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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the US FDA has tight restrictions on unpasteurized milk and cheeses, and France does not. Some French cheeses are straight up illegal in the US because they're raw and not aged long enough i.e. reblochon.

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If you are wondering, yes, every year a handful of French people get hospitalized from eating bad cheese. Usually E. Coli contamination.

. . . which is horrible. I wouldn't wish E. coli on my worst enemy.

I can't tell if this is satire or not since every healthy person has probably trillions of e coli in their gut.

Is this satire?

They’re clearly not talking about the benign strains.

The strains in your gut aren't really benign, they're just isolated to your gut. If you exposed someone to those strains by say not washing your hands before cooking, it would not be fine.

I agree GP is being silly though.

Not really. Anyway the genome of E. coli is extremely diverse, there is not really such a thing as "E. coli." And strain that colonizes your gut may not colonize someone else's, or cause problems. But most living things can be opportunistic e.g. if your immune system is compromised.

I stand corrected.

Well, you're not totally wrong since the body does have several layers of defense to keep the bacteria in the intestine, and bad things happen when they break down: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0803124105

On the other hand the immune system selects for beneficial bacteria, which take up space and nutrients so that really harmful ones can't colonize: https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/nri3535; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05141-x

The E. coli strains of concern are the so-called enterotoxic (or enterotoxigenic) E. coli and the Shiga-toxin producing strains. Those are not commonly found in peoples' guts and when they are, they cause... trouble.

Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is a type of Escherichia coli and one of the leading bacterial causes of diarrhea in the developing world,[1] as well as the most common cause of travelers' diarrhea.[2] Insufficient data exists, but conservative estimates suggest that each year, about 157,000 deaths occur, mostly in children, from ETEC.[3][4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterotoxigenic_Escherichia_co...

The most common sources for Shiga toxin are the bacteria S. dysenteriae and some serotypes of Escherichia coli (STEC), which includes serotypes O157:H7, and O104:H4.[4][5]

Symptoms of Shiga toxin ingestion include abdominal pain as well as watery diarrhea. Severe life-threatening cases are characterized by hemorrhagic colitis (HC).[15]

The toxin is associated with hemolytic-uremic syndrome. In contrast, Shigella species may also produce shigella enterotoxins, which are the cause of dysentery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiga_toxin

> I wouldn't wish E. coli on my worst enemy

Is curiously a double true. Either way you take it, there is always a possible interpretation that leads to a logical, non-satirical meaning.

E. coli is usually less than 1% of a healthy gut flora, but yeah. It one of the first bacterias to move from the mother's vagina to the newborn baby, until it uses up the oxygen which then lets the anaerobes move in.

That only says you don't have such a bad worst enemy.

Compared to things like listeria or salmonella? Surely, you’re joking. E. coli is benign in most cases. For perspective, in France (since we’re talking about French cheese), the orders of magnitude are hundreds of deaths each year from salmonella, tens from listeria (with a death rate of ~20% for its invasive form), and even fewer from E. coli.

Except in a tiny number of cases it is unpleasant but short and not threatening (remember to drink a lot, though, the most dangerous effect is dehydration).

Mostly children and elderly people though, and raw cheese isn't the lead cause for such contamination, despite regulation processed food is quite high as well (with the record in recent years going to … Nestlé, who else. /r/fucknestle)

A lot more in the US from Romaine lettuce of meats.

I'm so glad the US government is keeping us safe from our own culinary decisions.

US government and politicians would not care if not for the greed of large food corporations lobbying for absurd restrictions that only large corporate farms can economically afford to follow. This effectively pushes small farms out of business and they eat gobble up the market share. On top of this, only about 15 cents of every dollar goes back to farmers, the remaining amount pays for processing and marketing. The US food system is insane and WAY overpriced, due in large part to corporate greed.

Im French, and when I was 16, I went to New York and was traumatized by the border checks on both ends opening all my luggages in front of everyone (and every other French person had to do it) to make sure I wasnt carrying frigging supermarket cheese nobody cares about. They specifically check French people for these crimes, I was told, because we seem not to realize we're threatening the US with our crappy Camemberts.

If you tried the abomination sold in German Supermarkets as "Camembert" you would suddenly highly appreciate your "crappy" Camembert

You should take back that statue.

ha ha, good one. I wonder how many others got the reference.

Kind of funny given the guy who invented pasteurization

Ah, I had reblochon in a tartiflette once. Made the whole house smell like feet :-)

Yeah I didn't really get the appeal of reblochon for that reason. Really liked Brie de meaux though. Other cheeses that have "barnyard" aroma (manure) have an appeal that inscrutable to me.

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