Salmonella outbreak linked to onions in 43 US states | Hacker News Reader

Salmonella outbreak linked to onions in 43 US states

cnn.com

37 pointsfinphil54 comments

https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety...

I love how these onions are sold under fifty different fictitious brands, many of which are using highly misleading labeling and packaging. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but it seem dishonest to sell California onions in a bag that prominently announces "UTAH ONIONS" and doesn't say "California" on it anywhere.

Three weeks ago I bought a red onion. I have no idea if it was one of the affected brands. I have been eating it ever since, nearly every day, mostly raw on sandwiches. I've consumed maybe 2/3 to 3/4 of it.

Question: can I infer from not getting sick yet that my onion is not one of the contaminated ones? Or does the way this works is that only parts of the onion are contaminated, and it is possible that by chance I simply haven't gotten to the contaminated part and I should discard this thing?

https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/newport-07-20/index.html

Planet money had a really good episode about the romaine salmonella outbreak. The problem was that the water supply was tainted because it would go through protected federal land and the feces of the animal grazing on the land would get into the water supply. I wonder if this is the case for the onions.

Why can't this salmonella be cooked out safely?

You don't always cook onions.

And the UK govt wants to lower its food standards to do a trade deal with the states :)

(No offence to any american friends. I love your country, but your food has some problems.)

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. I get that you didn't intend to, but these things happen unintentionally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Apologies dang. Won't happen again.

Appreciated!

I am from the UK and lived in California and you don't know what your talking about. The food is much much better than the UK. Almost anywhere has better food than the UK (except bacon and pies). Cheap chicken is is terrible in the UK, I expect it's awful in US too. You are self delusional if you think UK can lecture other countries on food standards, it's a running joke across the world of the low quality of UK cooking [1]. I agree.

[1] https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/heaven.htm

> it's a running joke across the world of the low quality of UK cooking [1]

He's talking about food safety, not how good you think the cuisine is.

Hey man, I am from the UK and used to live in the states (north east though, not california). Yes, the quality of food in the USA can be VERY good, especially if you shop at places like wholefoods. The problem tends to be with the cheaper food.

In the UK, I would feel safe eating the cheapest chicken from Tesco, Alsdi, Lidl and ASDA (which is owned by Walmart). Would I feel safe eating chicken from the cheaper supermarkets in the USA? Definitely not.

I don't think the UK should be lecturing other countries, and at no point did I say we should.

Also, how dare you insult fish and chips, half and halfs, and fried mars bars :p

Finally, I would just like to point out that I did say I love the USA, I'm looking at moving back (post-covid). It's one of my favourite countries in the world, but I'm surprised at how controversial it is to say that the food isn't the best.

Yes I love vinigar on chips and fried haggis but it's an acquired taste / Stockholm syndrome :) The US food IS the best though (avacados). Maybe also simultaneously the worst (corn syrup) but I just feel UK has nothing to add to the disucussion and its too close to the lazy US stereotype Europeans throw around about Americans.

Currently, the UK suffers under the cruel tyranny of European food safety regs, but after WONDERFUL BREXIT it’ll be allowed have its own salmonella-y onions, because Consumer Choice. Or I think that’s the narrative, anyway.

This is nothing to do with cuisine or even food quality; it’s about food safety. The UK will soon no longer have to obey EU rules and is under pressure to relax its standards as part of a potential trade deal with the US.

The country famous for BSE is in a bit of a glass house when it comes to farming practices.

Sure, we're not great. But it blows my mind that you would ever want to _lower_ the quality of the food you are eating.

It wouldn't make sense in a world with infinite and free food, but that is not the world we live in.

The UK isn’t suffering from food shortages. Not yet, anyway.

Allocation between rich and poor is an issue, but the net imports and production are enough to cause widespread obesity.

There doesn't need to be a food shortage - the question is what percent of income do the poor spend on food, and would they spend less if they could?

Bear in mind that food poisoning isn’t free. It is not in society’s interest to have people off work sick, taking up medical capacity, and dying early. The advances in food safety over the 20th and 21st century was a great social good, and backsliding would be bad.

I do think that one problem, particularly in societies like the US where people don’t go to their GP very frequently, is that it’s pretty hard to measure impacts, because there’s little reliable data on mild (but economically impactful) cases.

The question should be: would lowering food standards make any difference?

Specifically in this case, in order to do a trade deal with a different continent, so the increased costs of transport are relevant.

I’m also told supermarket prices are very different from wholesale (and therefore import) prices. If so I would therefore expect any cost change to alter profit margins rather than family shopping bills.

Are you implying that the UK won't have enough food to feed itself post-Brexit, to the extent that it would need to import food from the US? I thought that the problem was that the US might insist on relaxing food safety regulations as part of a larger trade deal package. Do correct me if I'm wrong.

The question isn't the quantity of food, but the cost of food. There can be food aplenty, but if poor people need to spend a large amount of their income to acquire it, there will be a benefit to having a wider sourcing of cheaper food.

Changing the standard won't necessarily impact the quality of the food.

Meanwhile, from last year: Risking food safety, USDA plans to let slaughterhouses self-police

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/461774-riskin...

