Tag Archives: Deer

E. coli O103 and O145 sickens 29 students who prepared deer in Minnesota

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A Minnesota high school science project that involved hunting and butchering deer — including one road-kill capture — and turning the meat into venison kabobs backfired when 29 students were sickened with a rare kind of E. coli food poisoning, investigators say.

Linda Carroll of msnbc reports the 2010 incident, just now reported in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases (abstract below) highlights the risks of E. coli contamination, not just from factory-produced meat, but also from small, local providers.

Doctors first knew they had a problem in December 2010 when two kids from the same high school turned up at a Minnesota hospital with abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. Fearing they had a food poisoning outbreak on their hands, they quickly called in the state’s top-notch public health officials.

Both teens had taken part in a school environmental science and outdoor recreation class that involving hunting, shooting and butchering six white-tailed deer, explained Joshua Rounds, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Public Health. A seventh deer was harvested after being hit by a car, the report says.

The deer were processed on school grounds and then grilled and eaten in class a few weeks before the students got sick.

Epidemiologists interviewed 117 kids in five class periods and found that 29 definitely had become ill, but not with E. coli O157:H7, the strain commonly associated with food poisoning from ground beef.

Rounds suspected the deer might have carried another E. coli strain that also produces poisons known as Shiga toxins. He was right. Samples from the students and the deer meet turned up E. coli O103:H2, which is part of a larger category of non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bugs, known as STECs.
Scientists also turned up another E. coli strain, E. coli O145:NM that didn’t produce Shiga toxins.

People don’t usually get sick from eating hunks or steaks of muscle meat, Rounds said. In this case, however, the meat had been skewered and cooked only to medium-rare. The skewers had dragged contaminants from the meat’s surface down to the center of the kabobs, which hadn’t been cooked to a high enough temperature to kill the bacteria.

Another factor was hand-washing when handling meat — or the lack of it, Rounds said.

“If you think about high school males, they’re probably not the best when it comes to food safety practices,” he said. “So you can have cross-contamination.”
The case is a reminder, Rounds said, that all meat, no matter where it comes from, should be treated with careful precautions.

Rounds JM, Rigdon CE, Muhl LJ, Forstner M, Danzeisen GT, Koziol BS, et al. 2012. Non-O157 Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli associated with venison. Emerg Infect Dis http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1802.110855Description: xternal Web Site Icon

Abstract

We investigated an outbreak of non-O157 Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli at a high school in Minnesota, USA, in November 2010. Consuming undercooked venison and not washing hands after handling raw venison were associated with illness. E. coli O103:H2 and non-Shiga toxin–producing E. coli O145:NM were isolated from ill students and venison.

It really was Bambi: deer dropping linked to E. coli O157 outbreak on strawberries in Oregon; 1 dead 14 sick

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Oregon health officials confirmed today that deer droppings caused an E. coli outbreak traced to strawberries.

Scientists picked up environmental samples from fields at Jaquith Strawberry Farm in rural Washington County and 10 tested positive for E. coli O157:H7. Of those, six matched the strain that sickened 15 people in Oregon, including one woman who died. The other four were separate strains of E. coli O157:H7.

William Keene, senior epidemiologist with Oregon Public Health, said the outbreak strain turned up in samples from fields in three separate locations.

“It could be one deer that conceivably traveled from one field to another,” Keene said. But he said the positive tests probably indicate that several or perhaps many of the deer around Jaquith’s property carry O157:H7.

But they don’t know for sure because they’ve not done much testing.

A total of seven people were hospitalized in the outbreak and three suffered kidney failure, Keene said.

Blame Bambi: E. coli found in deer droppings in Oregon strawberry patch linked to outbreak; 14 sick, 1 dead

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William Keene, senior epidemiologist with Oregon Public Health, told Lynne Terry of The Oregonian that 10 percent of the samples collected over the weekend from Jaquith Strawberry Farm tested positive for E. coli O157:H7.

Those samples included deer feces, which he initially suspected caused the outbreak. Now it seems certain they were the culprit.

"We’re increasingly confident that we will be able to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that deer were the source of contamination of the strawberries," Keene said.

"It could be there but in such low quantities that you have to collect thousands of samples," he said. "We don’t have the resources to pay for that kind of testing."
Now the lab has to confirm whether the specific strain of the bacteria in the samples matches the strain that sickened the 15 people. Two suffered kidney failure, including an elderly woman in Washington County who died. Two patients are still in the hospital.

That study, published in 1997, marked a big breakthrough. Until then the bacteria had been found in other animals, including horses, dogs and sheep, but scientists had always thought that cattle were responsible for poisoning food with E. coli O157:H7. Keene’s study showed that three samples of deer pellets out of 32 were positive for the bacteria.

