The recent E. coli outbreak that killed three people in Wisconsin, Nebraska and Idaho and also seriously sickened 200 people in 26 states and Canada was traced to packaged spinach that was grown on a farm located close to a cattle ranch in California. The same strain of deadly E. coli found on the spinach was also found in manure droppings of cattle on the ranch, which illustrates what scientists have known for many years - intestinal bacteria living in cattle without harming the host animals (and in their manure) can be deadly pathogens if they get into humans.

The present California outbreak may have been due to spinach irrigation water pumped from an aquifer that had been contaminated by seepage from the ranch, or due to wild pigs roaming through the cattle manure and then into the spinach fields, or the contamination could have occurred at the packaging plant.

This epidemic has led food scientists to re-examine the relative hazards of different methods of growing foods, - on produce and dairy farms, and on ranches. The results may surprise you as they did me.

I am not a food scientist, but I had considered natural or organic agricultural methods to be better, safer and healthier than ordinary conventional methods of growing foods, but this is not always the case. Organic foods are grown without using synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fungicides unless a pestilent plague or outbreak of disease is imminent - and in such cases, only enough undesirable substances are used to control the problem (not to eradicate it, which would take far larger applications or doses).

Inasmuch as the simplest life cycle involving plants (producers via photosynthesis), animals (consumers, herbivores and carnivores) and fungi plus bacteria (converters plus decomposers that formed natural fertilizers for plants) had existed on Earth for more than a billion years before synthetic fertilizers were first made in the early 20th century by Fritz Haber (who received a Nobel Prize for discovering how to create nitrate fertilizers out of elemental atmosphere nitrogen and oxygen), I was convinced that evolution would have resulted in natural organic fertilizers such as manure (animal feces) and rotted vegetation (plant tissue) being superior to synthetic fertilizer. But I was wrong.

Research conducted by British and American scientists has shown that organic fertilizers like manure cause more dangerous harmful diseases than synthetic ones. Although E. coli is usually a harmless intestinal bacteria in humans and other animals, a new lethal mutant strain, e. coli 0157:HR, now causes 73,000 infections and 60 deaths annually in America. The US Food and Drug Administration had for weeks before the fatal outbreak expressed concern that cattle were being kept too close to spinach fields in California, but the federal agency didn't do anything such as ordering the cattle to be kept farther away from the growing crops - which might have prevented the outbreak.

Why do federal agencies always lock the garage doors after the car has been stolen? To protect your family, you might avoid packaged vegetables or even spinach itself (cooking may not kill possibly heat-resistant e. coli mutant strains) until California and New York health departments say the danger is past.