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FDA And CDC Use Technological Advancements To Investigate Cyclospora Illnesses Linked To Bagged Salads
This update is not just on the number of cases, but also on the scientific progress we’ve made in using a new method developed and validated by the FDA to sample for Cyclospora in agricultural water for the first time in a field investigation
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has provided an update on the status of the investigation of Cyclospora cayetanensis illnesses tied to the consumption of bagged salads. This update is not just on the number of cases, but also on the scientific progress we’ve made in using a new method developed and validated by the FDA to sample for Cyclospora in agricultural water for the first time in a field investigation.
This method was used in our current investigation and may be instrumental in our efforts to better understand the dispersion of the parasite in the environment, which could help prevent future outbreaks. The collective work by public health officials to get these new findings demonstrates a commitment to innovation and science in the service of public health and the importance of strong federal and state coordination on food safety work.
Even as our agencies continue to respond to the COVID-19 public health crisis, teams of experts from the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have continued to respond to a threat of a different kind – a nationwide outbreak of Cyclospora illnesses. Cyclospora cayetanensis is a parasite that is so small it can only be seen with a microscope. It causes an intestinal illness called cyclosporiasis from the consumption of contaminated food, mainly fresh produce, or contaminated water.
Ongoing Investigation Update
FDA’s Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation Network (CORE) and CDC today updated the case numbers and the status of the investigation, which advances what we know about Cyclospora, based on the three key parts of every food outbreak investigation:
Epidemiology linked the illnesses to bagged salad produced by Fresh Express. The number of reported cases of Cyclospora typically rises during May through August. Although CDC conducts surveillance for cyclosporiasis year-round, during the spring and summer months CDC conducts enhanced surveillance for cases of domestically acquired illness. In this outbreak, CDC has reported 690 cases across 13 states, with 37 hospitalizations and no deaths. Onsets of illness range from May 11, 2020 to July 20, 2020. Salads made by Fresh Express and containing iceberg lettuce, red cabbage, and carrots were identified as the food vehicle responsible for the outbreaks.
Traceback of cases with the strongest sources of information (shopper card info, etc.) revealed that bagged salad codes most likely to have resulted in illness contained iceberg lettuce from California and red cabbage from Florida. The FDA evaluated and investigated each of the ingredients in the bagged salads, identifying red cabbage from Florida and iceberg lettuce from California as those most likely in the bagged salads consumed by people who became ill. Traceback investigations are time-consuming work but are critical. In this instance, in the wake of traceback and collaboration with the retailers to recall product, FDA identified a noticeable decline in illnesses that matched the time period in which cabbage sourcing shifted from Florida to another area, providing a possible clue in the investigation.
Environmental sampling detected the presence of Cyclospora in the surface water of a canal near a farm suspected of being a source of the red cabbage. Two samples collected to the north and south of where the farm accessed canal water for seepage irrigation were found to be positive for Cyclospora cayetanensis. The farm that supplied red cabbage was no longer in production at the conclusion of the growing season, so it was not possible to sample product. Additionally, the farms growing iceberg lettuce in California were investigated and all of the samples collected in California were negative for Cyclospora.
Given the emerging nature of genetic typing methodologies for this parasite, the FDA has been unable to determine if the Cyclospora detected in the canal is a genetic match to the clinical cases, therefore, there is currently not enough evidence to conclusively determine the cause of this outbreak.
Advancements Aiding the Investigation
The FDA has pioneered ways to detect the parasite that have been employed in this outbreak investigation, developing and validating new methods to test for Cyclospora in produce and agricultural water. The first of these new methods was used in 2018 to confirm the presence of the parasite in a salad mix product tied to an outbreak that sickened hundreds of people.
In July 2019, the FDA made its second major advance in Cyclospora detection, completing studies that resulted in a novel, validated method to test agricultural water for the presence of the parasite. These new methods were developed by the Foodborne Parasitology Research Program that the FDA established in 2014 in our Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, in part to break the cycle of recurring Cyclospora outbreaks.
