“In God we trust. Everyone else must test for E. coli.”

This slogan should be printed on banners hanging over every meat purveyor in the business and on T-shirts worn by everyone responsible for food safety.

Microphoto by Eduweb UK

The government says it cannot pin down how many  of the estimated 80 million cases of food poisoning each year are attributable to E. coli bacteria.

The predictions are almost useless, says one investigator from the Centers for Disease Control, because guesstimates swing widely between 40,000 to as many as 20 million.

I have several acquaintances in the food industry, including cooks, food scientists and safety inspectors. A handful are vegetarians, a couple are even vegans, but most eagerly savor hunks of skillfully cooked beef.

Even the carnivores tell me, however, that they will not buy or use ground beef for burgers, meatballs or meatloaves unless they know who ground it and from what cut of the cow the meat came.

This probably sounds excessive to many, but these are people who know what Escherichia coli is and what it can do to the human body.

For years I have been reporting on the inability of government and private food inspectors and public health activists to get meat processors – from slaughterhouses to your grocer’s meat counter – to protect the consumer from E. coli in beef.

These people on the frontlines have repeatedly offered up evidence to Congressional committees and regulatory agencies on the collusion within the meat processing industry to block the required safety inspections of E. coli.

In the past, these whistleblowers have given the investigators proof that there is excessive use of trimmings, fat and low-cost waste meats, often contaminated with feces, sold as quality grade beef. Even those companies that want to do it properly and legally find themselves stymied by the meat suppliers.

If you really want to understand how this insidious food safety roulette is being played out and the personal destruction that comes from doing it wrong, I urge you to read this story in Sunday’s New York Times.

Reporter Michael Moss offers up an amazingly well written and thoroughly documented examination of this sinister side of food safety, how profit comes first and consumers suffer and sometimes die.

To illustrate how devastating E. coli can be, Moss tells the story of Stephanie Smith, 22, who was left paralyzed  after eating a burger tainted by E. coli.

I’ve studied the food industry for years and I thought I knew it well, but this reporter lays out a level of collusion that amazes and frightens even me.

If you don’t read Moss’s story, here are a just a few basic facts about this potentially lethal food toxin.

• E. coli, which has contaminated hundreds of food products including spinach, lettuce, cookie dough or beef, comes from feces.

• E. coli is an incredibly resilient organism. Food safety experts have reported that amazingly low numbers of E. coli bacteria can cause infection and can survive – sometimes for months or longer – on work surfaces, chopping boards, knives and other implements

• Disease detectives at the CDC worry that antibiotic resistance appears to be increasing in some strains of E. coli, in part, they speculate, because of soaring overuse of antibiotics in animals.

E. coli is just one of the foodborne pathogens that government disease detectives say cause more than 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.

These estimates are obscenely high for a country that brags about being the world’s leader in food safety.

Some food poisoning is unavoidable. Most is not. Government and industry experts know how food-borne pathogens can be controlled, but the will to do so is often absent.

Many observers of the USDA call the agency gutless when it comes to initiating or enforcing rules on food processors that make what we eat safer.

In the past, it was easy to blame it on the Bush Administration’s pro-industry stand on everything.

Congressional oversight committees repeatedly blamed the Republican majority for thwarting improvements in safety regulations.

A logical question is who’s to blame now?

Food safety lawyer and activist Bill Marler, who represented the victims in the notorious Jack in the Box E. coli cases in Seattle, is distributing T-shirts this week to every member of the U.S. Senate. The message: “Put a trial lawyer out of business.”

“Millions of Americans needlessly become ill and too many businesses lose billions due to contaminated food,” Marler said.

He is pushing Congress to enact stronger laws this fall. “It can be stopped if proper laws are passed and fully enforced,” he said.