Fenugreek seeds
You’ve no doubt heard of the E. coli outbreak in northern Germany. You may have missed the fact that after several false starts authorities have now fingered fenugreek seeds imported from Egypt.
The EU has now placed bans on the import of the seeds and associated products until 31 October:
The banned items were defined as “seeds, fruit and spores used for sowing; leguminous vegetables, shelled or unshelled, fresh or chilled; fenugreek; dried leguminous vegetables, shelled, whether or not skinned or split; soya beans, whether or not broken; other oil seeds and oleaginous fruit, whether or not broken”.
There were separate outbreaks in Germany and France. Over 4100 people were affected and 49 died.
According to this Deutsche Welle report the organic farm in northern Germany is still in the frame, but it is not clear how the bean sprouts became infected.
The advice from the UK Food Standards Agency is instructive:
- Do not eat sprouted seeds such as alfalfa, mung beans (or bean sprouts) and fenugreek raw
- Cook sprouted seeds until steaming hot throughout
- Clean equipment used for sprouting seeds
- Wash hands after handling seeds intended for planting or sprouting
I did hear the opinion on radio that food irradiation would solve the problem of food preparation, but there my knowledge ends. I do recall the subject being quite controversial when food irradiation was introduced in Australia some years ago.
Ridiculous!
I just ate a good quantity of alfalfa sprouts in my lunch. I always put alfalfa sprouts in salad – along with avocado and walnut pieces, they bring back fond memories of 1970s salads.
I didn’t make/eat them for decades, but my Mum continued right through with them and when she became too old to do anything I started sprouting the alfalfa for her, and putting them in my salads again. Now, alfalfa sprouts seem as essentially Australian as tinned beetroot is in a salad.
Next we’ll be hearing about the danger of eating raw eggs – which I have been adding to banana smoothies for the last, almost, 50 years.
Sorry, Russell, what exactly is ridiculous? Not 49 people dead in Europe, surely.
Trust is an important issue in food, and with increasing global trade, there is a concern.
Brian – this was a serious post? I thought you were just alerting us to another front of the relentless attack on the left – this ad legumen attack against the symbol of the counter-culture, the humble alfalfa sprout. An innocent little salad green that anyone can produce in their own kitchen.
And yes, another good reason to resist ‘increasing global trade’ – you can’t trust it.
Of course the sprouts could have been deliberately contaminated as a way of eliminating left-wing sprout eaters …..
I wonder how much food they will have to dump before they are really sure where this came from? It has certainly put a spotlight on how some of this food is grown.
Food irradiation is, by all reports, a useful food safety and preservation technique, but it’s no substitute for good hygiene in the kitchen unless you’re going to irradiate your food directly before consumption – not particularly practical…
It’s like cooking – it kills the pathogens that are present, but if a blowfly then crawls over the meat you can get a whole new batch of bacteria (not to mention maggots).
Mindy, as I recall, the culprit seeds were imported a couple of years ago, and yes, they were suggesting that all stocks of the stuff imported since then be dumped.
Russell, my primary desire was to inform. Today my brother-in-law and his wife took off for a boat trip that takes them I think from Copenhagen to Saint Petersburg. They were concerned.
It wasn’t a serious post about food production methods, global trade etc but has to be seen in that context.
The other problem with food irradiation is that it’s generally done using nuclear waste. Or in the case of Australia, the proposal was to re-engineer our reactor to generate suitable waste. Sorry, radioactive material, that after use becomes, well, a bit of a problem. Storing it in drums in the open Sydney only works because we don’t talk about that. Surely the British, French, Brazilians, or someone, will take it off our hands eventually? Surely?
Irradiation makes a certain amount of sense for compact, high-value products or things that are just so extremely dangerous that the cost is largely irrelevant (for example, with seeds of noxious weeds that are imported as foodstuffs). Or if you generate a lot of nuclear waste and are looking desperately for something to do with it.
I read this story more as a lesson in what life will be like without antibiotics. We will have to go back to practicing good hygene, or accept a high death rate. The fight to get everyone, including doctors and specialists, to wash their hands is hospitals, for instance, is one we must win. Ideally we’d also stop assembling restaurant food in pest-infested warehouses (the Sydney food court case a few years ago), but any of that would cost money. And saving money is the most important thing.
Oops, have I tied this into “does quality of life rest only on how much money you have?” My bad.
That’s helpful, moz. I thought the fact that it happened in Germany was a bit of a wake-up call.
Brian – what I thought was ridiculous was that advice from the UK Food Standards Agency and its blanket ban on all sprouts, when the BBC article you linked to said: “A single batch of fenugreek seeds is the likely cause”. Lord knows how many people die each year in Europe (thousands?) from eating contaminated food, so I think a batch of lethal fenugreek sprouts are being made a bit much of.
As for Radiation Robert’s claim that “Food irradiation is, by all reports, a useful food safety and preservation technique …” I’ve read enough to doubt it. Do we need any more nuclear proliferation?
>>The advice from the UK Food Standards Agency is instructive:
Do not eat sprouted seeds such as alfalfa, mung beans (or bean sprouts) and fenugreek raw
There are plenty of foodborne illnesses & deaths:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_illness
Remember Mad-Cow Disease?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_cow_disease
N’
That clarifies it, thanks, Russell.
nasking, we are more sensitive about some causes of death than others. Road deaths are relatively speaking received with equanimity. We do worry about what we eat.
