WASHINGTON -- As Memorial Day weekend signaled the start of summer's barbecuing season, Vice President Al Gore unveiled a new computer tracking system designed to help keep Americans safe from contaminated hamburgers, hot dogs and salads.
The PulseNet computer network reaches all 50 states, enabling investigators to identify outbreaks of foodborne illness five times faster than is possible now, and to make a quick match of illness-causing bacteria wherever else they may turn up.
``At those times, every single second counts,'' Gore said Friday. ``When Americans are about to bite into a tasty hamburger or a juicy strawberry, they really shouldn't have to worry and they shouldn't have to fear.''
A new task force will also coordinate rapid-response efforts by federal, state and local agencies. Without such systems, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said, ``getting all the different players working together in a crisis situation is a massive, nerve-wracking undertaking.''
Foodborne pathogens cause an estimated 9,000 deaths and 33 million illnesses each year.
The network will use the Internet to link the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department, four laboratories and state health departments.
This will enable officials to quickly identify pathogens like E. coli in illness outbreaks using the DNA of the bacteria found in the contaminated food and in patients who are suffering from gastric problems.
The DNA ``fingerprint'' of the pathogen could then be transmitted around the country to determine how widespread the outbreak is and what should be done to combat it, such as a product recall.
Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the current government FoodNet system only tracks such outbreaks in a few states and cannot cope with a large-scale outbreak.
Beginning Friday, PulseNet linked epidemiologists in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, Washington, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. The remaining states will be hooked up by 1999.
Meanwhile... The Root of the Problem
From E Magazine - The Trouble With Meat - To understand what Rifkin means about factory farming being "the primary cause" of meat's health crisis, it's necessary to track how disease is contracted and spread from animals to humans. Until recently, most criticism of factory farming has come from animal rights groups that emphasize its inhumane aspects. But, as Nicols Fox meticulously documents in her new book, Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire, the conditions on factory farms are tailor-made incubators for disease.
The modern broiler chicken house, Fox says, is no quaint little farm building, but a poultry metropolis holding up to 70,000 genetically similar birds in close confinement. "There is every evidence that Salmonella and E. coli don't have one cause but many, many causes," she says. "Any stress exacerbates the presence of microbes in chickens. And dirty water, dirty food, all of these things have been shown to increase the presence of pathogenic microorganisms, which spread much more quickly through flocks that are essentially clones of each other." In March, Consumer Reports revealed that its own testing had found Campylobacter in 63 percent of randomly selected chickens, and Salmonella in 13 percent. Only 29 percent of the birds tested were free of either bacteria. Almost all were infected with generic E. coli. - Go to E Mag for more
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