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Last week, trooper David Eggers stopped a truck that was speeding near the town of Kentland in northwest Indiana. Inside the truck, he found boxes full of contaminated food.
"Fluids from chicken and beef and pork were running onto the floor, and we found fluids from beef on vegetables," Eggers told Eyewitness News.
WTHR was there to see the contaminated load up close. Eyewitness News cameras captured blood on the floor of the delivery truck so much blood that it was flowing out onto the street below.
"These boxes are soaked through from blood," complained Newton County environmental health officer Jill Johnson as she inspected the load. "There's raw meat together with vegetables all moisture damaged and the potential for cross contamination is very great," she said.
Thousands of pounds of food inside the A1 Food Service delivery truck were supposed to be refrigerated, but the driver told inspectors he forgot to turn on the truck's refrigeration unit. As a result, inspectors measured the temperature inside the cargo area of the truck at nearly 70 degrees -- dangerously high for transporting food. State and federal regulations require refrigerated food to be stored and transported at or below 41 degrees.
Johnson condemned the load, and all of the perishable food on board destined for restaurants in Indianapolis, Columbus and Bloomington was destroyed.
"You wouldn't want your family eating any of that that we just unloaded from this truck," Eggers said. "Hard to believe anyone would transport food like this."
Indiana State Police have repeatedly stopped other trucking companies carrying loads of spoiled meat, eggs, vegetables, milk and cheese. All of it was supposed to go to Indiana grocery stores and restaurants before being condemned by inspectors.
"It's happening a lot more frequently. Just about any day you go out now, you can find people in violation of the safe transportation for these food products," said Capt. Wayne Andrews, who oversees ISP's commercial vehicle enforcement division.
While ISP patrols have caught tens of thousands of pounds of spoiled food in the past four months alone, state troopers admit most contaminated truckloads of food slip through the cracks -- cracks that were supposed to be fixed years ago.
In 2005, Congress ordered the Food and Drug Administration to create new regulations to protect the transportation of our nation's food supply. The Sanitary Food Transportation Act of 2005 was designed to increase monitoring and accountability for the millions of food shipments that take place annually in the United States.
Six years since the act became law, the FDA still has not issued the new regulations mandated by Congress.
Pigs given low doses of antibiotics had more E. coli in their guts, and that bacteria showed an increased resistance to antibiotics, according to new research. The study confirms the routine practice of feeding antibiotics to food animals increases drug resistance in the bacteria living in those animals. The practice is common at large livestock operations worldwide. But experts say it is helping spawn new types of antibiotic-resistant disease organisms, fueling a global public health crisis.
California executive Tom Dukes had a close call with one such superbug. He got painful stomach cramps a couple years ago. His doctor said it was a serious intestinal condition called diverticulitis and prescribed antibiotics. Started those on Monday morning and by Tuesday night, I really felt like a million bucks, he says. But a few months later, Dukes got the symptoms again. Again, he got antibiotics.
Drug failure
This time, though, they did not work. He wound up in the emergency room, in incredible pain. Id never encountered anything like this before," Dukes says. "Out of all the sports injuries and broken arms and things like that, that all paled in comparison. Drug-resistant E. coli bacteria were escaping into his abdomen through a tear in his colon. Emergency surgery removed a 20-centimeter section.
Doctors had only one type of drug left that would kill the germs. That saved his life. Dukes is a self-described workout fanatic who spends a couple hours a day in the gym. So how does an otherwise-healthy person get a life-threatening superbug? Although well never know for sure exactly, it seems that the probable cause was basically from eating tainted meat, he says.
Healthy animals vs. sick people
Half a world away, doctors in India are fighting outbreaks of bacterial infections that are resistant to more than 15 types of antibiotics. But closer to home, a similarly scary bug is making the rounds in intensive care and other long-term units of American hospitals. In at least 37 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, doctors have identified bacteria, including E. coli, that produce Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase, or KPCan enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to most known treatments. It's much more prevalent in America than bacteria that produce NDM-1, the enzyme that has Indian doctors "hell scared," and, according to Alexander Kallen, a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the final outcome isn't much different: superbacteria that are hard to kill.
"It's got a slightly different structure than [NDM-1]," he says of KPC. "But the bottom line is they're two different ways to produce bacteria that are resistant to a wide range of antibiotics." That's bad news for infected patientsthe mortality rate for patients infected with KPC-producing bacteria has been estimated to be as high as 50 percent. Doctors are advised to do their best to keep the bacteria from spreading, which explains why the problem is most prevalent in hospitals and other close-quarter medical units. Infected patients are often isolated. KPC has been seen in a wide range of bacteria, including E. coli, Salmonella, and K. pneumonia, which often affects hospitalized patients.
These superbugs are resistant to nearly every weapon doctors can throw at them, including carbapenems, a class of antibiotic that the CDC calls the "last line of defense" against infections that are resistant to other types of antibiotics. There are a couple antibiotics that have been shown to kill these superbugs, but often at great risk to patients. In fact, the FDA has associated the use of these effective antibiotics with an "increased risk of death" in patients with pneumonia. That leaves many doctors scratching their heads. KPC-bacteria often grow on medical equipment such as catheters and ventilators, so doctors can sometimes remove that equipment or perform surgery to try to eliminate the infection from a patient's body.
