How Safe Is The Food Chain?

Do Spices Sometimes Add More Than Flavor?

At any given time the CDC may be following a number of serious food born outbreaks of infectious diseases around the country. You certainly may have been aware of the outbreak of cantaloupe associated salmonella poisoning in December, which affected hundreds of people in 44 states and led to 158 hospitalizations and 6 deaths. This was followed closely in January by another episode of salmonella disease linked to pre-packaged charcuterie meats, and causing the recall of 18,000 pounds of this product. There is a current ongoing investigation of listeria infection from Mexican Queso Fresca and Cotija cheeses which has hospitalized 23 people in the US and killed 2. Listeria is a bacteria which is extremely dangerous to pregnant women, those with immune compromise and the elderly. In recent years listeria has been responsible for outbreaks linked to ice cream, various cheeses (especially unpasteurized varieties), salad greens, frozen vegetables, raw milk, and even frozen fully cooked chicken. Of course there are other pathogens causing food related illness including: norovirus, Shigella, Campylobacter, Clostridia, Vibrios, Staphylococcus, and E. coli. These bacteria and viruses cause obvious illness very quickly after ingestion, and when a sufficient number of people are effected it triggers an immediate investigation. On the other hand, certain poisons can and do enter the food chain, some of which are insidious, and cumulative in their effect, causing delayed recognition and increasing the risk for greater numbers of victims. This was the case in the recent lead and chromium poisoning of at least 420 people in the US (mostly children) caused by contamination of cinnamon used in the manufacture of various fruit snack pouches. The source of the contaminated cinnamon was traced to a food processor in Ecuador, and evaluation of raw cinnamon at the plant revealed no lead contamination. This is being treated as a probable case of intentional contamination. There is no safe level of lead for human physiology, and this is particularly true in young children who are more susceptible to its hematologic and neurologic damage than adults. Because lead poisoning is cumulative, and symptoms may be subtle at first, there is no certain way to know how long this situation was ongoing before it’s discovery in October. Similarly, the true number of children affected is likely much larger than currently known, and cases will likely continued to be discovered through routine lead level screenings.

The world wide the toll from lead poisoning is huge with an estimated 5.5 million deaths a year, outnumbering those from malaria, TB and HIV combined. The current episode of cinnamon poisoning is hardly a novelty in the spice world. Contamination of turmeric with lead chromate was only fairly recently recognized as a massive source of the toxin, particularly in Bangladesh and India; but adulterated turmeric finds it way into the international market since most of the spice is produced in these two countries. A study published in 2017 found that turmeric with very high lead levels from a variety of brands was sitting on US grocery store shelves. The source of the very high lead levels and clinical poisoning of people in Bangladesh was convincingly traced to turmeric through the efforts of American epidemiologists Jenna Forsyth and Stephen Luby of Stanford University. Lead is not very soluble in soil and environmental contamination could not possibly explain the extremely high levels they documented in the spice. The source was determined to be intentional adulteration by individuals in the spice trade. Why on earth would they do that? Turmeric is the tuber of a plant which is dug up, dried and polished. Tubers with blemishes or poor color are not as desirable, so the spice sellers dip them in a solution of lead chromate which has a lovely vibrant yellow color—nice huh? Some years ago a similar story lead to the serious poisoning of at least 50 people in Hungary (where else?) from paprika contaminated with lead oxide, which is quite red. Would you buy the story that the spice sellers had no idea that lead was toxic? If so I have a few shares left to sell of that bridge in New York which is being auctioned off to close the budget gap and house illegal migrants in the Roosevelt Hotel. The silver lining to this story is that as a result of these two researcher’s work, the government of Bangladesh in 2019 began a drastic campaign with severe penalties for anyone continuing to add lead to turmeric. The results are impressive with contamination levels falling from 49% of samples in 2018 to 0% in 2022. Am I convinced the level is actually zero today, or that the practice may not resume at some level in the future? Maybe, but in the meantime if you have old bottles of turmeric around, which perhaps you use only occasionally, throw them out and replace it with some new spice.

Ground Turmeric as a Source of Lead Contamination in the US. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0033354917700109

The COVID update will be brief today. Although test positivity rate remains fairly high at 10%, hospitalizations in the US are continuing to fall with 20,000 last week, down from a peak of about 36,000. Deaths are slowly trending down as well and have decreased from over 4% to 3.1% of the weekly total. This winter wave is definitely fading—you can see from the following graph that hospitalizations for the country as a whole were almost as high as last year. That’s not a very good record after four full years of the Pandemic. JN.1 remains the most persistent of variants with absolutely nothing on the horizon to challenge it. That’s good news for now, but bound to change at some point.

