Washington - By letting cows munch on hay instead of the grain, the risk of people getting sick from E. coli-tainted beef may be dramatically reduced.
The Agriculture Department at Cornell University, has concluded that the way farmers fatten up cows actually makes E. coli bacteria strong enough to sicken humans.
The solution may be to feed cows hay instead of grain for five days before they are slaughtered, said USDA microbiologist James Russell.
E. coli is a common bacterium that lives in the digestive tracts of humans and animals. Some E. coli strains sicken people; one strain - E. coli O157 - is highly toxic, causing bloody diarrhea and severe cramps in an estimated 20,000 Americans each year and killing several hundred.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate E. coli 0157 sickens up to 20,000 Americans each year, killing several hundred.
E. coli can get into beef during slaughter, from contamination with cattle feces. Thorough cooking, especially of hamburger, kills E. coli, but outbreaks from undercooked meat or poor kitchen sanitation increasingly make headlines. Just last year, E. coli prompted the nation's largest meat recall - 25 million pounds of ground beef.
Russell's research for the first time shows that a cow's diet largely determines how bad a strain of E. coli is for people who eat bacteria-tainted beef.
Feeding cows grain fattens cattle quicker, so the beef is more tender. But because cows do not digest starch well, it increases acidity in the cows' colons, where E. coli lurks.
Russell found that this cow diet change after World War II let E. coli adapt to acidic conditions - enough so that the germs can survive the typical two hours that a person's meal sloshes around in the stomach's highly acidic juices and then move down to infect that person's intestines.
Hay, in contrast, does not increase a cow's acid levels, so E. coli from cows eating hay can be easily destroyed in acid like that in the human stomach.
The beef industry welcomed the news as a "major breakthrough," in the words of Gary Cowman, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association's quality assurance chief.
None of Cornell's cows actually harbored the super-toxic E. coli O157. So Russell tested that strain in the laboratory, and found it behaved the same as other E. coli strains. Buchanan said the hay diet should be tested in cows infected with the super-bacteria.
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