The Science Is Clear: Dirty Farm Water Is Making Us Sick
wired.com
wired.com
In the US where we have a flimsy excuse for a safety net, and still-too-high uninsured rate, the fact that this regulation has been pulled off of businesses, and instead the burden placed onto the consumer is shameful.
There are certainly families who have been harmed economically and irreparably so because of this.
Now that I'm done ranting, why is so much of the romaine lettuce market concentrated in Yuma, AZ?
[1] https://apps1.cdfa.ca.gov/FertilizerResearch/docs/Lettuce_Pr... [2] https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/7216.pdf
Japan turned a shuttered semi factory[1] of some sort into an automated leafy greens farm. One would hope in this case there is no indirect contamination, if the actual soil beneath the campus was contaminated.
[1]https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/travel-food/article/209...
>In 1890, the German microbiologist Robert Koch (who had isolated and described the tuberculosis bacterium in 1882), showed that sunlight killed TB bacteria. Later on, research showed sunlight also killed E. coli bacteria in twelve feet of seawater and in waste stabilization ponds.
[1] http://sunlightinstitute.org/sanitizing-with-sunlight-the-be...
that being said, a big part of the problem is irrigation with liquified fecal waste that has not fallowed properly as a bare minimum
this just in ... a high school student can do this and it is regularly set up and maintained by said highschool students, all you need to remember as a core concept is P.L.AN.T. photosynthesis light atmosphere nutrition temperature. cannabis cultivators are not the brightest or most adept bunch but they seem to struggle through and make millions as the tax revenue would suggest
I say largely consists of, as this is still the dominant way plants go about seeding soil (plus animal and insect vectors).
This seems to assume that all outbreaks would be prevented by mandatory testing. However, the article says that the farm involved in the latest outbreak was already doing the same type of testing (on a voluntary basis). Clearly it's failed to stop at least one major outbreak. Maybe testing irrigation water is not actually that useful in preventing the consumer-end medical expenses.
I can't be 100% sure if the FDA regulations would have caught it, but I know I would feel safer knowing there were consequences and minimum safety levels that could be verified.
The proposed FDA rules would have them taking 5 samples a year [1]. I agree that it would be great to have regulations that made produce safer, just not sure these are the right regulations.
https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/GuidanceRegulation/FSMA/U...
I think reading this gives a pretty good picture of the situation from a bureaucratic point of view.
"All a sample can tell you is that one sample, from that place, on that day, was clean."
"A lot of water contamination events are very temporary: a rainstorm washes manure into a well or canal, and then it's gone within a day or two. Testing only catches that if you target your testing program for it. Guarantee you most farms aren't doing that; they test on schedule."
https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/10670960981...
> "Testing only catches that if you target your testing program for it."
Seems like a contradiction to me.
That said, just because testing alone isn't good enough doesn't mean it's better than nothing.
The political argument always comes in the form of "regulation bad!" vs "safety good!" without much attention to the actual policies. Thank you for bringing our attention to some of the problems with the proposed regulations, but the real issue is that we're politicizing something that we should clearly do _something_ about.
> Testing your irrigation water won't keep the feedlot next door from blowing dried-up cow shit dust all over your lettuce. (Or, you know, into your irrigation water on a day when you're not testing). [1]
> It won't keep harvest crew co's from putting so much time pressure on crews that they can't clean their harvest rigs properly between shifts. [2]
> And it sure won't solve our traceability problem. There's no way in hell we're having this much trouble tracing the lettuce to its source, unless there's massive supply chain fraud going on. We should be worried about THAT. [3]
This one reminds me of a situation I ran into once:
> (You also have to ask, WHY would a farm or any other business target their testing towards when they're likely to get red flags? They don't want that. Any time you do testing, there are lots of ways to game it to lean towards clean results. Which is what farms & companies want.) [4]
We were installing a drinking water monitoring system at a rural retirement home (on well water), probably a couple hundred residents.
