Gaps in safety system let `bugs' hide in food

Here's the scary part first: There are new food pathogens and they've gotten harder to fight.

The one that most people are familiar with is E. coli O157:H7, which has killed children and last year precipitated the recall of 25 million pounds of hamburger meat. But there are other worrisome bugs.There is, for example, salmonella typhimurium DT104. An apparently new subtype of salmonella first seen in food in Europe 10 years ago, it popped up in the United States, on the East Coast, a few years ago.

Salmonella DT104 has been found in sea gulls, cows, chickens, mice. In England, people have been infected with DT104 after eating beef, pork sausages and chicken. Several diners died after eating improperly thawed turkey.

"It's basically a question of time" before it shows up in Utah, said Thomas Breuer, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

It is the prospect of salmonella DT104, as well as the reality of E-coli O157:H7 and other food-borne pathogens, that keeps Utah's regulatory and public health officials vigilant.

Salmonella DT104 in its mildest forms causes diarrhea and vomiting. But it's more likely than other forms of salmonella to cause problems that can be deadly (one study in England revealed a 3 percent mortality rate, 30 times higher than other salmonellosis).

DT104 can cross the gut and enter the bloodstream, where it can cause blood infections or meningitis. And 85 percent of DT104 isolates have proved resistant to at least five antibiotics.

They have become resistant, said Stanford University microbiologist Stanley Falkow, because of the widespread use of antibiotics in animal feed, as well as the overuse of antibiotics in humans.

Bacteria are resilient and tricky little creatures. One of their little tricks is the ability to share their genetic information with other, different bacteria, which they like to do while sitting around in, say, a pile of manure on a farm.

And that means, said CDC epidemiologist Rodrigo Villar, that other types of salmonella, or other types of food pathogens, could learn DT104's secrets of resistance to anti-microbials (one of which is to locate its resistance genes on a chromosome, thus making it easier to pass that resistance to its progeny).