Swedish would, after all, not be so bad.
4 COWS, CATS, AND PURE COUNTRY WATER
E. COLI AND OTHER WATERBORNE BACTERIAL INFECTIONS
DRINKING BOTTLED water every day is like using a toilet bowl brush to clean your teeth, driving a snowmobile for recreation, or using an all-terrain vehicle in the city. All these items have important uses, but in most parts of the world none of them should be part of everyday life. When they are used outside of the circumstance for which they are designed, they are, for the most part, destructive and dysfunctional. Bottled water is for emergencies and should be saved for them.
Mostly, I dislike bottled water because it represents an unwarranted and pervasive anxiety in Western societies. Bottled water purports to solve an individual problem—fear of illness—by contributing unnecessarily to big public health problems—large-scale water and energy shortages and under-funded public water systems. I hate the idea that someone can suck an increasingly scarce public good out of the ground and then use scarce energy resources to package it and sell it back to the public. This process fosters