Up to that point, one of the tests they did was a manual daily chlorine level check. Essentially you need to have a certain amount of residual chlorine in the water at the point of use, which lets you know you you are putting enough in (if you put too little in, it gets used up as it's breaking down organics in the water, and you end up with a zero). If the level is too low, you have to report it and explain what happened and how you fixed it, and if it happens too much, inspectors will start looking closely at your practices and forcing fixes and basically nobody likes that.
The new system had continuous monitoring of several parameters, one of them being chlorine, and would record everything as well as send alerts to people if anything dangerous happened. The chlorine monitor was installed at the opposite end of the building from the water supply, trying be representative of the worst case 'point of use' level.
As soon as it was online, it started sending alerts every night in the middle of the night. The free chlorine level would drop starting late in the evening (as the usage dropped), and then somewhere between 2 and 5 am would drop below the alarm threshold, and around 6-7 am jump back to normal. The owner was pissed that we had screwed the system up, because they didn't have this problem before the monitoring system was in.
Of course what was happening was not new, it was just that as usage dropped off as the residents went to bed, the water in the pipes just sat stagnant, and residual chlorine was slowly used up to the point there was none left. The daily checks were usually done mid-morning, after there was a lot of use as everyone woke up, and so all the water in the lines was freshly chlorinated when the check was done.
For years, anyone getting water in the middle of the night was drinking technically unsafe water (it still had been treated and likely posed no real health risk, so long as there was no contamination in any of the pipes or fixtures), and all that happened was the situation was exposed.
We eventually added a solenoid to the end of the line, and programmed it so it would open and dump water when the chlorine level got low but before the alarm threshold, at least getting fresh water into the main distribution lines of the building and avoiding the alarm condition.
It always stuck with me that the owners reaction was not "Oh, thank you for finding and fixing a problem I didn't even know about before it got someone really sick" but more like "your stupid system made things WORSE, we should rip it out and go back to how it was before."
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/10670961003...
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/10670961010...
[3] https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/10670961017...
[4] https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/10670961060...
* Is there a reasonable contamination hazard from water sitting in pipes that are flushed daily with chlorinated water? In other words, is it vital that there always be residual chlorine 100% of the time, or were the standards designed to accomodate this sort of periodic lapse?
* If the dips were harmless, would the inspectors be willing to accept that?
* Was the dump solenoid effective at flushing the entire network of pipes, or just the branch containing the sensor?
Depending on the answers, the end result could range all the way from "the new system let us eliminate a serious hazard", through "we were probably fine before but now we can be sure at a little extra cost", down to "now we have to waste water to avoid tripping a sensor so we don't get fined, with no actual improvement to the water quality". It's a great example of how what we want, what we test, and what we enforce can get just a little out of alignment, and make a hinderance out of what ought to be a definite improvement. Thanks again for sharing.
1)
My understanding is there is very little actual hazard here, provided the pipes are in reasonable shape and there isn't a source of contamination.
One example of a source of contamination: dead ends in plumbing (eg, an old branch that's been capped off). The stagnant water can grow bacterial colonies which can then contaminate everything downstream from where the dead end branches off. The residual chlorine can fight this but it's of course better to not have the dead end at all.
2)
The problem with the dips is it's not possible to distinguish between the "expected" nightly dips and real problems.
For example: do you just ignore all alarms between 3am and 6am? or should that be 7am? Is there another check (+alarm) to be sure the clock is correct (and do you now need a secondary clock source for that) and that DST is respected?
Or do you build something very complex that checks against recent flow rates before raising the alarm -- in which case, how do you test that code and ensure it never breaks (keeping in mind it's safety-related and it's very hard to unit test real-world flow meters, chlorine sensors etc). This gets difficult because you might have different plumbers / maintenance people doing things (adding branches, fixing leaks, etc) that might change the physical layout and not even realize there is control software that might be affected by changes. You can add more sensors to try to check for some of these potential conditions but each sensor costs even more money and adds more complexity.
A lot of this is really "CYA". If something ever did happen and a resident got sick (or worse) from the water, and it came to light that not only were there alarms every night but they were specifically suppressed, even though that might be a rational decision given the facts, at best, that decision would still be faced with a lot of scrutiny and at worse it could be considered criminally negligent.
