We've all heard about hamburger disease and we all know to cook chicken well to avoid salmonella. But now hamburger disease has been found in lettuce, and salmonella in cereal. There have been serious food poisoning outbreaks caused by strawberries, apple juice, cantaloupe, and alfalfa sprouts. And in early 1998, the processed cheese in JM Schneider Lunchmates infected hundreds of Canadian children with salmonella.

It's a frightening trend. Health Canada statistics show that, in 1981, the number of Canadians who fell ill with E. coli, salmonella and a related disease called Camplobacter was 9,463. By 1996, that figure had doubled to 18,750 for just those three illnesses.

But those numbers could be much higher. Just last week, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States, using a new, more detailed reporting system, estimated that eight million Americans got food poisoning last year. Using a widely-accepted statistical formula, that could mean the number of cases in Canada is in the hundreds of thousands.

David Waltner Toews

"The numbers of foodborne diseases in Canada, as in other countries, are vastly under-reported," says David Waltner Toews, an agricultural research scientist in Guelph who specializes in food and salmonella disease. "And for some reason or other, Canada and Scotland appear to have the highest rates of this disease in the world. It appears in the food chain at this particular time in history for some reason, because we have created the conditions under which this organism can thrive."

But what are those conditions? We live in an age that boasts modern technology and high standards of sanitation, so why this increase in foodborne illness?

Factory farms

Many experts point to what's happening on our farms. Today, many farm animals spend their entire lives locked in tiny pens or cages. In huge barns, tens of thousands of animals are crowded together under heavy stress and in filthy conditions. Many eat in the same cages where they defecate. These are so-called "factory farms." They're geared to mass production, but they can also breed disease.

Gail Eisnitz, of Montana, has spent years investigating the meat production industry. She's done much of her work undercover, on behalf of the Humane Farming Association.

Gail Eisnitz

"If people aren't going to be thinking too much about the way animals are treated for the animals' sake," she says, "then they sure as heck better be thinking about the way the animals are treated for their own sake. Because animals raised under these conditions become extremely susceptible to disease spread, because their immune systems are so compromised."

Poultry

Earlier this year, a survey commissioned by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found that 45 percent of store-bought chickens have Salmonella. What's more, salmonella-contamination of chicken eggs is also on the rise. Few Canadians realize just how potentially dangerous their eggs have become.

Nichols Fox is an expert on food disease. She lives in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Nichols Fox

We have an epidemic here," she says. "Not just an epidemic, but a pandemic. All over the world, eggs are now periodically contaminated with salmonella."

Both the US and Canadian governments have issued warnings: you should not eat eggs unless they're thoroughly cooked. That rules out soft-boiled eggs, lightly-cooked eggs, eggs over-easy, and any dressing made with raw eggs.

"That," Fox says, "makes each egg potentially like playing Russian Roulette if you eat it undercooked. Now, to me, this is a tragedy. It's a terrible thing, because it didn't need to happen."

Beef and pork

Chickens and their eggs aren't the only cause for concern. The way cattle and hogs are handled, both before and after slaughter, is also raising eyebrows.

Cattle eat their last meals before slaughter in feeding grounds called "finishing lots." The animals walk around and rest in their own muck and by the time they leave for the slaughterhouse, they're often very dirty.

We spoke to one southern Alberta man who has worked as a cattle hauler, trucking beef to slaughterhouses. To protect his livelihood, he's asked Marketplace to conceal his identity.

"I have had manure in the bottom of my trailer a foot deep at some times." Alberta cattle hauler

"I have had manure in the bottom of my trailer a foot deep at some times," he says, "basically all through the trailer. It's just covered." And when cattle arrived at the slaughterhouse, they would often be covered in manure "right up to their bellies." That's routine in Canada, he says.

The U.S., however, has much tougher standards. Trucks heading south of the border, he says, have to be "top-of-the-line clean."

Here, "we get away with a lot of stuff."

Slaughterhouses

Over the past 15 years, the facilities where livestock are slaughtered and processed have changed dramatically. They're bigger than ever, and they produce a lot of meat at very high speed.

"As the line speed increases," Gail Eisnitz says, "it's more and more difficult for the worker to do his job properly. They can't necessarily cut the feces away that they should, if it's on the carcass. Once you have feces on a product, you know you're in trouble, because that's where contamination occurs."

One woman agrees. She's recently worked as a meat plant employee in Alberta and says that, with fast line speeds, contamination gets through. She's asked Marketplace to conceal her identity.

This woman worked as a meat plant employee and says that, with fast line speeds, contamination gets through

On the line, she says, "there would be fresh manure and it would all have to be cut off. Sometimes there might be lots left, because you had probably 20 seconds to do two sides of beef. So you had to be fast. And if you weren't fast enough, if you had problems on one side of the beef, the second side might not have got as clean."

To people suggesting that any contamination let through under those circumstances is the employee's fault, the woman is blunt: "Maybe they should slow their line down, so that we could do our job properly. They're pushing too hard to get this beef through."

Bacteria

The problem is bigger than line speed, however. Even when a worker has enough time to cut feces off meat, bacteria can remain. These invisible microbes can cross-contaminate and multiply on almost anything. And when the contamination gets through to the consumer, the consequences can be horrific.

This is because a new strain of E. coli has developed -- one that originates in animal manure. It's called E. coli 0157.

Eileen and Jim Mattson

Eileen and Jim Mattson almost lost their young daughter Holly to E. coli 0157. It wasn't anything Holly ate that caused her illness. As her father recalls, it was simply handling a package of hamburger meat in a supermarket.

