Very young children haven’t learned good hand hygiene and so are not good at washing their hands, and also that they are more prone to complications from E.coli than adults. But there is a counter-argument being made by some health professionals that a child’s immune system is only built if it is given enough exposure to the wider world and depriving children of this kind of contact actually harms their ability to battle a range of viruses and infections.
Drinking water poses a threat due to possible perchlorate contamination and BPA leaching from plastic, but it seems reasonable to assume that in the United States, bottled water is free from fecal matter. Yet until now, there were no requirements to test source water — 70% of which comes from the the same place as tap water.
Beginning December 1st, “bottled water containing E. coli will be considered adulterated,” says the US Food and Drug Administration. You don’t say? It doesn’t seem as though we’d need a press release to tell us that, but this is the FDA we’re talking about.
From our friends at ZapRoot: Farmers take it to the extreme to protect their crops. The Auto Alliance has jump on the green bandwagon. These Guys are Full of **it returns.
Links for this week’s edition:
sustainablog - Killing for Crops
Gas 2.0 - Ecodriving with the AAM
EcoScraps - McDonalds Green Billboard
Shell and the Alberta Oil Sands
Sad Hippies
How far should farmers go to ensure that consumers get their salad in a bag? According to an Associated Press article Calif. farmers use guns, poison to protect crops, some farmers are using some extreme, possibly unnecessary practices to keep E.coli and other bacteria out of their fields of greens.
It’s understandable that farmers would want to make sure that deadly contaminants do not taint their crops given that in 2006 three people were killed and about 200 others became ill after eating fresh spinach contaminated with E.coli. That scare ended up costing California spinach growers about $80 million in sales that year.
One of the possible causes for the 2006 deadly outbreak could have been wildlife such as deer or wild pigs who defecated near crops, although the exact cause was never determined. In response to the outbreak, the farmers, the packers, and the shippers created new standards to help head off another contamination outbreak. According to the report, however, none of the standards directly related to wildlife. Many farmers, however, aren’t taking any chances at losing their crops so they are taking measures way beyond the new standards. Measures like:
Subscribe to our RSS feed or newsletter
Some Rights Reserved • Green Options Media • San Francisco, California • Legal