3)
It's basically not possible to flush the ENTIRE building, because you'd have to open every fixture (every sink, shower, and flush every toilet). In this case, the solenoid dumped water from what was effectively the main line through the building which everything branched from, so from any apartment running the water for maybe a minute would get you fresh water from that main line.
So I'd rank this in the middle of what you said: "quality was probably (usually) fine before, definitely more likely to be fine now, and if an alarm goes off at any time it's real".
For instance, could we have almost everything that pushes water to plants contain some kind of low-cost sensor that sends data about the water going through it back to some base station for analysis?
We would need to spend some money to: * develop the technology * deploy the technology, including ensuring either the sensor can be self-powered (solar?) or we can hook up electricity to the water outputs easily (and electricity + water = not an easy solution!) * monitor the data
However... all of this seems do-able if we want to reduce health problems like this.
I imagine, like most everything, it comes down to tradeoffs: how frequently do outbreaks like these happen? What is the monetary cost when they happen? Would constant monitoring tech like this actually help us detect it? Who would pay?
I'd argue this is exactly what something like the FDA should be helping with - ensuring our food is safe, and that means helping deploy state-of-the-art sensors to reduce the chance of contamination. With government money going to some group that can make this a reality, the risk of developing this on their own and hoping that food producers would choose to pay for it goes away.
Shouldn't people on hackernews be familiar with "continuous testing"? There is no reason to believe non-tech can't modernize their test infra too.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that every year at least 2,000 Americans are hospitalized, and about 60 die as a result of E. coli infection and its complications. A study published in 2005 estimated the annual cost of E. coli O157:H7 illnesses to be $405 million (in 2003 dollars), which included $370 million for premature deaths, $30 million for medical care, and $5 million for lost productivity."
US GDP is $20T/yr, 325 Mpopulation.
The cost of E.coli is 1/50K of US GDP, affecting about 1 person per 150K per year, killing 1 in 5 million.
Meanwhile, second-hand is claimed to kill 7000 people per year and cost $5B/yr.
https://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/smoking-facts/health-effec...
On one hand, I've seen these kinds of analyses carried out to explain that people who worry about exogenous terrorists are "irrational" because other things (e.g. second hand smoke, or a mistake in a prescription medication, or a traffic accident) are more likely to kill an innocent person than such terrorists.
On the other hand, people have a value system and a system of priorities. Some kinds of risks just seem unacceptably horrifying to people while other kinds of risks seem tolerable.
Is a simple numerical analysis enough to label a line of thinking "irrational" or is it reasonable to make "irrationality" a function of arithmetical division and people's values?
Moral of this story: all greens are contaminated with feces - wash your greens.
Washing greens will not remove E. coli contamination.
> birds
The contamination causing the current E. Coli outbreak was almost certainly caused by feces from an animal farm and has nothing to do with wild birds.
The only grocery items I can specifically recall seeing marked irradiated are spices. I'm speaking of grocery stores in Oregon and Washington.
For context, it is my understanding that E. coli breakouts are caused by those lagoons overflowing during rainstorms if they are not managed correctly.
I'm really looking forward to the urban farming revolution.
Cities are way more efficient than spread-out rural towns and villages[1], but we still mostly rely on rural land for food, so they continue to exist. Because rural needs and daily experiences are very different from the average city-dweller, so too are their political beliefs.
The less we need to depend on rural land for food, the more people move into cities, the more efficient everything becomes.
[1] I'd recommend reading the chapter on Dense Cities from Whole Earth Discipline - totally changed my perspective on cities.
Large-scale farming (which vastly dominates the rural land mass of the US) has similarly dramatic downsides.
Why should that stop you from having a strongly held opinion that you can share to prove everyone else wrong?
Sure, if it's easy and cheap to test and sterilize irrigation water, then let's do so. I strongly doubt that's the case, though, and requiring farms to do so is one of those regulations that would be a small dent in a large corporate farm's checkbook and a gaping hole in that of a small independent farm.
The figures I've repeatedly seen say that ~$10-15mm worth of testing would have saved > $100mm worth of medical and related expenses — so far.
An order of magnitude cost savings is, by most definitions I'm aware of, a serious bargain.
