Posted October 13, 2013: by Bill Sardi
I’ve been saying for a long time now that US Department of Agriculture food inspectors are too cozy with food producers and for financial reasons are permitting unclean meat products to enter the nation’s food chain, all the while blaming consumers for not cooking meat long enough.
So now we read of a Salmonella outbreak with Foster Farms chicken, a contamination that had been going on since March 2013 and had hospitalized an unusually high percentage of consumers.
The Centers For Disease Control issued a bulletin showing most of the strains of Salmonella-contaminated chicken meat involved antibiotic resistant strains. This problem emanates from over-use of antibiotics to fatten animals prior to slaughter. Antibiotic resistance makes contaminated food intolerable, since once sickened, antibiotics may be of little help.
A news report says: “The USDA says that salmonella is always presumed to be present in US poultry and is generally acceptable under USDA rules. It says that up to 7.5 percent of chicken in a plant may test positive for salmonella before action may be taken.”
The most sickening aspect of this Salmonella outbreak is that inspectors issued a press release only when they had been laid off work by the Federal government shutdown. They never had the public’s safety in mind – only their own jobs.
Food Safety News reports 10 furloughed workers were returned to their jobs. But the outbreak had been going on for months while the USDA issued its press release only after food inspectors had been laid off due to the Federal government shutdown. It’s one thing to close down National Parks but completely another to grandstand the government shutdown to the point of putting lives at risk. Consumers should cook meat to 165 degrees-F, and maybe a little longer than usual. Consumers might also want to add garlic powder to their chicken recipes for added protection. — ©2013 Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc.
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