E.Coli is a very deadly form of bacteria and it is particularly deadly to children. In recent weeks there has been a rash of outbreaks but there is no specific cause. There is some speculation on what caused it but no one is able to nail down the origins. There is a number of children in the hospital, please to check out the articles written on this outbreak.

Also there has been a documentary released on Netflix about this very issue. It’s worth a watch.

Without a doubt we are at a critical point with food safety and this is a public health crisis especially when the primary victims, children, are in the hospital. What has been becoming increasing clear is there is at the very least a time correlation between the new single use packaging policies and the outbreaks of E.coli.

So to get to the bottom of this I called the City of Edmonton and Health Services. In both cases I got management on the phone and they did not want to be identified for this article. I wanted to know what the city is doing about the fact the packaging of some food items are leaving stores and in particular fast food places with not enough packaging to protect the food. I knew from the documentary that food safety requires proper packaging as well. I knew there must be a connection, the City of Edmonton, brought up right away the concerns they had with what they called “Primary Packaging”. This was a new word on me. But basically any packaging used to protect the food is called “Primary Packaging”. They indicated that Health Services was contacted to get their perspective on single use packaging before the new single use packaging law was put into place. So the City Of Edmonton lays blame with Health Services for indicating there were few or no issues. When this was brought up to Health Services management, they were shocked. It would seem they did not expect to be directly blamed for any short comings in “Primary Packaging”. My concerns were if someone uses their own bag that bag could have E.Coli contamination, causing cross contamination. Furthermore fast food must be covered or risk E.coli contamination. When this was brought up to Health Services I could hear quiver in the voice of the person I was talking to. They had not considered the reasons for the recent outbreaks could be because of the change to the single use packaging policy. That this policy is causing some businesses to forgo primary packaging if the customer refuses to pay. This compromises the safety of the food and compromises public safety since E.coli has secondary infection potential.

I cannot believe this was not considered so I am writing this article which is far outside my wheel well to hopefully shine some light on this problem. People are dying of E.coli infection and in particular children. The environment is very important but should this be at the cost of human lives. This progress is going way too fast, we need to slow this down, work on new types of environmentally safe packaging that actually protects food from E.Coli and Salmonella. I just want to get his article out there so forgive the lack of editing. We need to do something now.

Edit:

I just wanted to add to this article the following information, this is from a government study on the very subject of primary packaging.

The most concerning part of the study was this finding, “Biodegradable packaging from biopolymers requires some water solubility to promote degradability. However, at the same time, hydrophilic property decreases mechanical and barrier properties.”

The issue is, substances that are more biodegradable, also make them less protective against bacteria like E. Coli.

What is clear from this study is that any legislation to improve biodegradable packaging must include a proposed solution standard and we can’t charge for that solution.