Thread by @reveal

1/ Last year, hundreds of people were sickened by an E. coli outbreak after eating lettuce grown in Arizona. 27 suffered kidney failure. Five died.

Six months before that, Trump’s FDA had shelved rules designed to prevent this very sort of incident. revealnews.org/article/5-peop…

2/ William Whitt escaped with his life. But his sickness was harrowing. He suffered days of diarrhea and vomited blood. His body swelled like a balloon. He was given painkillers every 10 minutes.

3/ The culprit? Salad.

It turns out that leafy greens are particularly vulnerable to bacteria. And a gaping hole in the U.S. food safety system contributes to the problem. Produce growers don’t have to test the water they use on their crops.

4/ Lots of dangerous bacteria, such as Salmonella, E. coli 0157:H7, and Listeria, can end up in water that’s used to irrigate your cantaloupes, lettuce and sprouts.

5/ The FDA has known about this for awhile. In 2015, under President Obama, it adopted rules that would require farmers to start testing their water in 2018.

7/ But under Trump’s FDA:

* The largest farms won’t have to start sampling their water until 2022.
* They won’t have to meet bacteria standards until 2024.
* Small farms have until 2026 to make sure their water meets the standards.

8/ The delay could cost the public a lot: Roughly $108 million a year in hospital bills and other expenses, according to @US_FDA’s own analysis.

9/ Meanwhile, the produce industry will save $12 million a year from the delay.

10/ How exactly does dirty water make us sick? For one thing, it doesn’t always wash off the produce we eat.

11/ Second, a little bad bacteria goes a long way.

We asked Mansour Samadpour, a microbiologist and food safety expert, to test the survival rate of E. coli for us.

12/ His lab found that after lettuce is harvested from a field, the amount of harmful bacteria may decline, but slowly. A few cells usually survive on the leaves.

13/ That’s bad news: According to Samadpour, just 1-10 cells can sicken people if they make it to the small intestine alive.

14/ Once in our bodies, things can go downhill really fast. E. coli can double every 20 minutes.

This means that one cell becomes about 1,000 in an hour and a half. After about six hours, it’s around 1 million. 👇👇

15/ Most farm water tests can’t detect the presence of the most dangerous pathogens, like the strain that poisoned William Whitt.

Instead, they detect generic E. coli, bacteria that indicate the presence of manure in water.

16/ Basically, if a sample contains lots of generic E. coli, that means the water has lots of manure - which means it’s more likely to be carrying harmful bacteria.

17/ Industry reps + growers say these tests are expensive, unnecessary for some produce and aren’t accurate enough. One of these reps wrote a letter opposing the water testing rule last year on behalf of his then-boss, the Produce Marketing Association. documentcloud.org/documents/4941…

18/ In January, this same rep, Jim Gorny, accepted a FDA job that appears to have been created especially for him.
pma.com/Content/Press-…

19/ And at a meeting in February, Gorny told growers, “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

In other words, don’t worry about water testing.

20/ We’ll continue to cover issues of lax food safety under the Trump administration. To get our reporting delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. revealnews.org/newsletter

21/ By the way: Investigative journalism is more important than ever. Support our work to produce stories that improve lives and protect communities. bit.ly/2xXpLIc