Spinach not “ready-to-eat”

E. Coli outbreaks have usually been associated with bad meat. But as I write this, today’s news headlines announced a new source for the potentially deadly bacteria: Bad spinach. Within hours, the Kroger Company announced that it was pulling all bagged spinach off of its stores’ shelves until further information was available. At the time of this writing, health officials are estimating that over 100 people, 1/3rd of them from Wisconsin, have been sickened by the recent outbreak and one person has died.

Epidemiologists have traced the bacteria to spinach bagged by Natural Selection Foods, which is based in San Juan Bautista, California.

Concerned that the bacteria cannot be adequately purged through washing and cooking, a spokesman for the FDA advised people not to eat it.

It is interesting to note that this problem was somewhat forecasted at an American Society for microbiology meeting in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2005. At that time, Sonia Walia of Rochester Hills, Michigan, reported that she and her colleagues investigated several bags of ready-to-eat spinach. They ground the spinach from each bag in a sterile mixer, then spread extracts from the mix onto laboratory dishes to culture for bacterial growth.

Within a matter of days, they identified several types of bacteria that were living in the spinach mixture. These not only included E. coli, which comes from the Escherichia species, they also found other bacteria from the Staphylococcus and Enterobacter species. Further more, upon challenging them with antibiotics, they found that the vast majority of these bacteria were resistant to at least two common antibiotics.

These researches suggested washing freshly bag spinach thoroughly and then cooking it prior to ingestion.

O’Farrell, P. (2006). “Discard bagged spinach: E. Coli outbreak traced to California supplier.” Enquirer Retrieved September 16, 2006, from.

Posted on 10/03/2006 under Diseases. Comments RSS feed.
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