CDC researchers, including Kallen, say that hospitals who haven't been vigilant about isolating patients with KPC-producing bacteria may have missed their chance. According to a paper co-authored by Kallen released last year, "failure to recognize CRE infections when they first occur in a facility has resulted in a missed opportunity to intervene before these organisms are transmitted more widely." The good news is that, at least for now, KPC-producing bacteria generally only infects people who already have compromised immune systems. "It can move into the wider community," says Kallen, "but we haven't seen much of that yet."
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That's the least of your worries. Do you think all those chemicals they add to food crops are good for you?Saw this investigative report on Indy news and makes you think just what you are getting.
13 Investigates finds feds ignoring"hot trucks" - 13 WTHR
Last week, trooper David Eggers stopped a truck that was speeding near the town of Kentland in northwest Indiana. Inside the truck, he found boxes full of contaminated food.
"Fluids from chicken and beef and pork were running onto the floor, and we found fluids from beef on vegetables," Eggers told Eyewitness News.
WTHR was there to see the contaminated load up close. Eyewitness News cameras captured blood on the floor of the delivery truck so much blood that it was flowing out onto the street below.
"These boxes are soaked through from blood," complained Newton County environmental health officer Jill Johnson as she inspected the load. "There's raw meat together with vegetables all moisture damaged and the potential for cross contamination is very great," she said.
Thousands of pounds of food inside the A1 Food Service delivery truck were supposed to be refrigerated, but the driver told inspectors he forgot to turn on the truck's refrigeration unit. As a result, inspectors measured the temperature inside the cargo area of the truck at nearly 70 degrees -- dangerously high for transporting food. State and federal regulations require refrigerated food to be stored and transported at or below 41 degrees.
Johnson condemned the load, and all of the perishable food on board destined for restaurants in Indianapolis, Columbus and Bloomington was destroyed.
"You wouldn't want your family eating any of that that we just unloaded from this truck," Eggers said. "Hard to believe anyone would transport food like this."
Just think of all the trucks that do not get stopped!
Indiana State Police have repeatedly stopped other trucking companies carrying loads of spoiled meat, eggs, vegetables, milk and cheese. All of it was supposed to go to Indiana grocery stores and restaurants before being condemned by inspectors.
"It's happening a lot more frequently. Just about any day you go out now, you can find people in violation of the safe transportation for these food products," said Capt. Wayne Andrews, who oversees ISP's commercial vehicle enforcement division.
While ISP patrols have caught tens of thousands of pounds of spoiled food in the past four months alone, state troopers admit most contaminated truckloads of food slip through the cracks -- cracks that were supposed to be fixed years ago.
In 2005, Congress ordered the Food and Drug Administration to create new regulations to protect the transportation of our nation's food supply. The Sanitary Food Transportation Act of 2005 was designed to increase monitoring and accountability for the millions of food shipments that take place annually in the United States.
Six years since the act became law, the FDA still has not issued the new regulations mandated by Congress.
13 Investigates finds feds ignoring"hot trucks" - 13 WTHR
The reason: Dangerous bacteria that can kill people have been growing resistant to the drugs, which can leave humans at risk of getting infections that can't be controlled. The announcement Wednesday by the Food and Drug Administration, which asks producers to make the change voluntarily, comes two years after the agency declared that using antibiotics in food-producing animals "is not in the interest of protecting and promoting the public health." "This is a sea change," says Michael Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for foods. "We're finally ready to put this issue behind us."
Skeptics fear the animal pharmaceutical industry will make only cosmetic changes and the meat producers will continue using feed with antibiotics. "They'll just stop marketing drugs as growth promoters and instead market them for disease prevention at exactly the same doses and same period of use," says Steve Roach with the Food Animal Concerns Trust in Chicago. Antibiotics have been added to animal feed and water since the 1960s, when it was found that very low, long-term doses not only kept animals from getting sick but also made them grow faster. Concerns about bacteria becoming resistant to those antibiotics often the same ones used to treat human disease began in the 1970s. The FDA tried to restrict their use in 1977, but Congress opposed the restrictions. The agency, doctors, farmers and activists have been fighting about the issue ever since.
The new guidance asks, but does not require, that companies stop selling antibiotics medically important in human disease as growth promoters for animals. Two commonly used ones would be penicillin and tetracycline, says William Flynn, deputy director for science policy at the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the FDA. Antibiotics could still be given to sick animals, but feed containing antibiotics would have to be prescribed by a veterinarian. Jeff Simmons, president of Elanco, a large animal pharmaceutical company in Greenfield, Ind., agrees with the the FDA's move. Putting antibiotic use "under the oversight of the veterinarian is critical," he says. The "final rule," in FDA's terminology, is a guideline that does not have the force of law.
There already is a shift away from long-term change the over-use of antibiotics in animal feeds, Taylor says. "Europe no longer allows product that has been treated that way," and McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken don't accept it either, he says. The FDA will give companies three months to declare their intentions "so we know who's going along with us on this and who isn't," and then will begin a 90-day comment period, Taylor says. After that, companies will have three years to implement the changes. If some companies don't go along, he says, the FDA will "look toward other regulatory options."
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