Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [196]
195 roughly 200,000 people are sickened: Derived from the annual numbers cited in Mead et al., “Food-Related Illness and Death”: 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths.
more than a quarter of the American population: Ibid.
can precipitate long-term ailments: See James A. Lindsay, “Chronic Sequelae of Foodborne Disease,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 3, no. 4 (October/December 1997).
entirely new kinds of outbreaks are now occurring: See Tauxe, “Emerging Food-borne Diseases.”
196 a newly emerged pathogen: See Armstrong et al., “Emerging Foodborne Patho-gens.”
thirteen large packinghouses now slaughter: Cited in James M. MacDonald and Michael Ollinger, “U.S. Meat Slaughter Consolidating Rapidly,” USDA Food Review, May 1,1997.
more than a dozen other new foodborne pathogens: Cited in Tauxe, “Emerging Foodborne Diseases.”
infectious agents that have not yet been identified: See “Food-Related Illness and Death.”
defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals: See Consumer Product Safety Commission, press releases, June 1997–June 1999.
197 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples: The figures on ground beef contamination are from “Nationwide Federal Plant Raw Ground Beef Microbiological Survey, August 1993–March 1994,” United States Deartment of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service, Science and Technology, Microbiology Division, April 1996.
fatal in about one out of… cases: Mead et al., “Food-Related Illness and Death.”
“a food for the poor”: David Gerard Hogan, Selling ’Em by the Sack (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 22.
“The hamburger habit is just about as safe”: Quoted ibid., p. 32.
198 “nothing but White Castle Hamburgers and water”: By the end of the experiment the student was eating up to two dozen hamburgers a day. Quoted ibid., p. 33; Tennyson, Hamburger Heaven, p. 24.
pork had been the most popular: Interview with James Ratchford, American Meat Institute.
almost half of the employment in American agriculture… annual revenues generated by beef: National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Fact Sheet.
More than two-thirds of those hamburgers were bought: Cited in David Theno, “Raising the Bar to Ensure Safer Burgers,” San Diego Union-Tribune, August 27, 1997.
children between the ages of seven and thirteen ate: A survey by McDonald’s once found that children under the age of seven ate 1.7 hamburgers a week; those from seven to thirteen ate 6.2. People from thirteen to thirty ate 5.2; from thirty to thirty-five, 3.3; from thirty-five to sixty, 2.6; and over sixty, 1.3. Cited in Boas and Chain, Big Mac, p. 218.
more than seven hundred people in at least four states: See “Update: Multistate Outbreak of Escherichia coli 0157:H7 Infections from Hamburgers — Western United States, 1992–1993,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 16, 1993; and Fox, Spoiled, pp. 246–68.
199 In 1982 dozens of children were sickened: Nicols Fox offers the best account of this outbreak. See Fox, Spoiled, pp. 220–29.
“the possibility of a statistical association”: Quoted ibid., p. 227.
In the eight years since the Jack in the Box outbreak: I have taken the annual E. coli 0157:H7 numbers from Mead et al., “Food-Related Illness and Death” — 73,480 illnesses; 2,168 hospitalizations; 61 deaths — and multiplied them by 8.
In about 4 percent of reported E. coli 0157:H7 cases: Cited in Mead et al., “Food-related Illness and Death.”
About 5 percent of the children who develop HUS: Interview with Dr. Patricia Griffin.
200 the leading cause of kidney failure among children: Cited in “Isolation of E. coli 0157:H7 from Sporadic Cases of Hemorrhagic Colitis — United States,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, August 1, 1997.
201 as few as five organisms: Interview with Dr. David Acheson.
The most common cause of foodborne outbreaks has been: See “Outbreak — Georgia and