So many things in California, including the recent e-coli outbreak, seem to come back to the need for a larger and cleaner water supply.
An excerpt.
E. coli culprit vexes industry
Decade of outbreaks casts suspicion on Salinas Valley water.
By Jim Downing and Matt Weiser - Bee Staff WritersPublished 12:00 am PDT Sunday, September 24, 2006
For more than a week, the million-dollar-a-day Salinas Valley spinach harvest idled as government investigators hunted for the source of an E. coli contamination that has sickened 171 people across the country.
Now, as scientists comb over 10 suspect farms in the valley, most other growers, within days, are likely to get the all-clear and send their spinach back to markets.
Yet a sense of crisis lingers over the industry because one scary thing is now clear: This wasn't a fluke.
For nearly a decade, the Food and Drug Administration has zeroed in on the Salinas Valley -- the "Salad Bowl of the Nation" -- as a hot spot for foodborne illness. The latest E. coli outbreak is the ninth incident in the last decade to be traced back to the region, which produces two-thirds of the nation's spinach and much of its other fresh greens.
"The region grows great spinach. It has to grow great, safe spinach," said Dr. David Acheson, chief medical officer at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. "(The outbreak) does raise the question of what are the practices of that valley and what will it take to ensure the produce coming out of there is safe. We have got to get a handle on this."
State legislators also are promising to get tough. Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and incoming Assembly Agriculture Chairwoman Nicole Parra, D-Hanford, plan a joint hearing on the E. coli outbreak.
The biggest barrier to combating the Salinas Valley's recurring contamination problems has been the unsolved mystery of its specific cause: All previous outbreak investigations have failed to confirm the source of the harmful bacteria.
Water, contaminated by human or animal waste, has consistently been a leading suspect. Those bacteria can move to lettuce or spinach in myriad ways -- from a creek flooding a field in winter to dirty water in a roadside ditch soaking a field worker's boot.
In the Salinas Valley, water troubles run deep.
