Healthy chickens could reduce campylobacter

by frog

American disease scientists are warning that bouts of food poisoning can cause serious health risks months or even years after people think they have recovered from the initial illness. E coli for instance has been linked, years after a patient has recovered from it, to hospitalisation as a result of high blood pressure, colon or pancreas inflammation, or endometriosis.

Folks often assume once you’re over the acute illness, that’s it, you’re back to normal and that’s the end of it,” said Dr. Robert Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The long-term consequences are “an important but relatively poorly documented, poorly studied area of food borne illness.

In New Zealand campylobacter is the food borne disease of the moment, with The New Zealand Food Safety Authority recently releasing its new Risk Management Strategy for processing of poultry.

Studies suggest that up to 90% of chickens in New Zealand are infected with campylobacter. There are three key points at which the risk of campylobacter can be reduced; In the kitchen, with safe handling and cooking of chickens, in the retail process in the shops with safe packaging and freezing, and at the very beginning by doing something about the infected birds themselves. Unfortunately while the code has many sensible plans for the first two areas, it lets us down on this third aspect.

As Sue Kedgley notes:

A higher emphasis should be placed on more hygienic methods of transportation to avoid cross-contamination between live birds. Campylobacter lives in the gut of the chicken and transporting them in cages stacked on top of each other will inevitably result in the droppings from birds higher up the stack contaminating those below them.

The spray caused by the rubber fingers of the automatic defeatherer is a major source of contamination from one bird to the next, as is the automatic evisceration machine. This machine pulls the gut from the bird, however, if not set to the correct size can tear the gut spilling the contents over the chicken and contaminating the machine.

And the consequences can be horrific:

About 1 in 1,000 sufferers of campylobacter, a diarrhea-causing infection spread by raw poultry, develop far more serious Guillain-Barre syndrome a month or so later. Their body attacks their nerves, causing paralysis that usually requires intensive care and a ventilator to breath.

frog says

Published in Health & Wellbeing by frog on Thu, January 24th, 2008   

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