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Go ahead, eat your veggies

Despite the recent E. coli outbreak, our food supply is safe.

When I ordered my favorite salad recently and the waiter told me spinach wasn't being served, I realized how seriously our government takes threats to the public's health. After all, the outbreak of E. coli that was the source of the problem came from California, yet its ripple had affected my dinner in Texas.

The E. coli scare shows how our public health system works. Three federal agencies work together to keep the food supply safe: the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC works with laboratories and scientists nationwide to detect early signs of outbreaks. When a pattern of illness is identified in an area, researchers converge on the location to look for common threads that may lead them to the source. Labs work quickly to isolate and confirm the specific bug once a source is found.

When CDC workers isolate a pathogen, they alert their colleagues at the FDA. If the source of the problem stems from meat, poultry or certain egg products, then the USDA gets the call. Once involved, these agencies launch a campaign to minimize the outbreak's effect on the health of those in the area. They also calculate where the organism will spread next so they can minimize the effect on citizens elsewhere. This system is what allowed us to nip the spinach scare in the bud.

In addition to containing problems once they've occurred, these agencies work to keep outbreaks from ever happening. Through their work with individuals and groups in agriculture, they can avert problems before they ever occur. They offer guidance and expertise to those in the agricultural industry who work with produce that can become contaminated, such as cantaloupes, tomatoes, leafy greens (including lettuce), green onions and herbs.

The FDA and USDA also are involved in research that's designed to help better understand how food-borne illnesses are spread, what factors increase the odds of contamination of the food and water supplies, and what technologies and strategies work best to reduce the human cost. We're all the beneficiaries of the work that these government scientists have done for the past several decades.

Keeping our nation's produce supply clean is a tricky business. Many of us like to eat our fresh fruits and vegetables raw. And considering that they're grown outdoors, fertilized with manure and harvested with dirt-laden equipment, it's amazing we don't have more outbreaks of food-borne illnesses.

Thanks to the efforts of the CDC, FDA and USDA, our food supply is among the safest on Earth, and, if a problem arises, they're on top of it.

Even if that means I'll occasionally miss my favorite spinach salad.

Tedd Mitchell, M.D., president and medical director of Dallas' Cooper Clinic, writes HealthSmart every week.