Found this article on "InfoPlease" and got me to wondering.
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Where Does It Come From?
E. coli lives in the intestines of cattle, chicken, deer, sheep, and pigs. Animals are just carriers—E. coli doesn't make them sick. The use of untreated animal manure as fertilizer is a common route of transmission for the bacterium.
E. coli can be spread by eating ground beef, unpasteurized juice or milk, alfalfa sprouts, or water. Person-to-person transmission can occur in places like day care centers, hospitals, and nursing homes, or anywhere people come into contact with fecal matter of an infected individual.
Unlike many infectious organisms, where it takes thousands or tens of thousands of organisms to cause disease, it only takes a few organisms, fewer than 200, for an E. coli infection to occur.
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Could the coincidence of high fertilizer costs, thus causing cattlemen to use more Chicken Litter as fertilizer lend itself to causing the unusally large numbers of E-Coli incidents?
I would say most chicken producers are at the same time cattle producers down here..............................