U.S. Food Safety: Home-Grown Problems Abound

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But the types of outbreaks are now far more varied, due, in large part, to Americans' growing appetite for more raw fruits and vegetables, which can harbor dangerous bacteria.

Outbreaks of Listeria, a bacterium found in raw foods, have declined, while incidents of salmonella infection have stayed relatively flat. But infection with E. coli 0157:57, the dangerous bacteria that can show up in undercooked ground beef as well as dairy and vegetable products, which dropped dramatically in 2003 and 2004, is rising again -- and it's showing up in unexpected foods, such as spinach.

Fresh Produce Now the Focus

"One of the big issues of the day is fresh produce," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, in Griffin. "Produce is where the action has been in the last few years, and there are a lot of reasons for it. One is a greater interest by consumers in eating fresh foods uncooked, and cooking serves a very important purpose of killing harmful bacteria."

"We've been consuming more produce, which is a good thing from a nutritional standpoint," he added. "But along with that, there have been issues with harmful microbes being present."

The cause of the E. coli outbreak in spinach that swept the nation in 2006 was never determined. However, the episode provided a glimpse into what can and does go wrong.

Increasingly today, produce is grown in fields close to cattle and, sometimes, wild animals. The E. coli spinach contamination could have come from cattle or boar feces, or from contaminated irrigation systems, federal officials concluded.

The widening of E. coli cases from protein products to fresh fruits and vegetables is related to "the fact that U.S. agricultural commodities tend to be grown in areas that have cattle, which are reservoirs for bacteria," explained Bruce Clark, a partner in the Seattle law firm of Marler Clark, which represents victims of food poisoning. "As soon as you have manure on the ground, and you have birds and wild animals and water, you have all these vectors for transferring bacteria to fresh fruits and vegetables."