Eighty Percent Of Cities Studied In Developing Nations Use Untreated Wastewater For Irrigation: And FDA Is Surprised About Salmonella Contaminated Peppers
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 08.28.08
Jalapeno Peppers and Salmonella: What's the Root Cause?
US print media continue to mince words about the summer-long, Mexican peppers linked, salmonella outbreak. What makes the general reluctance to 'tell it like it is' especially galling is that everyone knows it is best not to drink the tap water in Mexico. This is not some politically incorrect condescension: every tourist book warns visitors to avoid the water and salad greens or unpeeled fruits and vegetables because they might be 'washed' with contaminated water. Washington Post documented the facts about the recent Salmonella outbreak - and the bureaucratic (FDA) reaction. Mexican peppers posed problem before outbreak
Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last week that they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers had not been spotted as a problem before. But an Associated Press analysis of FDA records found that peppers and chilies were consistently the top Mexican crop rejected by border inspectors for the last year.Since January alone, 88 shipments of fresh and dried chilies were turned away. Ten percent were contaminated with salmonella. In the last year, 8 percent of the 158 intercepted shipments of fresh and dried chilies had salmonella.
It is not just a food quality issue for US citizens. Mexicans suffer disproportionately from water borne disease. Sometimes the root cause is failed wastewater treatment, as in this case: Water-borne transmission of chloramphenicol-resistant salmonella typhi in Mexico. From the summary:
In mid 1972 an outbreak of typhoid due to a chloramfenicol resistant strain of Salmonella typhi occurred in a small village in central Mexico. 83 cases were recorded, with 6 deaths. The highest attack-rates were for the age-groups 1-14 and 45 and above. Most patients lived in an area of the village with the highest population density and the lowest income levels, close to an irrigation canal which traverses the village.
One outbreak is not a trend, of course, but the irrigation canal is the substantive point.
Here's the overview. The Mexico Secretariat Of Health reported in Children’s Health and the Environment in North America - A First Report on Available Indicators and Measures Country Report: Mexico, that:
Diarrheic illnesses persist as a serious problem among the child population. These diseases are transmitted by contaminated food and by drinking water. Data from 2003 indicate that 95 percent of drinking water is disinfected, although in that year, 17 percent of the population did not have water of appropriate bacteriological quality. Although national sewer system coverage and access to drinking water have increased significantly over the last 20 years, in 2000, one of every four inhabitants lacked sewer system access and one in ten lacked household potable water. In rural areas, the lack of access to both services continues to be a major problem.US FDA Act Surprised about Peppers and Salmonella
US FDA food safety experts act surprised that crops grown in Mexico are occasionally contaminated with salmonella bacteria? They shouldn't be surprised at all. When protracted drought strikes, as it certainly has in Northern Mexico, farmers can be expected to use the water resources available to them: wastewater discharges tend to have steadier flows than natural streams, under drought conditions. There is a strong potential for use of untreated wastewater for irrigation.
Many of the major cities in developing countries are using untreated or partially treated wastewater to irrigate nearby farmland, according to the International Water Management Institute (IWMI)...Wastewater, mainly produced in cities, is directly used to solve the shortage of irrigation water in many developing countries. The IWMI says that wastewater irrigation occurs on around 20 million hectares of farmland across the developing world.Via::SciDev.net, Wastewater 'widely used' in urban agriculture, report findsThe authors of the report surveyed 53 cities across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. They found that over 80 per cent of the cities studied used untreated or partially treated wastewater for agriculture.
International Water Management Institute (WMI) has positive designs for managing wastewater to make it safe for irrigation. See the report Recycling Realities: Managing health risks to make wastewater an asset here for details (pdf file download).
Reality Check Vacation For FDA Bureaucrats and Reporters
A field trip might clear things up about the import pepper patch. Let's send a delegation of FDA "food experts" and newspaper "food reporters" on all-expense-paid-trips to rural Mexican farm country to observe some produce exporting farms. Taxpayers might benefit if they foot the travel bill for this road trip on the condition that the "experts" drink only unfiltered tap water and eat a salad every day. Those able to return to their jobs immediately afterward can keep their positions.
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Ridiculously bad reporting all around. So there were 16 shipments of peppers from Mexico found to be contaminated with salmonella last year. What on Earth does that mean? Without knowing how many shipments were inspected, that number has absolutely no meaning.
And 80% of cities in the developing world used waste water irrigation? What, again, does that mean? Someone in the city used waste water irrigation? Everyone uses it? Either way, it's not clear at all that it has any bearing on the discussion. It stands to reason that produce grown for export, which will undergo inspection, will likely be grown using different techniques than produce destined for the corner market in small town Mexico.
Looking for numbers which actually tell me something, I see that the study apparently estimated that "wastewater irrigation occurs on around 20 million hectares of farmland across the developing world." How much farmland is there in the developing world? Apparently China says they have around 120 million hectares. Assuming they have a third of the developing world's farmland (which seems reasonable since they apparently have a relatively low amount of farmland per capita), that works out to 360 million hectares of total farmland in the developing world. This means wastewater irrigation would be used on 5% of the total farmland in the developing world. That doesn't sound quite as exciting as "80%!!!" though, does it.
They're just following Albert Howard's Law of Return, a practice still used in organic farming today.
If you prepare your produce properly, via washing and/or cooking, you have nothing to worry about. Maybe we should applaud them for not sending their sewage out to see.
==== author's response follows ====
Because this is a health issue, I would like to point out the contrary view. It is generally rather ineffective to wash all pathogens off of rough surfaces of greens, even with triple rinse.
Virus are not touched by any chemical additive you are going to be rinsing food with.
Rinsing with contaminated water, of course, is worse than ineffective, it is dangerous. The packing houses in Mexico are using what to rinse with???
People are so used to eating produce unwashed or poorly washed produce that convincing them to do otherwise is like getting them to always wear seat belts or shut the lights off -takes years to reinforce the needed behavior changes.
Finally, if a produce item has been washed with contaminated water and then coated with a carnuba wax or shellac mixture to reduce dessication (often done to veggies and apples), the pathogens are un-washable.
The post should have mentioned that there are labor intensive ( relatively low expense in Mexico ) land intensive based processes to clean the water so that it would be safe for farmland irrigation.