"Well," Jim Mattson says, "I remember being caught in the crowd and looking up at her on the end of the cart, running her finger along the seal on a package of ground beef and licking it. And I remember chewing her out for it, just as any parent would. 'Don't do that! You could get sick!'"

"It really happened so fast," Eileen recalls, "because first for one day, it looked like stomach flu. And then a day later, the diarrhea turned to blood. I think the worst moment for me was when I came and saw that she couldn't move anymore, that her kidneys had failed, and she could no longer sit up. And I saw her trying to breathe, and she couldn't take those breaths, and that was really scary to me."

E. coli 0157 attacked not only Holly's lungs and kidneys, but her heart as well. She had five heart attacks, and required two hours of continuous CPR.

"It was something of a miracle," says Dr. Gary Cornell, Holly's cardiologist. "This case was really one of the most extraordinary of my whole career. Holly was dying before our eyes and we didn't know, really, if there was any possibility of saving her."

Holly beat the odds, but few children survive such advanced attacks of what is now popularly called "hamburger disease."

Mary Heersink almost lost a child to E. coli 0157, too. In the time since her son Damien's illness, she's become a leading advocate for food safety and founded an influential lobby group called STOP (Safe Tables Our Priority). Her message? be wary of this microbe.

Mary Heersink almost lost a child to E. coli 0157

"This is a new variant strain," she says. "It is a strain of E. coli which has picked up some very nasty habits. For one, the toxins that it produces are some of the most dangerous biological substances known to man. They are now a biohazard level three in European laboratories. They are on the level of rabies and anthrax.

"It's now become the leading cause of kidney failure in North American children. It is killing, on average, in the United States, one child a day. Up to 500 deaths a year."

Lines of defence

Dr. John Bradley is a veterinarian in Lethbridge, Alberta. Until three years ago, he also worked as a senior meat inspector in a number of packing plants. He's retired now, but he still keeps in contact with his colleagues in the industry. And he says that today's inspectors have little authority to correct problems on the line.

Dr. John Bradley

"Nowadays," he says, "with the huge international companies, they carry an awful lot more weight. And it's more difficult for the inspector on the floor to make them comply, first of all, with the regulations. And even if they do, to get the government, in terms of supervisory upper management, to support them in the action that they are taking at the plant."

Dr. Robert Charlebois is a senior manager with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, an organization launched two years ago to consolidate inspection under one roof. The agency reports directly to the Minister of Agriculture.

Dr. Robert Charlebois

Charlebois says Canadians should feel confident that Ottawa is doing its job. "We have, in Canada," he says, "one of the safest meat inspection systems in the world."

He also says the way plants deal with problems on the line is to slow down production. When told that Marketplace had spoken with plant workers who say the lines don't slow down, he declined specific comment.

"I wasn't there when you interviewed those persons but, really, that's what we have as a program. What we're asking the people to do. And we have people that are in the plants to verify that."

John Bradley isn't convinced. "In the old traditional way on inspection, 34, 35, 40 animals an hour was quite a high speed. Whereas now, there are over 300, and sometimes, in the States, over 400 carcasses an hour going past any particular point. And for a person to be able to catch anything on line is getting to be virtually impossible."

Mary Heersink is even more blunt.

"This industry chants it like a mantra," she says. "'Safest meat supply in the world, safest meat supply in the world.' It is absolutely without foundation."

The Canadian Meat Council, which represents packing plants, didn't respond to requests for an interview.

Pasteurization

Meat packing plants do take steps to safeguard meat; one of the most effective, steam pasteurization of carcasses, is supposed to kill 99.9 percent of bacteria. But pasteurization occurs in the middle of the packing process, not at the end.

A study done by Health Canada in 1997 confirmed that recontamination occurs after pasteurization. And some high bacterial counts were found on finished cuts of meat.

Other foods

It's not just meat. People can also get sick from eating contaminated fruits and vegetables. Here's how that happens:

Pathogens like E. coli 0157 can survive for some time in animal manure. That same manure can be used to fertilize crops. And studies have shown that fecal contamination also leaches into irrigation canals.

"We have had several outbreaks now in North America," says David Waltner Toews, "related to fresh foods -- things like iceberg lettuce, things like fresh strawberries -- where it's believed that the water which was used to irrigate these crops was contaminated."

The consequences of fresh-food contamination can be just as horrible as those associated with bad meat; a girl in Connecticut lost some of her sight and sustained permanent brain damage after eating lettuce contaminated with E. coli 0157.

Protecting ourselves

The first step we should all take is, as Nichols Fox says, "to treat all meat as if it were potentially contaminated, because it probably is. This means we have to avoid cross-contaminating anything in the kitchen. You should have two cutting boards: one that you use for raw meats, one that you use for vegetables. Don't confuse them. They should be washed thoroughly in hot, soapy water after they're used, and allowed to air dry."

Those personal-safety measures aside, Fox says, a safer food system is up to consumers. "In Scandinavia, when consumers found out how contaminated their chickens were, they stopped buying them. Consumption dropped at once by 40 per cent. The industry responded, and now produces salmonella-free chicken so you can buy that in a grocery store, clearly marked. It's going to be our demands for safer food that's going to drive government, that's going to drive producers to do a better job."

"In some countries, like the Netherlands," Toews concludes, "they have already begun limiting the size of, for instance, hog operations. So it is possible, in fact, to reverse some of these changes, if the political will is there."