Salinas Holds E. Coli Summit

Grass roots city council action! Shouting and microphones and lines being drawn! Charts! Counties and their issues! Here's KCBS with the report:

"Salinas, CA (KCBS) -- On Friday more than 70 lawmakers, health officials and members of the Agriculture community met in Salinas to discuss ways to avoid future E-coli outbreaks.

The summit was organized by Rep. Sam Farr, (D) of Carmel, and held at the Monterey County Agriculture Office who urged the audience to keep making improvements in food safety regardless of the recent spinach E. coli setback.

After months of investigations, the tainted spinach that killed three people, and sickened more than 200 has been pinpointed to wild pigs that entered a local spinach farm after trampling a surrounding fence.

Now that the outbreak has a culprit, Farr believes the next step in the process is to get federal money for more research into E. coli and other health issues. The research is projected to take somewhere between four to five years, and will offer important insight into better farming practices.

"E-coli is very hard to detect in the Salinas Valley region and so we decided there needed to be some solid separation between the animals and fields. We do a pretty good job of it now but we’re got to do a better," Farr told KCBS’s Melissa Culross."

-------------------------------------

Just more proof of my assumption that nothing ever gets done until local government gets involved. Federal policy has teeth like a newborn.