Chili Sauce Contaminated with C. botulinum

Nanobug in the News Today

Announcement was made today that several brands of commercial hot dog chili sauce has been found to be contaminated with Clostridium botulinum.  Four people have been infected and hospitalized - 2 children in Texas and 2 adults in Indiana - but no deaths reported. Yea! 

This is an unusual source of an outbreak of botulism - Clostridium is usually an issue with home-canned foods especially green beans or other low-acid foods.  The problem is that C. botulinum has spores that must be completely killed in the canning process or they will revive the organism and grow in the alkaline environment of the food and produce a powerful neurotoxin. (The spores and the toxin can be destroyed by boiling and essentially sterilizing the food).  Now it would seem that chili sauce would be an unlikely food to incubate Clostridium botulinum but it seems to be so.  The American Public Health Association states that tomatoes - once thought to be too acidic to incubate C. botulinum - are no longer considered a low-risk food for incubating botulism.   Commercial foods are heat sterilized rather than just pasteurized to assure that the dangerous spores are killed.  Obviously something went wrong at the food processing plant.  

Check out the brand names and numbers provided in the Associated Press article and heed the advice to discard the cans and do not open them (cans with the contamination are usually bulging due to the build up of gas inside).  The botulism toxin is so potent that you could have grave consequences if you opened the can and the contents sprayed in your face and eyes.  This nanobug is also one on the list for potential terrorism agent because of the potent toxin it produces. 

It is kind of ironic - late Summer is when we are usually reminding people to take care with home canning their green beans.  I wonder if housewives are still canning these days.  Or is freezing more convenient and therefore the preservation of choice?  Or is everyone just eating things fresh and buying their vegetables in the store after their garden finishes producing for the season? 

In the Summer there is also the threat of infant botulism when infants are given unprocessed or raw honey.

And then I also wonder about the wisdom of Botox - a neurotoxin used to paralyze the facial muscles so wrinkles won't show.  Granted, it is minute doses, but it just seems wrong to me - I think we should avoid neurotoxins rather than inviting them into our faces to try to hide the signs of our aging.  My "signature" nanobug, which I have on my business card and on my VW Beetle, is Clostridium botulinum.  I chose it because she is a classy anaerobic spore-former.  Her gas mask is stylish and complements her outfit! Please don't think that my choice is any kind of an endorsement of techniques to inject neurotoxins into our aging faces. 

This entry was posted on July 19th, 2007 at 9:09 am. RSS | Back to Blog Homepage.

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