Did deer poop kill one and sicken 15 with E. coli O157:H7 in Oregon strawberries?

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My friend Farmer Jeff e-mailed me this morning. He’s not doing so well, but still has fire in his belly and the Oregon strawberry outbreak prompted him to write.

Jeff was a pioneer in fruit and vegetable growing in southern Ontario. I’m sure he got a chuckle when he heard that Monsanto announced last week it was going to start selling a consumer-oriented herbicide-tolerant Bt sweet corn. Jeff was growing, labeling and selling Syngenta’s Bt sweet corn over a decade ago (that’s Jeff, in the white T-shirt and banana pants doing what he loves — talking farming).

But Jeff always had a receptive ear for my microbial food safety rants and he always tried to fit my theories into the practicalities of farm life: especially strawberries.

Jaquith Strawberry Farm in rural Washington County, Oregon is a 35-acre strawberry producer, has been identified as the source of an E. coli O157:H7 that has killed one and sickened 15; four people went to the hospital, including two people who suffered kidney failure.

The farm sold potentially tainted fresh strawberries to buyers who in turn distributed them to roadside stands and farmers markets in Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Yamhill and Clatsop counties.

The last of the berries were sold Aug. 1, but health officials are worried that consumers might have stored some of them in the freezer or turned them into uncooked jam.

Anyone who bought strawberries from a stand north of Marion County and as far east as Clackamas County should throw them out. They were sold in unmarked containers without labels.

According to reports in The Oregonian, once it became apparent an outbreak was emerging, epidemiologists kicked into high gear, grilling patients on what they had eaten and where to find a common link. Many said they bought strawberries from a roadside stand.

Next, epidemiologists drove to homes to collect berries from freezers for testing. They quizzed roadside stands where patients had shopped. Those questions turned up Jaquith Strawberry Farm as the likely source of the contamination.

William Keene, senior epidemiologist with Oregon Public Health, suspects the source might be deer he saw roaming through the fields. Scientists took more than 100 soil and other samples from the farm this weekend and sent them to a lab outside Seattle for testing, hoping to confirm the source of E. coli O157:H7.

In the scramble to unravel an E. coli outbreak traced to strawberries, Oregon food safety experts have spent days poring over sales information.

Jaquith Strawberry Farm provided hand-written lists of buyers, sometimes first names only, to food safety specialists. Officials then worked the phones, calling all the people on the list. But the calls didn’t stop there. What they discovered is that the berries sometimes changed hands, traveling from buyer to farmers markets and then to consumers.

And sometimes farmers bought the berries and resold them as their own crop, a practice that is illegal.

"Apparently, it is more common than we thought," said Vance Bybee, head of food safety at Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Deer, like other ruminants, are the natural reservoirs for shiga-toxin producing E. coli like O157:H7 (that’s right, Food Inc. fans, it’s not just feedlot cattle). Deer were the suspected source in the 1996 E. coli O157:H7 in unpasteurized Odwalla juice that sickened 76 and killed a 16-month-old. Deer meat has also been involved in at least two recognized E. coli outbreaks.

My friend Jeff says the pickers should have noticed the deer poop, or at least been aware, and as another farmer friend would suggest, “shoot the f***ers.”

Jeff says agriculture is going backwards.

A table of strawberry-related outbreaks is available at http://bites.ksu.edu/strawberries-related-outbreaks. The overwhelming majority of these outbreaks are related to handling, not growing. But, stuff happens.
 

Can reindeer poop be considered a Gem for holiday ornaments?

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Yup, that’s Sorenne, attempting to pet a deer at Amy’s dad’s place in Missouri on Saturday (he raises deer). Amy says she made sure Sorenne didn’t touch her hands to her mouth and washed them thoroughly. I was in bed, bemoaning the state of my insides, but that’s another story.

There’s a lot of poop on a deer farm.

The Miller Park Zoo in Bloomington, Illinois, is once again recycling their reindeer poop into ornaments and necklaces. Or, as the zoo says,

“… elves have been busy making Magical Reindeer Gem Ornaments and Necklaces for this year’s holiday season, with the hope that the tradition of this magical story will continue. Each piece is handmade and includes one “Gem.” “Gems” are actual reindeer dung droppings from Miller Park Zoo’s reindeer. Before production begins, each “Gem” is dehydrated, sanitized in an autoclave machine, painted and drilled. These Gem pieces developed with a story from retired Miller Park Zoo Superintendent, John Tobias. Here is how the story goes…

John’s grandmother use to gather her grandchildren and take them outside on Christmas Eve to scatter home­made chocolate chips. She would tell the children that the chips would attract Santa and his reindeer to their home, because the reindeer would know that other reindeer had already visited and left droppings…

In order to continue this wonderful tradition, Miller Park Zoo has designed ornaments and necklaces using actual reindeer droppings. If you adorn your tree or wear this necklace on Christmas Eve, it will help Santa and his reindeer find their way to your home. Because each ornament is handmade, they vary in size, shape and color. Gem pieces are hand made by volunteers with all proceeds benefiting Miller Park Zoo.

