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WEDNESDAY, Oct. 11 (HealthDay News) -- American consumers have been confronted with a veritable conveyor belt of food-safety concerns in recent weeks.
Despite headlines covering everything from tainted spinach to contaminated carrot juice, health experts don't think these developments represent a breakdown of the nation's food-safety system.
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On Sunday, a California company announced the recall of 8,500 packages of lettuce in western states after discovering that water used to irrigate the produce contained E. coli bacteria. On Tuesday, however, company officials said that tests revealed the variety of the germ discovered poses no health risks.
On Friday, an Iowa company recalled about 5,200 pounds of ground-beef products because the meat might be contaminated with the life-threatening 0157:H7 strain of E. coli.
While no illnesses have been linked to either of these recalls, at least four people in the United States and Canada are thought to have been poisoned by botulism in recent days from bottled carrot juice produced by California-based Bolthouse Farms.
All this followed the weeks-long E. coli 0157:H7 scare that surfaced in mid-September and sickened nearly 200 people in 26 states, leaving three others dead. The bacterial outbreak was traced to contaminated spinach produced in the same Salinas Valley region of California as the recalled lettuce.
While experts say the nation's system of growing and distributing food products remains reasonably safe, they do add there are measures that government, industry and consumers can take to minimize the risk from eating foods -- particularly uncooked fresh foods.
"I don't think these occurrences are more frequent than in the past," said Dr. Pascal James Imperato, chairman of the department of preventive medicine and community health at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in New York City. "I just think they're more easy to detect."
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