What? The farmers aren't paying everyone else's medical bills? "Externalized costs are, like, totally someone else's problem, man..."
Meanwhile, testing is only half the battle. Let's say the water is contaminated. Unless you're okay with not having water (and therefore not having crops), you'd need to sterilize that water somehow. You'd need a machine that can boil and re-cool the water; just boiling it isn't enough unless you want to pre-cook your crops before the leave the farm ;) (but you could certainly let it cool in a reservoir before sending it to crops). Or maybe you have some fancier machine that uses something like radiation to do the sterilization. Either way, that costs money. Big corporate farms can easily afford that. Small independent farms typically cannot.
The idea that regulation like this can completely kill small-scale agricultural practices ain't far-fetched; this has quite literally happened again and again. I'm personally/intimately familiar with the case of Loyalton, CA, which used to have a thriving dairy (particularly milk and cheese) industry up until the middle of the 20th Century, when new pasteurization requirements made continued operation too expensive for all these small-scale dairies. As a result, they all switched to beef and alfalfa, and now that's all you see.
So if we are going to go ahead and make testing and sterilization mandatory, then we'll definitely want to subsidize it (whether for all farms or just for ones below a certain size). Given that it'll save the country money in the long run, as you say, this should be easy to justify budget-wise.
To that end: how about any industry that has potentially harmful externalities be compelled to carry insurance against those things demonstrably causing harm, the premiums of which are determined significantly by how competent the policy holder's mitigation strategies are.
Then we can, as needed, subsidize those mitigation strategies, applying the solution at the point of the problem, where it's not only going to be the least expensive, but also the most effective. Thus, if the rancher upstream of the lettuce farmer isn't taking care of his shit, he pays, not the farmer whose crops are contaminated by the rancher's negligence. The subsidy money ultimately goes not to incumbent insurance interests, but to the people and organizations creating new and better ways not to fuck ourselves up — which is, I think, something worth subsidizing a bit...
Either that, or you pay for the damages your cost-cutting externality-imposition causes out-of-pocket, with strong statutory preferences for compensating victims over everyone else in the event of bankruptcy, because I suspect that would kill a whole lot of farms and businesses.
EDITs: phrasing.
A manure lagoon for 200 animals is much easier to manage safely than a lagoon for 8,000 animals. Yet, laws keep making it harder to build anything else.
Boycott all growers who do not test their waters. If one farm can start testing and do marketing around that and consumers show a preference, the rest will follow.
You also have no control over what any business buys and it would be virtually impossible to find out. You'd never know, for example, where the Romaine used at your local Chipotle was purchased.
I also think you're giving way too much credit to human beings if you think they care enough to take action on this and boycott over this (even if they had full information that was easily available). They didn't even demand that the US government stop spying on them and jail the perpetrators within the CIA after the Snowden incident and after an investigative panel during Obama's administration acknowledged that the acts committed by the CIA's PRISM program were illegal.
But you are right, it's hard to track down individual suppliers/farms/grower. Maybe blockchain does have a use-case!
Also it seems the farms being affected are actually literally being shit on by other farms and it's not even them in the first place.
> After several high-profile disease outbreaks linked to food, Congress in 2011 ordered a fix, and produce growers this year would have begun testing their water under rules crafted by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration.
> But six months before people were sickened by the contaminated romaine, President Donald Trump’s FDA – responding to pressure from the farm industry and Trump’s order to eliminate regulations – shelved the water-testing rules for at least four years.
I don't understand how "it had never actually started in the first place" is relevant at all. There were plans to help address this problem, but those plans were delayed by the Trump administration.
This is precisely my point that people incorrectly blame anything and everything on Trump.
It's relevant because of a comment another user made here, which explains why the tests are not effective and would almost certainly have not resulted in catching this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18536230 The full Tweet thread linked to in that comment provides more info but the base theme is that the tests are not an appropriate solution because spot checks would not catch events like this. https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/10670960981...
In any event, the original comment was regarding journalistic misrepresentation. The comment I responded to brought up the issue of relevance given an apparent solution. My comment merely addresses the issue of relevance that was raised.
My apologies. I wasn't paying attention to the names.