monanotlisa

Those methods might be ineffective: E. coli survives up to 70 C - which means that the quick cooking of tomatoes for a fresh pasta dressing might not be enough, and the peeling is more than likely to deposit some bacteria from the peel to the inner, just-exposed flesh of the vegetable.
As far as I know the only effective methodes are 1)employing copper (might be difficult/risky); 2)cleaning EVERYTHING EVER with sodium hypochlorite (kills everything, even at a fairly low concentration).

Here, many farmers are just waiting for E. coli to be found on apples to file for bankruptcy. :(

Those methods might be ineffective: E. coli survives up to 70 C - which means that the quick cooking of tomatoes for a fresh pasta dressing might not be enough,

I don't know, when I make pasta dressing the sauce cooks for about ten minutes anyway, which was said to be sufficient to kill the bug at 70 C. If I wanted to make extra sure, the warnings in mind, I'd just set my alarm clock.

Here, many farmers are just waiting for E. coli to be found on apples to file for bankruptcy. :(

Yeah, I know. The farmers in my area have been pretty desperate even before the EHEC scare. We barely had any rain in ages... must be over two months now. Terrible timing.

Or 3) not routinely feeding antibiotics, including 2nd and 3rd line antibiotics we need for human patients, on cows and chickens to allow us to raise them in appalling conditions.

But we've already crossed and burned that bridge.

I don't think that bridge is burned: the antibiotics are necessary (for economical purposes, I mean) in intensive/high density animal farming, vastly unnecessary if the animals are well kept and not cooped up.

My acquaintances with =/< of 15 cows say that they don't need to employ antibiotics except when there's an outbreak (vaccinations are, instead, routine), and that EU contributes encourage such (small-ish) stable sizes... :o

Well, yes. But as long as a significant portion of animal farming is done CAFO/battery farm style, they'll need to use antibiotics that way. And with all the MRSA and c. difficile and whatnot already unleashed, even if we stopped now, we'd still have to deal with the fallout.

I blame MRSA more to the free-handedness of antibiotics by&on humans than on animals. And that's a nasty beast of a habit that will be hard to change. ^_^;;
But yeah, agreed. Sadly. :(

I don't know about MRSA, but industrial agriculture shares in the blame for resistant e. colis:

That excessive exposure happens any time anyone takes antibiotics for a health problem for which they are inappropriate, such as colds or ear infections. It happens even more when low-dose antibiotics are deployed by the tonne in large-scale agriculture, without any surveillance to report back what bugs are emerging. Researchers in Spain and the US say there are links between large-scale agriculture and the emergence of ESBL: they have found bacteria harbouring that resistance in the meat of supermarket chickens.

Even if investigators identify the vegetables from which this outbreak may have originated, they may never be able to say how the resistant bacteria found their way on to the produce. In 2006, the US experienced a nationwide outbreak of E coli O157 in fresh spinach, and though investigators suspected manure from either livestock or feral pigs near the farms, they were never able to prove contamination occurred.

But we already know where the antibiotic resistance in this outbreak has come from – and given bacteria's promiscuous propensity to trade genetic material, we know that O104 is keeping that resistance going by harbouring it and handing it off to yet another species. It's past time that governments and health authorities do what they can to slow down the evolution of drug resistance, by curbing the antibiotic misuse that brings it into the world.

Of course, there's a lot more taking of antibiotics for colds in places (like India) where such prescriptions (even for the stronger antibiotics) are handed out like candy. But we seem to be curbing that use in the U.S., anyway. We probably create more problems with agriculture (and possibly with anti-bacterial hand soap, which is utterly unnecessary for civilians).