E. Coli produce outbreaks related to GOP immigration tampering?

[gulliver]

Has anyone connected the dots on this? The GOP started tampering with U.S. immigration policy last year in order to try to make an election issue of it this year. States like California have seen reduced availability of migrant workers. Remember that picture of a pile of rotting pears?

We didn't have E. Coli outbreaks before the GOP started their immigration fiddling as far as I can remember. Has GOP political manipulation affected the food supply? Has their corruption trickled down to the biological level?

On edit, more:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/29/health/main2053707.shtml

The link talks about previous outbreaks, but it also talks about farmers needing to get serious about E. Coli in their fields. My point is simple. Getting serious in the fields means labor. There has been reduced labor thanks to the GOP. Ergo, reduced seriousness. If pears rot in the fields, maybe E. Coli prevention is also lagging.

It's never a question of whether a problem existed before and after a particular action. Invariably the problems that exist have always existed to a degree. It's a question of how bad the problem was before and after. I'm arguing that on the face of it, the effect of this E. Coli outbreak is far larger than before.

[acmavm]

1. Are you serious?

[gulliver]

3. Completely.

[C_U_L8R]

2. Too much Republican shit in the world

[HereSince1628]

4. Your memory is incomplete, EC0157:H7 outbreaks are not new

And there are other enterotoxic E. coli's as well. All have been identified for a long time.

[gulliver]

7. I know they are not "new" of course. My point ...

... is that I don't remember anything like this spinach outbreak. Not in the news. Not at the stores. There have been outbreaks of E. Coli all over the place in the past. I'm talking about big honking ones that make it into the national news.

[HereSince1628]

16. Oh yeah there have been some. Even with spinach.

Any veggie that gets a "communal" wash can spread contamination through tons of product. And they've been happening since "convenience veggies" became popular over a decade ago.

It has less to do with a GOP plot and more to do with having an administration that isn't as interested in enforcing food safety as it should be.

About 75% of the social disasters this administration has contributed to have been sheer negligence and raw incompetence. About 23% more have been done as efforts to provide regulatory relief for corporations. The remaining 2% have been intentional.

The proportion under each category has no relationship to the severity of the disaster. Nor does incompetence rather than intention in anyway mitigate the scope of the disasters that have happened.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. well, not enforcing the immigration laws...

would send the message to the employers that they can treat these people like shit, and not be held to account.

So, maybe in a round-about way...

[acmavm]

6. Maybe if you think long and hard enough you can link the Foley

scandal to illegal immigration too.

[gulliver]

8. Argue the point if you can. Anyone can make snide comments.

Even you.

[acmavm]

13. Argue what? There's nothing to argue. Your post was ridiculous. It's

not immigration, it's hygiene. Yes, you do have to be careful of what you fertilize your food with. And it's bad juju to fertilize on the cheap with any old organic material you can get your hands on.

Or is your point they're grinding up illegals and putting them in fertilizer now?

[gulliver]

14. Thanks.

Reduction of a labor force can have far-reaching effects in quality. That's the argument. The GOP tampering, while having no visible positive effect on immigration problems, has hurt the migrant labor supply at the root of the produce supply chain. It may be hygiene as you say, but reduced labor forces can lead to shortcuts in hygiene.

I don't know what the root cause of this latest national outbreak is, but I don't think it is unreasonable to ask if there is a connection to the GOP's tampering. If they hadn't been tampering with the immigration laws to make headlines for their elections, I wouldn't be asking the question.

It may be ridiculous to you and others, but I work in software. Whenever there is a quality change for the worse, we always look for recent changes.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

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[gulliver]

12. Goodbye, my thread!

My poor thread seems to have struck the wrong chord. Wow.

There have always been migrant workers picking produce for as long as I can remember. There are fewer this year as a result of GOP political tampering.

I have heard about the tuberculosis too. Whatever the GOP-led Congress is doing with immigration, it's not working. The reason, I think, is that they don't have serious solutions. They only fiddle with laws and policy to make political commercials for their elections.

[Name removed]

15. Deleted sub-thread

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[Double T]

10. I wonder about E. Coli and still wonder about Anthrax............

it is interesting how both issues fade with no hard evidence as to who or what caused the serious problems.

[Demoiselle]

11. Seriously, folks...

I read a theory somewhere (sorry, can't remember the source, but it was probably the NYTimes ) that what many livestock farmers feed cattle these days may be at least partially to blame. The super duper hyped up feeds (as opposed to old fashioned grass) provide a better environment in cow tummies for the e coli bacteria.
Hence more ecoli in cattle waste. Cattle waste gets into water. Water irrigates crops. There is, of course, lots more to this story...Why is cattle waste allowed to get into the water that irrigates our spinachat all, for example. I don't offer the feed theory as biblical truth, by the way, and there are alarmist/conspiracy theories floating around out there about our food supply that smack of Luddite to me...but I DO wish we would pay more attention to the details of how we raise our food and what we're doing to our planet! I mean, you can't wash the bacteria OFF the spinach once it attaches itself, for heaven's sake!!