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Salad
©  2010  Rose George

Posted in Blog — 2nd February 2010

The US consumer magazine Consumer Reports finds that 39 percent of bagged salad tested contains far higher than recommended levels of total coliforms or enterococcus, common indicators of poor sanitation or faecal contamination. Nick Kristof just tweeted about this saying that “our food supply is a mess.” But I’d be curious to know how many of those salads were grown on fields fertilized with sewage sludge. Or even near fields fertilized with sewage sludge.

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The US EPA and waste industry are promoting the landspreading of Class B sewage sludge containing infectious human and animal prions on grazing lands, hay fields, and dairy pastures. This puts livestock and wildlife at risk of infection. They ingest large quantities of dirt and top dressed sludge with their fodder.

Prion infected Class A sludge “biosolids” compost is spread in parks, playgrounds, home lawns, flower and vegetable gardens – putting humans, family pets, and children with their undeveloped immune systems and hand-to-mouth “eat dirt” behavior at risk. University of Wisconsin prion researchers, working with $100,000 EPA grant and a $5 million Dept. of Defense grant, have found that prions become 680 times more infectious in certain types of soil. Prions can survive for over 3 years in soils. And human prions are 100,000 times more difficult to inactivate than animal prions

Recently, researchers at UC Santa Cruz, and elsewhere, announced that Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a prion disease. “Prion” = proteinaceous infectious particle which causes always fatal TSEs (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies) in humans and animals including BSE (Mad Cow Disease), scrapie in sheep and goats, and Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, elk and moose. Human prion diseases are AD and CJD (Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease,) and other rarer maladies. Infectious prions have been found in human and animal muscle tissue including heart, saliva, blood, urine, feces and many other organs.

Alzheimer’s rates are soaring as Babyboomers age – there are now over 5.3 million AD victims in US shedding infectious prions in their blood, urine and feces, into public sewers. This Alzheimer’s epidemic has almost 500,000 new victims each year. No sewage treatment process inactivates prions – they are practically indestructible. The wastewater treatment process reconcentrates the infectious prions in the sewage sludge.

Quotes from Dr. Joel Pedersen, Univ. of Wisconsin, on his prion research:


Our results suggest that if prions were to enter municipal waste water treatment systems, most of the agent would partition to activated sludge solids, survive mesophilic anaerobic digestion, and be present in
treated biosolids. Land application of biosolids containing prions could represent a route for their unintentional introduction into the environment. Our results argue for excluding inputs of prions to municipal wastewater treatment.”

“Prions could end up in wastewater treatment plants via slaughterhouse drains, hunted game cleaned in a sink, or humans with vCJD shedding prions in their urine or faeces, Pedersen says”
(Note – This UW research was conducted BEFORE UCSC scientists determined that Alzheimer’s Disease is another prion disease which may be shedding infectious prions into public sewers and Class B and Class A sludge “biosolids.)

Helane Shields, Alton, NH 03809

http://www.sludgevictims.com/pathgens/prions-composting.html

http://www.sludgevictims.com/pathogens/prion.html

• Posted by Helane Shields at 4:22 pm on Feb 2nd, 2010

A reply from the EPA about the salad issue, sent to Ned Beecher of NEBRA (Northeast Biosolids and Residuals Association), posted with Ned’s permission:

“There is no lettuce or other green vegetables for human consumption being grown on biosolids in Arizona, California, Hawaii, or Nevada (except perhaps for a tiny amount of compost purchased by individuals for use in their own back yards).
>>
About 1/4 of biosolids in Region 9 is composted, and the final destination of
the compost is not always tracked, but the vast majority of the compost is
used for landscaping, golf courses, erosion control, and growing feed and
fiber crops. No biosolids compost is provided on a commercial scale for
growing food crops, except for a very small amount used for fruit trees.
>>
Manure is used on some crops for human consumption throughout Region 9, as is
wastewater effluent. I’m not sure what % of human consumption crops receive these.”
>>

• Posted by rosegeorge at 6:16 pm on Feb 3rd, 2010
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