Sounds fine, as long as there are no failures in the production process. There is a Huh? factor involved. The one ornament reminds me of Mr. Hankey, the Christmas poo, from TV’s South Park.
 

Girl almost dies from E. coli after helping dad slaughter deer

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Demonstrating once again that dangerous E. coli like O157:H7 exist in all ruminants, 7-year-old April Lambert of Beckley, West Virginia underwent a horrific yet typical encounter with E. coli as her kidneys shut down and doctors scrambled to save her life.

The Charleston Daily Mail reports that April’s father, Red, had shot a deer the Friday after Thanksgiving and she helped him skin it and prepare bigger cuts to send off to a local butcher, but Red cut the tenderloin himself.

April placed the pieces of meat into freezer bags, handling the meat with her hands.

The family and the doctors concluded that April likely hadn’t washed her hands afterward as well as she could have. In fact, April recalls she may have rinsed them and not used soap.

Dr. Amana Nasir, a West Virginia University pediatric gastroenterologist who was on the team that treated April in Charleston said she and fellow doctors have treated four similar cases traced to handling of deer meat, adding,

"Deer harbor infection – it’s estimated that 17 percent of the whitetail population harbors E.coli.”

The natural reservoirs for E. coli O157:H7 and other verotoxigenic E. coli is the intestines of all ruminants, including cattle — grass or grain-fed — sheep, goats, deer and elk.
 

If you bag a deer, don’t slaughter it in a restaurant kitchen

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The manager of Stromboli Pizza in Allentown says a customer saw one of the restaurant cooks carving up a deer Tuesday. John Okumus says the venison wasn’t intended for the store. He says he shot a doe during a hunt and left the carcass in the store’s kitchen for pickup by a friend.

Okumus says a customer complained to the city health department after seeing a cook mistakenly butcher the deer.

The department investigated the incident but did not issue a citation.

There are reasons animals are slaughtered in  slaughterhouses.  See the infosheet below.

Staff butchering deer leads to closure of Chinese restaurant

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“In general, you can’t have a dead animal in a food services establishment.”

That’s the advice from Erie County Health Commissioner Dr. Anthony J. Billittier IV after a dead deer was discovered being butchered in a restaurant.

The Buffalo News in New York reports the discovery was made after a tipster called the Health Department.

A health inspector was quickly sent to the restaurant, which was immediately closed. A hearing on the matter is expected to be held early next week.

Officials don’t know whether the dead deer at China King, 5999 South Park Ave., had been hunted or if it was road kill.


 

Summer sausage is tasty, maggots and all

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I grew up in a deer hunting family, and although my own deer hunting career started and ended when I was 13, I was so used to eating venison that beef tasted weird. I still remember one deer my family butchered at home, and my brother chased me around the house with an eyeball. We packaged and marked the cuts, but they stayed in our family freezer. Perhaps we had some guests over for dinner or gave some to a friend at church, but if anyone got sick, it was us.

In Omaha, apparently, things are run differently. Deer processor and poacher extraordinaire Jack McClanahan was finally put out of the summer sausage business.

According to the Omaha World-Herald McClanahan processed and sold tons of tainted summer sausage, much of it from poached deer. McClanahan told federal undercover agents that he sometimes shot deer at night with a rifle from the bathroom window of his home in Omaha’s Ponca Hills and then would retrieve the carcasses in the morning. He baited the deer with corn, used a spotlight to blind them, and then shot.

McClanahan is a retired butcher who sold summer sausage in 5-pound casings at $3.50 a pound. He also made salami, jerky and snack sticks, and authorities estimated annual production at about 10,000 pounds.

Mark Webb, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agent, said mouse droppings, maggots, deer carcasses, dried blood, deer hair and other contaminants littered the commercial-grade meat processing equipment that filled McClanahan’s three-car garage. There was no running water for cleaning. When wildlife agents seized the equipment and cleaned it with hot water and soap at a carwash, they discovered two lead bullets the size of a man’s thumb lodged in the grinder. The blade had been shaving lead into the meat.

The butcher-poacher was fined $10,000 and sentenced to three years of probation Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

My family and most deer hunters I have known have a strong conservationist ethic. I was raised to respect wildlife and have a deep appreciation for nature. McClanahan, and other poachers, are appalling, but making humans sick and putting their lives at risk with filthy processing conditions is even more disgusting.