The big news this week I suppose is the CDC planning to do away with the 5 days isolation for people testing positive, and replacing it with the recommendation that as soon as you are afebrile you can have at it, spreading the virus as you go. Are there no more immunocompromised and elderly people, who despite vaccination may become severely ill or die from COVID? The current winter wave of critical illness and death answers that question. Is there any new evidence that currently you spread less virus as soon as you’re afebrile than say a year ago? Of course that also is not the case, it’s simply the CDC deciding that they will take a new tack since few people are listening to them. I have discussed many times, including in my last post, how the CDC and other Public Health authorities’s blunders have contributed to skepticism and distrust. Some have been scientific errors, but more frequently a total lack of judgement regarding an understanding that their true role should be to interpret science and formulate recommendations which take into consideration the realities of human nature, economics, social structures, religion, and the likelihood that their edicts will be followed. The idea of aiming for zero risk from a novel insult to the population which ignores the many other harms which will result from that policy should be a hard stop learning point; because there will be another pandemic (potentially a great deal more lethal than COVID) and we owe it to ourselves to do better. 5% of Americans listened to the CDC about vaccinating their young children with the most recent booster. You cannot explain that number through the lens of political affiliation, fringe vaccine dis-information or pandemic fatigue—only a profound population wide cognitive decision that the CDC is wrong, and has misjudged the risk benefit balance accounts for this. For a discussion of how some Public Health and scientific experts are coming to understand this I’d recommend the short New York Times article by David Leonhardt this week entitled, “The CDC., Ignored”.

The last issue for discussion today is a bit complex and I will try my best to briefly explain it, and provide the reference to a recent highly detailed review article if you find it sufficiently interesting. It has been known for quite a while that vaccines can have non-specific effects on the immune system beyond the simple lock and key view view where the vaccine stimulates specific antibodies which create immunity to the one disease targeted. This is not a question of antibodies cross-reacting to very similar antigens on a closely related organism, but rather much more complicated effects either enhancing or reducing a wide range of immune responses. It has been observed that live, attenuated (weakened) vaccines such as BCG or MMR, which create immunity to the specific target organisms, also have a positive effect on overall mortality from infections far in excess of the reduction of mortality directly from TB or measles. It appears there is an enhanced protection from a variety of unrelated diseases, but the exact mechanism is not well understood. Conversely there is significant evidence that non-live vaccines, which include for example DPT, Hepatitis B, and the mRNA vaccines, appear to have a negative effect on the impact of unrelated infectious diseases. Epidemiology studies suggest this negative effect is greater in women. The positive effect of reducing the mortality impact of the specific target disease is much greater on balance, and the science is certainly not settled on this issue. I personally believe that the surges, and seasonal dislocations, we have observed in various respiratory diseases following the Pandemic are the result of waning immunity, which resulted from prolonged social distancing, and not some profound long lasting immune suppression due to COVID infection or mRNA vaccination.

Rubio-Casillas A et al. Do vaccines increase or decrease susceptibility to diseases other than those they protect against? Vaccine. 2024. 42(3):426-440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2023.12.060.

If you get the feeling that civilization in general, and America in particular is circling the drain, I can say with near certainty that I spotted the Tidy Bowl man today on a nearby raft. He did not seem the least bit perturbed by being flushed, and told me to relax and go with the flow….it will all work out in the end. As for the sudden media scare-porn that Russia Might Be Thinking about putting nukes in space and targeting our satellites—they have 6000 right here on earth, enough to cause some serious global warming, followed by the winter to end all winters. Then again, we have worse things to think about than nuclear annihilation. The national debt now stands at 35 trillion dollars and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office just released their estimates that the debt will grow another 19 trillion to 54 trillion in ten years. Yearly deficits will increase from the current year 1.6 trillion to 2.8 trillion as the pace of debt accumulation increases. The result of this will be catastrophic sooner or later. If there are any adults out there who can do simple math, and are willing to sacrifice themselves on the alter of public service in Congress (that means no bribes, kick-backs, influence pedaling, or insider trading) you can count on my vote. Thanks for your interest today, if you would please forward these pages on to a friend or associate I would appreciate that.