Three months after scores of young women across the country began to fall ill with a particularly nasty strain of e-coli, Federal health officials manged to piece together the puzzle and discover that the root is Nestle’s refrigerated cookie dough products, eaten raw.

Nestle issued a recall yesterday, but managed to confuse more than elucidate. On the one hand Nestle is asking people to return products to the store, but on the other hand it says that as long as you bake the product it should be safe. What’s a consumer to do?

The FDA is more clear cut in its instructions: Cooking the dough is not recommended because consumers might get the bacteria on their hands and on other cooking surfaces.

Meanwhile, consumer groups are calling for improved food safety measures by the FDA, so that these contaminations are discovered before people get sick. Nestle is actually known for stringent safety protocols, so it will be interesting to see what else it could have done to prevent this recall.

What you need to know:

The contaminant casuing the problem is E. coli O157:H7. It causes abdominal cramping, vomiting and a diarrheal illness, often with bloody stools. Most healthy adults can recover completely within a week. Young children and the elderly are at highest risk for developing HUS, which can lead to serious kidney damage and even death.

What to do at the supermarket:

Folks, you knwo the drill. Remember the recall is just for cookie dough, although if past behavior is any indicator, sales all  Tool House cookies are going to slump in the next few weeks.

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It seems like every week there’s another product recall involving melamine. In the last week, 2 more recalls have been issued:

Wonderfarm brand of biscuits

G&J Gourmet Market cocoa products

Bill Marler is a personal injury and products liability attorney litigating food borne illness cases since 1993. In a stomach knotting blog post, he lists this year’s top 9 food safety stories including:
- Melamine originating in China
- Salmonella St Paul in tomatoes and peppers
- Frozen uncooked entrees only partially prepared by microwave heating
- Listeria in deli meats in Canada

What you need to know:

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), there are 76 million cases of food poisoning annually. Over 300 thousand hospitalizations are the result of bad food, and sadly 5000 deaths each year are the result of food poisoning. Most deaths are related to E. coli, bacteria found in cattle feces that  make their way into our steaks and burgers.

While these numbers are very high, just 100 years ago the food safety situation was even worse. The meat packing industry was not regulated and sanitation conditions were far worse than today.  In the 1860’s and 70’s thousands of babies died just in New York as a result of a scandal known as “Swill milk,” where milk was  produced by cows fed distillery waste. Upton Sinclair’s undercover work and novel The Jungle resulted in The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

So while there is plenty of room for improvement, most of us should prefer today’s safety standards to those of yesteryear.

A far graver danger to most Americans, though, is the nutritional quality of the food they eat. Too many calories, fats, and sugars won’t send you to the hospital after a visit to Burger King, but the health effects of such a diet over the course of years are devastating. Diet related diseases, such as hypertension and heart disease, are today a much bigger threat to our personal and national health than an occasional salmonella outbreak.

The manufacturers responsible for a food safety outbreaks pay the price for the damage they caused, or at least some part. But who pays the bills for the millions of of heart attacks caused by poor diets?

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A quick reminder from the Center for Disease Control (CDC):

An estimated 76 million cases of foodborne disease occur each year in the United States. CDC estimates that there are 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths related to foodborne diseases each year. With the recent high-profile Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak fresh on our minds, now is an ideal time for food safety education.

Read on for food safety rules…