During the heyday of hippie foodism (1970′s) I read that improperly managed sprouts of all sorts were serious contenders for food contamination. Cannot recall why but I have been avoiding them ever since on the basis that whatever the evidence was at the time it was convincing to me.
The issue is very interesting in terms of global production and distribution because it illuminates the hazards of globalisation carried out entirely on terms to suit the market: unregulated. Global regulation of food production/storage (etc) standards is anathema to businesses and probably antithetical to notions of the free market. The end result of copping this argument, however, is a caveat emptor situation in which the risks are externalised onto consumers.
Watch that next tuna and sprout sandwich. Or the contaminated baby’s milk powder from somewhere or other. Same with the seaweed and the soy milk. The list is expanding.
Hmmm, is a corporatised, sterilised, global agribusiness future really the safe option?
Isn’t the global mass industrial processing and distribution of food the only vector that could create the possibility of exposing ten of thousands of people across many countries to a risk?
Will a ‘kill em all’ approach to the vast microbiota which appears integral to, and underpins, the biology of all living things and ecosystems on planet earth, serve us well?
Or is there evidence already that a completely sterile environment could be the source of it’s own dis-ease burden?
There’s evidence that other creatures including some worms, or lack of them due to sterile conditions, possibly contribute to a whole range of diseases that have grown in significance in the ‘developed’ world.
It’s a fiction, and probably biologically unsustainable, to establish and maintain a basically ‘germ free’ environment.
Particularly in agricultural and rural situations, it’s part of the reason why things grow and environments work, recycle nutrients etc.
Sure there’s times and some people who need to avoid unecessary contamination, but on the whole we’re never going to avoid sharing the planet with ‘bugs’.
The more pressure we put on them, the greater adaptive responses arise quicker (and virulance?). Combined with a ~20 minute rate of reproduction means we’ve got no hope of really ‘beating them’, ever.
Previously identified as a ‘dangerous’ infection, Helicobacter was identified as the cause of gastric ulceration, ‘proven’ by a self-administration experiment of someone trying to prove a point. For which they got a Nobel.
Now it seems others find that it is protective against asthma by it’s modulation of our immune cells.
It’s probably widespread in mammals and obviously highly adapted to the tough environment of our stomachs, dealing with acid and enzymes, which probably reflects a very ancient adaption.
Is that a dangerous infection, a parasite or symbiont?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110701121528.htm
This adds to evidence for the so-called hygeine hypothesis, that too sterile an environment and lack of exposure to a range of common microbial and ‘parasitic’ lifeforms could play a role in the development of numerous conditions that are now fairly widespread in many so called developed countries.
Perhaps it also diminishes the activity and function of our immune systems as well. Use it or lose it? Making us more susceptable to disease when we have not learnt (immunologically) to identify and fight them before?
It seems there’s basically no getting around the fact that living creatures and biological systems are way more complex and dynamic than we can sufficiently describe in any sort of valid and wholistic way currently.
Human life will always be fraught with some dilemmas of our biology. We don’t want to be sick, but the truth is that it can and probably does to an extent increase our robustness and ability to be healthy more generally if we do get sick every now and again.
Can a book of rules and regulations, applying bans, or even the application of our most potent technologies overcome this? I very much doubt it.
Though there’s certainly huge scope for a lot of interesting research on the web of life.
We’re all dust again one day anyway, one way or another, whatever you think.
It seems pretty self evident to me also that we are most likely to be best adapted to the microflora around us normally, those in our own gardens, local area and region, rather than what might be imported from distant shores.
Quite right too Quoll. Eat local.
Quoll, the New Scientist has had some interesting articles recently about our relationship to bugs. As I recall we have about 1kg of foreign organisms living in and on us. We actually need many of them, and do ourselves some damage when we take antibiotics.
Indeed, Brian. Antibiotics should always be followed by live yoghurt.
July 6 2011 at 00 05 Egyptian fenugreek seeds have been linked to both outbreaksThe EU has banned the import of some Egyptian seeds and beans after fenugreek was linked to the E. coli outbreaks in Germany and France.The European Food Safety Authority linked a batch of fenugreek seeds to outbreaks which claimed 48 lives.Imports of seeds and beans for sprouting will be frozen until 31 October EU officials said.All fenugreek seed imported from one particular Egyptian company since 2009 would be destroyed they added.
DI: yoghurt is not enough. The more effective the antibiotic the more you need to do the disgusting stuff that babies do, to replenish your stock of microorganisms.
I expect that at some stage in the near future we will discover that to digest wheat, milk and so on we need particular gut bacteria, and those are vulnerable to various pollutants (not excluding antibiotics deliberately ingested). Solution: ingest a replacement set of microbes. So much nicer that getting mummy to chew your food, or eating cat vomit.
Already in the US they are sending SWAT teams (yes they are) to arrest farmers who are suspected of selling unpasteurised milk.
The next step will be to mandate irradiation for all foodstuffs.
That will get rid of those Farmers markets that are stealing business from the supermarket chains.
Huggy