How concerned should I be about the latest Escherichia coli strain?

From what I've heard it's mostly German related with all the cases either in Germany or people who visited Germany.

You think that cutting out raw foods is NOT a health risk? If you aren't getting enzymes, you are not going to be well for very long.

I wash my fresh veggies down with hydrogen peroxide and let it bubble for a minute then wash the H2O2 off if I'm worried about it. Especially seafood that feels a tad slimy. You can also skin the veggies before you eat them.

If you are concerned that the ecoli has been absorbed by your food, you can also eat something like cheese or drink milk. Calcium is harder for your system to digest than other foods and you will produce more stomach acid - which inadvertently destroys more bacteria during digestion.

If it's water that has the ecoli problem, yes - boil the heck out of it, but you absolutely have to have fresh raw foods.

3 cases now in the U.S of the European E-coli strain.

3 cases? This is news?

Sounds to me like a scare tactic that will make people willing to let them irradiate our vegetables - which will nullify any nutritional value left in them. People are going to end up starving to death even while having enough on their plates if we don't get a handle on food regulation pretty soon.

Actually Thom - the stuff used for fertilizer is supposed to be aged and treated some way to kill the ecoli in it. However - the amount of livestock has created a problem that water is often full of it. It's carried to waterways via storm water, so when fields are irrigated the bacteria is spread.

The only way the problem will ever be mitigated is to quit eating as much meat as we do and put a cease to factory farming. Right now there is so much livestock being grazed and herded everywhere that both ecoli and desertification is a threat to human population. There are some places you can't even walk on public land without having to walk through cow dung because the government rents the property out to cattle farmers. Livestock creates a LOT of dung. Usually it's just buried somewhere or left scattered. There are some places that pig farms were creating a lot of mess not too long back - not sure whether they cleaned it up or not.

As far as an animal gene? I don't think that would be enough to make something particularly an ecoli carrier - the stuff doesn't grow generally in animals - it's just in the intestines when all is working normally.

The GMOs that scare the crap out of me is the roundup ready stuff. That "natural" bacteria they use to make a plant roundup ready resistant (and who wants to eat a plant sprayed with that toxic crap anyway?) is a toxin. When you eat a GMO plant, it actually dumps that toxin in your intestines where it actually gets into your other bacteria and starts reproducing itself, making your intestines a toxin factory. It can actually explode the stomachs of rats and mice - and they are finding severe problems in people that eat it now, too. They even know that MONSANTO hid the research and knew that would happen. The answer that America came up with for that is to make it legal to NOT have to put "GMO" on a food label so people just plain won't know when they are eating it.

The only way we are going to get MONSANTO out of our lives is to start to refuse to eat anything that isn't labeled "organic". Once companies can't sell their packaged foods because people won't eat food stuffed with poison, and they have to use real food if they are going to stay in business - and farmers have to use real seeds instead of Monsanto frankenseeds, we might see a few laws protecting us kick in. We already can't sell meat, corn, and soy to most other countries. I'm wondering how long before our food becomes so tampered and poisonous that we will have to move out of the country to survive if we don't have our own farm.

My first and most major problem with factory farms is the way they treat live beings. Can you imagine what someone from another planet would think of us if they saw the way humans treat other beings?

And what we feed them? Can you imagine going your whole life without ever being fed food that you were naturally meant to eat? Then, too - the crap they feed them, GMO corn, antibiotics, you name it - and that all gets transferred straight into us. Meat has become so bad now that they are using a glue like substance to keep it from falling apart in the stores. Yuck. And antibiotics aren't fed to them to keep them well - they are fed to make them fat. Did someone say that Americans are fat? Maybe they should be eating more of that wholesome antibiotic stuffed meat! Just one more reason that if it's not organic, it doesn't belong in your mouth.

The funny thing is that if you go to supermarkets in Hong Kong now, some vegetables and fruits now proudly display the sign "produced in China" and sell at a premium price. This would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago.

I have to agree with you Heysal - the underlying problem is that we now have a distorted view of food and how it should be produced. Safety and quality have been sacrificed for cheapness and huge profit margins. Corporations tell us what we want to eat and influence our eating habits to a frightening degree. We are encouraged to consume products instead of real food. As for how we treat the creatures we use for food, well its a disgrace. Cheap chicken = torture, but most people ignore the fact.

Trouble is that food has become cheap and consumers have become conditioned to that. On average we spend a low proportion of our income on food despite the fact that it is so important. What has been forgotten is that organic farming is the normal way to produce food, not some newfangled thing, and was the norm until relatively recently.

The latest suspect is beansprouts from an organic farm in Germany.

E.coli Outbreak: German Beansprouts Grown On An Organic Farm Are The Likely Cause Of E.coli Outbreak | World News | Sky News

This just shows that supposedly the 'healthiest and safest" of farming methods is not 100% failsafe.