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Food-Borne Illness: More Than Meets the EyeBy Jennifer LaRue Huget

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Luke and Chloe Bennett are celebrating their 10th birthday this month. The Great Falls twins, born Sept. 30, opted for separate parties: Chloe had friends over to romp in an inflatable moon bounce in the yard, and Luke invited some friends to a Nats game.

Nothing too out of the ordinary, right? But to their mom, Trissi Bennett, the fact that her babies lived to see their 10th birthday is nothing short of a miracle.

A decade ago this week, Bennett fought for her own life at Inova Fairfax Hospital as her newborns, delivered by emergency C-section, struggled for theirs. Bennett's premature labor and subsequent illness were caused, a quick-thinking nurse recognized, by listeria, food-borne bacteria that most commonly taint deli meats and soft cheeses. Bennett apparently was infected by eating store-bought p?t?.

The contamination caused Bennett's body to go into sepsis; her son, hit harder than his sister, suffered seizures, for which he needed medication for months. The Bennetts waited five days after the babies were born to spread the news, so uncertain were they that both would live.

Listeria is one of the more dangerous but less common food-borne pathogens, unusual in that it thrives in cool environments. Campylobacter, salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 are more-common culprits, infecting everything from produce to raw eggs and causing a range of symptoms, from fever, cramps and diarrhea to, in the case of E. coli, a potentially deadly kidney condition. The most frequent offender may be a pathogen known as Norwalk-like virus, but it is rarely diagnosed because its gastrointestinal symptoms come and go quickly.

The Bennetts' nurse had been in California during a cheese-related listeria outbreak in the early 1990s; her recognition that little Luke's symptoms were similar to those she'd seen there led to the correct prescription of antibiotics that eventually saved the three Bennetts.

"We are absolutely the lucky ones," says Bennett, who has joined an advocacy group called Safe Tables Our Priority, or STOPhttp:// (). The group has several goals: to teach people how to lower their risk of being poisoned by food, to document the sometimes devastating long-term consequences of food-borne illness by maintaining a national case database and to press the federal government to improve the nation's food-safety system.

Oddly, for all the attention food-borne illness has received in the wake of deadly outbreaks related to peanut butter and refrigerated cookie dough, nobody seems to have a good handle on the number of people it affects. The latest government statistics -- citing an estimated 76 million cases, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually -- are from 1999.

Part of the trouble is that most cases probably go unreported, as people don't always associate a gastrointestinal ailment with something they have eaten. But STOP's executive director, Donna Rosenbaum, thinks they should. "There is no such thing as a stomach flu," she says. "When you're sick with a stomach bug, it's usually something contaminated you ate or drank."

Rosenbaum, whose daughter's best friend died after being contaminated with E. coli in the 1993 outbreak related to Jack in the Box restaurants, says people who think they have food poisoning typically assume it's from a food eaten recently. In fact, it can take days or weeks for a pathogen to colonize sufficiently in the gut to make you sick. Listeria, she says, can take up to 70 days to cause symptoms. Most harmful bacteria incubate for at least 12 to 24 hours before causing problems, she says. Adding to the confusion: These pathogens aren't visible to the naked eye, and many reside in foods where they can't be washed away. Cooking kills most, but that doesn't help when you're eating, say, lettuce or raw tomatoes.

STOP is keeping a close eye on legislation pending in Congress that is aimed at bolstering the national food safety net. The Food Safety Enhancement Act, passed by the House in July and awaiting Senate approval, would make companies do a better job of anticipating risks and figuring out how to prevent them; it would also give the Food and Drug Administration the power to issue recalls (which currently are issued by food producers on a voluntary basis) and would require the secretary of health and human services to set up a system for tracking food "from farm to fork." Some lawmakers and industry representatives oppose the bill in part because they say it places undue pressure on small farmers and other low-volume food producers.

Rosenbaum agrees that a one-size-fits-all approach might not be warranted, but she argues that small producers need monitoring just as large-scale producers do. "Pathogens don't discriminate as to what piece of manure they sit on," she says. Given that the FDA is increasingly hard-pressed to monitor all the foods produced in or imported into the United States, she says, there's plenty for consumers to worry about.

The FDA this month launched a Web site, , that features food recall announcements, food-handling tips and related news. The site reminds people to wash hands and surfaces often, keep raw foods separate so they don't contaminate each other, thoroughly cook foods -- using a food thermometer to make sure the heat's high enough to kill pathogens -- and stick food in the fridge right away instead of letting it linger on the counter.

Trissi Bennett would like to see government action, but in the meantime she's a stickler for following food-safety rules at home. "I take extreme caution," she says. "I question everything that we eat. I look at dates [on food packages] and recalls."

As for cold cuts, the potential hosts to the listeria bacteria that nearly devastated her family, she says, "I prefer the kids don't eat cold deli meat. But they do. And I do. But I'm nervous about it. "

Check out Tuesday's Checkup blog post, in which Jennifer tells what to do if you suspect you have a food-borne illness. Subscribe to the Lean & Fit newsletter by going to .

Source: The Washington Post

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