@Merriment
I wasn’t questioning your motives but there’s a long history in this country especially where major public relations are at stake to blame something on a dis-empowered minority with little likelihood to create a backlash. The desired result which would be to remove culpability from the business owner. What lawyers like to do, (sorry another unfortunate pun) is throw out a ton of shit at the wall in the form of accusations and hope that some of it sticks. The farm will incur lawsuits but they may be less if they can claim that they couldn’t have prevented it.
I wasn’t saying that your intent was in question.
But in this case the trace can be found on neighboring farms which were no doubt assaulted with a barrage of lawsuits.
From the New York Times Op Ed Contributor Nina Planck, September 2, 2006
First, some basic facts about this usually harmless bacterium: E. coli is abundant in the digestive systems of healthy cattle and humans, and if your potato salad happened to be carrying the average E. coli, the acid in your gut is usually enough to kill it.
But the villain in this outbreak, E. coli O157:H7, is far scarier, at least for humans. Your stomach juices are not strong enough to kill this acid-loving bacterium, which is why it’s more likely than other members of the E. coli family to produce abdominal cramps, diarrhea, fever and, in rare cases, fatal kidney failure.
Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? It’s not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms.