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And you thought you might be eating healthy!


And you thought that the food processing companies are getting their acts together - and that you are now eating healthy!    Think again!

"Back in August 2011, the agribusiness giant Cargill recalled a stunning 36 million pounds of ground turkey tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella that had come from a single processing facility in Arkansas, a failure that eventually sickened 136 people and killed another. The company shut down the plant, tweaked its process (mainly by adding to and "intensifying" its system of spraying meat with antimicrobial fluid), and quickly reopened it. Within a month, the company had to recall another 108,000 pounds of ground turkey from the same plant, because it was infected with the same strain of superbug salmonella.

Have things gotten any cleaner in the world of Big Turkey since those events? Cargill says it has cleaned up its act, but recent research suggests that ground turkey still has an antibiotic-resistant-pathogen problem. The latest evidence comes from Consumer Reports, which has just published the results of testing it did on 257 samples of ground turkey picked up from retailers around the country, produced by a variety of processors, including Cargill."

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"Even so, the results of Consumer Reports' tests won't make you eager to order that next turkey burger: "More than half of the packages of raw ground meat and patties tested positive for fecal bacteria."

Overall, 90 percent of the samples tested by CR researchers carried at least one of the five bacteria they looked for—and "almost all" of the bacteria strains they found showed resistance to at least one antibiotic. The two fecal-related bacteria strains—enterococcus and E. coli—showed up the most frequently".

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