Paul Fassa of Real Pharmacy writes:
While Texas has lately been raiding raw milk co-ops and forcing the destruction of raw milk even if there are no complaints of any food borne illnesses, another E. coli event has recently occurred. This time not from commercial dairy or meats, but 45 million pounds of potentially contaminated flour produced at General Mills in Kansas.
Ecoli in flour? What next. Yet the strain of E. coli that has infected 45 people in 21 states does trace back to General Mills (GM). General Mills spokespersons announced that GM is cleaning up the Kansas plant as a precaution, but they cite their sources of wheat as the probable primary point of E. coli infection.
GM has also maintained that because of the assumption that their flours and other bake out of the box products will be baked at high heat for lengthy periods of time they had never thought food poisoning would occur from its products.
According to GM, it could only happen if people handled or tasted the raw batters made for baking before going into ovens. Add that this particular e-coli strain usually infects folks with lowered immunity harshly, it’s easy to see that 45 immune compromised individuals were licking their fingers a lot as they prepared batters for baking, wink-wink.
Thirteen of the 46 confirmed outbreak victims have been hospitalized and one has developed a type of kidney failure known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which is often fatal.
The recall includes three main brands of flour, Gold Medal, Signature Kitchens and Wondra. Several sizes and varieties of these three brands are under recall. The complete list is available online. The dates of production involved in the recall are Nov. 4, 2015, through Feb. 10 this year.
A General Mills official statement issued late July 2016 said that the entire outbreak might not be that unusual.
“At this time, it is unknown if we are experiencing a higher prevalence of E. coli in flour than normal, if this is an issue isolated to General Mills’ flour, or if this is an issue across the flour industry,” according the recall notice issued as a news release.
“The newer detection and genome sequencing tools are also possibly making a connection to flour that may have always existed at these levels.”
This type of statement is similar to the crap they hand us about autism is higher because it’s being diagnosed better, nothing to do with vaccines.
What’s the Big Lie With Food Safety?
Problem is this is not an anomaly. It’s part of a big pattern. There have been and continue to be many episodes of food poisoning from large scale food and agricultural industries.
Just two months prior to the General Mills flour episode there were many episodes of listeria, another type of bacterial infection, from frozen food products. Looks like freezing doesn’t get rid of listeria.
From eater.com:
Companies pull 8,000 products off the shelves each year. Where do they go — and how much does that cost? In just the last week, [Jan. 2016] nuts, salad, and dried kiwi products have been recalled from store shelves, with more recall cases still to come. In 2014, the latest year on record, 8,061 food products were recalled by the Food and Drug Administration, while there were an additional 94 recalls by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (each of which may include multiple products). Of those USDA recalls, two-thirds were “Class 1,” meaning that there was a “reasonable probability” the food would cause illness or death.
Since the Food and Safety Act of 2011, the FDA can force a recall, while the USDA, “which handles meat, poultry, and egg products — can only force a recall if it receives an unopened package of contaminated food from someone who got sick.”
Despite food agency powers, food industries are expected to initiate a recall if evidence of contamination and illness or death leads to the manufacture or distributor. The hard part is isolating which products with what time frame produced are the culprits.
Then the costly recall process begins. So costly that most food processing companies carry costly recall insurance. Customers have to be warned, but not all of them get the word.
Read more HERE