Dung Beetles: Future Heroes of Organic Food Safety?
James Andrews writes: “In 2011, an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in Oregon killed one person and sickened more than a dozen people. The outbreak was eventually traced back to organic strawberries grown at an Oregon farm, but how E. coli had managed to contaminate the strawberries remained a mystery for some time afterward.
Eventually, state health officials traced the outbreak to deer that had been rummaging through the fields and leaving behind droppings that contaminated some of the strawberries. And animal feces on the farm have been implicated or strongly suspected in a number of other outbreaks.
But what if organic farmers had a natural, unobtrusive way to help reduce the risk of contamination from animal feces on the farm? Enter the dung beetle.”
Image credit: Steve Slater / Flickr, CC BY 2.0