Strong federal and state coordination on matters of public health are critical. In identifying clinical cases of Cyclospora, assisting in providing traceback records and completing investigations in processing facilities and growing fields, our state partners’ work has proven essential to this investigation. We continue to work to strengthen these vital public health partnerships and federal agencies continue to work together to advance additional tools needed to assist with these investigations. For example, CDC is piloting the use of a genotyping tool to help identify cases of parasitic illness that might be linked to a common source.
For the full report, check the FDA website.
Publication date: Mon 17 Aug 2020
It’s Not Just Meat: Covid-19 Puts All Food-System Workers in Peril
Stan Cox on Building a More Humane, Robust Way of Putting Food on The Table
By Stan Cox
June 10, 2020
Covid-19 outbreaks are now reaching far beyond the meatpacking industry. Migrant farmworkers in fruit orchards and vegetable fields, long the targets of intense exploitation, are seeing their health put in even greater jeopardy as they’re pushed to feed an increasingly voracious supply chain in pandemic-time.
The crisis has come to a produce farm in Evansville, Tennessee, where every one of the 200 farmworkers has tested positive for the virus, with harvest season about to get underway. With the pandemic rolling on unchecked, the fragility of the entire US food system and the vulnerability of its workforce is coming into stark relief.
Eliminating that fragility—a result of the industry’s single-minded pursuit of profit—will require shifting the priority to the lives of the people who produce our food, the landscapes where they live and work, and, ultimately, to resolving the global ecological emergency.
Southern New Jersey, for example, is seeing hundreds of migrant farmworkers become infected with the virus.
According to WHYY radio in Philadelphia, many of the 20,000 to 25,000 seasonal workers who arrive in South Jersey each year to harvest fruits and vegetables sleep in cramped dormitories and eat in crowded cafeterias. Yet state guidelines allow farm managers, if they find their operations shorthanded, to keep infected workers on the job; they can forget paid sick leave.
As in meatpacking, confined workplaces of all kinds are being hit hard. A complex of hydroponic greenhouses in upstate New York was an early focus of coronavirus spread. A single Southern California city, Vernon, has seen outbreaks in nine food facilities processing coffee, tea, frozen foods, deli meats, seaweed, baked goods, and other products.
A state “pandemic strike team” deployed in mid-May to help long-term care facilities in Washington’s Yakima Valley quickly redeployed when they found even more dire situations on the valley’s farms and in food processing plants. It had gotten bad enough that workers there have been walking out on strike over lack of health safeguards.
The town of Immokalee, which lies at the center of the most intensive winter-vegetable growing area in southwest Florida, now has the densest concentration of Covid-19 cases in the region.
We’ll no longer have access to every type of fresh vegetable and fruit any day of the year. Eating what’s in season will make a comeback.
State officials say that’s largely because of increased testing. But medical researchers beg to differ. They see fertile ground for the coronavirus to flourish in the densely packed buses and vans that take workers to the fields, as well as in worker housing, which consists mostly of mobile homes, each with numerous occupants.
Gerardo Chavez, speaking for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has long pushed for the rights of the area’s migrant labor force, told a local TV station, “This is not something that happened just because. It happened because people there are poor, they live overcrowded. They travel to work under not very safe conditions many times, and that makes them the perfect place for Covid-19 to spread.”
The “farmworker paradox”
The current public-health crisis in food production and processing has grown directly out of the drive for profit. In recent decades, the overriding goal of the agriculture and food industry—a sector whose pace and production were once strictly dictated by the seasons and the weather—has been to turbocharge profits by maximizing output per hour per worker.
It doesn’t have to be like that. In a system motivated by nutritional goals rather than profit, a much more widely dispersed workforce producing at non-exploitative rates of output could easily produce enough food to meet this country’s needs.
Instead, under the protection awarded to businesses producing essential goods, the industry is loosening the screws of exploitation only slightly, further threatening the health and lives of workers and their families.
