By the Numbers

—How serious was the recent dioxin contamination of Belgian’s poultry industry? The two chickens, whose testing set off the international recall of Belgian dairy products, were found to contain 958 and 775 parts per trillion of dioxin in their fat, and one had 400 parts per million of PCBs—400 times the Dutch limit for food. Estimates are that, given the Belgian diet, if all chickens and eggs in the effected area contained 900 parts per trillion of Dioxin in their fat, the local population would have consumed 40 times the World Health Organization’s recommended daily limit of 1 picogram per kilogram of body weight.

—Meanwhile, the contamination was traced to an 80-ton batch of fat which was sold to 12 feed manufacturers—who subsequently made 1600 tons of feed, enough to feed 16 million chickens a day. The feed, which was found to contain dioxins in excess of 1500 times the legal limit, was distributed to 475 poultry farms, 150 cattle farms, and 550 pig export-oriented farms.

—The cost to Belgian's food industry: a minimum of 50 billion Belgian francs ($154 billion).

—Researchers attending the recent general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Chicago released findings from a study showing that nearly 40 percent of bacteria found in streams in rural Dubuque County, Iowa are resistant to numerous antibiotics, suggesting that persons who might become infected with any of these bacteria could have difficulty being treated for the illness. “Further analysis of these tetracycline-resistant bacterial colonies,” claimed John Bennett, assistant professor of microbiology at Dubuque’s Clarke College, “demonstrated that greater than 80 percent are resistant to more than one antibiotic, and some were resistant to five.” Bennett’s group reportedly collected water samples from 95 percent of the permanent streams in Dubuque County.

—According to a study on the effectiveness of warnings on recalled food conducted in Georgia by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), when a nationwide outbreak of foodborne illness forced the recall of Salmonella-tainted ice cream in 1994, the media and public health officials did a less than adequate job alerting the public to the dangers. The study, published in the January 1999 issue of The American Journal of Public Health, found that despite a flurry of media reports on the issue, only 6 percent of the news reports included the fact that the recalled food should not be eaten. As a possible result, 16 percent of all reported illnesses in the area (an estimated 11,000 people) occurred after the warnings were issued. The study also found that, when asked, 250 randomly selected Georgia customers of the recalled product admitted that after first hearing the warning, 36 percent said they did not understand that the recalled ice cream should not be eaten; in 31 percent of the households who had the product and heard the warning, someone ate the ice cream anyway; and 26 percent of the people who said they ate the ice cream reported they had become sick with diarrhea.