The UK is undergoing a small crisis of parenting at present. The reason is that there has been an outbreak of E.coli, in one of its most virulent forms: 0157, which causes kidney damage in a small proportion of people contracting it, and the outbreaks have been linked to two city farms visited by children with their parents or as part of school groups.

City Zoos linked to disease outbreak

Forty-nine cases of E.coli have been linked to Godstone Farm in Surrey which has been closed, and its fellow site Horton Park Children’s Farm in Epsom, Surrey has closed voluntarily.  Other sites have closed in Nottingham and Devon. In Exmouth, Devon, a petting farm has closed after three children became ill, although there hasn’t been a direct link from their illness to a visit to the site.

However, in responding to the concerns, there appears to be a division of opinion in the governmental ranks. Professor Hugh Pennington who was chair of the Pennington Group enquiry into the Scottish Escherichia coli outbreak of 1996 and Chairman of the Public Inquiry into the 2005 Outbreak of E.coli O157 in South Wales, says parents should not allow under-fives to touch animals on farms. But the Department of Health (DoH) is maintaining that its current advice still stands: contact with animals is okay if good hand hygiene is undertaken.

Youngsters most at risk of harm

The concern is partly that 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.

One solution could be to provide better systems of hygiene, such as nail brushes that would allow people to ensure that they removed every lurking trace of the bacterium from their hands.  It is impossible to remove E.coli risk entirely from animals or their environment, even though most strains of the disease are very short lived outside the gut which is their natural habitat. So parents must decide whether to give their children the chance to get to meet animals, to improve their knowledge and development and to boost their immune systems through contact with the wider environment, or to reduce the risk of exposure to E.coli by avoiding such experiences as city zoos and agricultural or wild animals, altogether.

City Farm photograph author’s own

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.

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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

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:

• taking gun-safety classes to safely shoot animals that could carry bacteria
• removing natural habitat, in hopes of keeping wildlife away, by uprooting native trees and plants
• poisoning frogs that may carry salmonella on their feet who can get caught in harvesting machinery
• trapping wildlife
• fencing in their crops to keep wildlife out

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