This treatment of an essential workforce is in keeping with what the economist Michael Perelman has called the “farmworker paradox” in which he asks, “why those whose work is most necessary typically earn the least” (in pandemic-time, we can add, “…and are most compelled to risk their lives and their families’ lives.”)Done right, localizing vegetable production would not reduce the total output.
The paradox exists, observes Perelman, because of the circular logic of capitalism. Economists argue that farmworkers earn low wages because they are not highly “productive”; that is, collectively, they generate low profit per worker. But that’s because everyday food sells cheap, and it’s cheap largely because many of those who produce it earn near-starvation wages.
Now workers are forced to risk infection by a debilitating, often deadly, virus in order to keep production costs down and profits up.In contrast, coronavirus infection rates have been low so far among the older, largely white independent farmers who produce staple foods like wheat, oats, rice, and dry beans. But their protective isolation in sparsely populated areas of the country has come at a terrible price: the decline of small family farms and the consolidation of land into fewer and fewer hands over the past four decades.
Such rural areas—where depopulation of the countryside and small towns has meant a withering of local economies, culture, and health care—are now highly vulnerable to the pandemic when, inevitably, it reaches them.
Reversing the destruction
The changes needed to reduce the vulnerability of the food system and its workers to infectious diseases have already been needed for decades on humanitarian and environmental grounds. Addressing the climate emergency, in particular, requires such deep changes.
The imperatives are clear:
Abolish feedlots and other confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Convert the tens of millions of acres now being used to grow dent corn and soybeans (for feeding confined cattle) to pasture and hay production, and eventually, perennial food-grain/pasture crops. Then cattle can eat what they were born to eat: grasses and forage legumes.
Break up the meat-industry behemoths and ban foreign ownership. Decentralize meat production and processing and regulate much more strictly for health and safety.
Such measures would result in better but smaller national supplies of meat and poultry. No problem. Deep reductions in consumption of animal products—especially feedlot- and CAFO-raised meats—have long been needed for nutritional and ecological concerns, most prominently their heavy climatic impact.
For fruits and vegetables, reduce the velocity of production in fields and factories to a humane, ecologically supportable pace that can meet the highest standards for workers’ rights, safety, and economic security. Grow those crops close to the populations who will be eating them—as much as possible in backyard or community gardens and greenhouses.
Done right, localizing vegetable production would not reduce the total output. Vegetables currently occupy only three percent of national cropland, so they could easily be dispersed among myriad small plots of land in every state, every community.
What we’ll no longer have, however, is access to every type of fresh vegetable and fruit any day of the year. Eating what’s in season will make a comeback.
Adaptation will be necessary. In northerly regions, vegetables can be grown in simple, inexpensive, unheated greenhouses almost year-round (a practical alternative to the fanciful idea of urban “vertical farming,” which envisions raising crop plants indoors without soil, under artificial light—that is, in botanical intensive care units).In summer and fall, home and community canning operations could make locally grown produce available all year, as they did in the war years of the 1940s. That would diversify the northerly vegetable diet in winter and spring.
Supplies of staple grain and bean crops, in contrast, come to us from hundreds of millions of acres across vast swaths of rural America. Only a tiny fraction of that production could be localized, but that’s not a problem. Those crops (and products like flour that are made from them) are dry, have long shelf lives, and can be efficiently shipped to every part of the country by rail.
More near-term policies could come through federal legislation. It has been proposed that farmworkers’ right to organize should be guaranteed, and a path to citizenship should be available for all essential workers who need one; there should be opportunities for farmworkers to become independent farmers; and rural transportation and communication systems need improvement.
Now is the time to build a new, more humane, more robust food system on the ruins of the one that has failed us. This nation can have an ample, nutritious food supply without exploiting and endangering the people who produce and process it
Stan Cox is a research fellow at The Land Institute and the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (City Lights, 2020).