What's your point?

I was pointing out that it is fallacious to conflate/equate regulatory standards and quality, not arguing that regulatory standards are useless.

I think the difference is that the BSE crisis caused massive regulatory change, with farming, slaughter and rendering practices dramatically changes across a continent. Whereas the US does seem to just have this sort of thing routinely.

Is this sort of "tu quoque" fallacy acceptable on HN? And you're talking about events from two decades ago. What relevance do they have today?

You could just as easily have said: I love your food but your country has some problems

What they said was hardly mean.

I’ve never seen any recipe from the commonwealth that I could call “loveable”

I was ill twice on beef in the UK - and never once in places like France where one eats raw beef with a raw egg on it. I had beef in restaurants twice in several years of living in the UK, and twice I was ill. It was very well done, as well.

English vegetables are served in two forms: raw, boiled to smithereens. I guess I wouldn't have been poisoned by onions, luckily, given those appetizing options.

Now, Waitrose, the pricey British supermarket chain, is absolutely superb, and blows away, yes, Trader Joes and certainly Whole Foods by an exponential factor. You get fresh vegetables and fruit and products from all over the EU, with varietals and country origin listed.

But I'll trade our dangerous onions for your mysterious* meat any day of the week.

* - while I was there a scandal had been discovered: there was horsemeat mixed in with ground beef being sold in supermarkets and served in restaurants. Maybe I'm allergic to horse?

The UK had a large salmonella outbreak less than a year ago, with the cause not understood: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2019/11/uk-bears-brunt-of-mul....

and a smaller one 3 months ago from eggs: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/07/salmonella-outbreak-l...

The UK compares quite favourably to the US when it comes to salmonella infections from eggs. According to Wikipedia, "142,000 people in the United States are infected each year with Salmonella Enteritidis from chicken eggs". The number in the UK is a few dozen. That's a substantial difference per capita. Calling it a "large" salmonella outbreak is definitely glass houses.

I feel that some of the "tu quoque" responses to GP are fuelled by US nationalism.

> I feel that some of the "tu quoque" responses to GP are fuelled by US nationalism.

Or just fueled by the relatively constant stream of smug "here is yet another reason Europe is better than the US" posts from people who frequently turn out to be speaking from a position of ignorance. There is plenty of nationalism to go around, and it gets tiring.

Calling 200+ infections "a few dozen" seems intentionally misleading. And that was just with a single outbreak in November. Whose cause is still not known.

The US doesn't require vaccination of chickens for salmonella, never mind that it is basically free.

"Give me freedom or give me death" is the motto I think.

There would be no outbreak if farmers didn't use animal manure to fertilize their vegetable crops. That's the real source of salmonella.

What alternative do you propose? Petrochemical products are no sustainable alternative.

The real source of salmonella in the U.S. is the lack of a strategy to eradicate it. Many countries have, where you can eat raw eggs any day without problem. Once a chicken farm gets an outbreak, you burn it down, that's it.

Sounds drastic? Well, then that's the choice you make and will have to live with salmonella.

Well, you don’t burn it down, but it’s bad news for the chickens, certainly. And the practical approach is normally keeping bacterial load low via vaccination, hygiene, culling etc., rather than total eradication.

I live in one of the ‘raw eggs are basically safe now’ countries; a government study in Ireland involving testing 5000 eggs about 10 years ago found no salmonella in egg contents, but did find it on two shells. I still don’t trust raw or undercooked eggs, though; I was at an impressionable age when the last major outbreak happened in the early 90s.

Or if farmers cared about animal welfare and improved the conditions for them instead of creating this situation where animals and products have to be constantly medicated or washed to make them fit for consumption.

You know, maybe money isn't the singular most important thing? As much as the US believes it is.

As a layman, it would seem more desirable to use pasteurized manure than petrochemical based fertilizers.

As long as the animals are making the poop it makes sense to use it. Has organic fertilizer usage had an impact on the bottom line for the companies making the poop?

Is this based on anything other than an gut distrust of "chemicals"? I am, admittedly, a layman as well, but my understanding is that fertilizers are essentially distillations of the important elements (Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphate) which you would get from manure, but without the risk of food poisoning.

It's a good way to dispose of the manure. It's beneficial to the soil and pretty much any other disposal will cost more than spreading it on fields.

Chemical fertilizer is used because it increases yields well beyond crop rotation (and because minerals are depleted over time).

There are other minerals in manure. Basic multivitamins and active bacteria besides salmonella benefit the soil.

As long as we have cattle we will have manure anyway. Might as well use it beneficially, also because disposing of the rest is already hard enough.

Do you know for sure? My father was in the ag business in the Salinas valley and he always suggested it was either wild pigs shitting in the fields or migrant workers not given proper or enough "porta potties" so they go in the ditches sometimes.

I'd be really interested in information sources of salmonella; I understand a lot of fertilizer is cooked to kill pathogens, and that salmonella also comes from rat feces in warehouses. If you have any sources on this, please post them.

What alternative do you suggest?

There would also be no outbreak if farmers immunized their animals against salmonella.

See https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23165-us-should-vacci... for more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com