OP-ED: Wiping out bacteria on lettuce has downside - (USA Today)
September 2, 2008 – 8:50 pmJeff Leach, Paleobiotics Lab, writes that wiping out bacteria on lettuce has downside The fresh produce industry has officially lost its innocence with the recent Food and Drug Administration’s green-lighting of irradiating spinach and lettuce. But the ruling, driven by public anxiety over tainted food and industry anxiety over lost revenues, missed the point and might cause more suffering than it relieves (”Your salad soon could be irradiated,” Money, Aug. 22).
As counterintuitive as it sounds, why has nobody asked what appears to be a reasonable and obvious question: Do we really want to kill all the bacteria on a leaf of spinach?
If we had had a similar discussion in the 1940s, when British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, warned that overuse of antibiotics might lead to antibiotic-resistant strains, we might have approached the use of antibiotics differently.
For the complete news item, please visit http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/09/wiping-out-bact.html#more
MORE:
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/foodsafety/news/fsnews.cfm?newsid=28557
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