KEY POINTS:
The way the chattering classes carried on last week you'd think alcohol-fuelled boy racers were a major threat to human life. Actually, you're more at risk from people who don't wash their hands than from wheel-spinning teenagers.
It's true - filth is killing us and wreaking havoc with the economy. But as a nation, we'd rather wring our hands than wash them.
And the result? Food poisoning, in particular, campylobacter, defined by the New Zealand Food Safety Authority as bacteria that causes food-borne illnesses in people, with severe and sometimes lasting consequences.
I should know. I contracted this vile bug a few days before March 21, and I'm still suffering the lasting consequences.
How can it be that in a time when the regulations governing the growing, storing, preparation, selling, manufacturing, and displaying of food are tougher than ever; when we have our very own Minister of Food Safety in the person of Annette King; when you can't eat a commercially prepared sandwich without fighting your way through a casket of moulded plastic stapled firmly shut, New Zealand has the highest reported rate of campylobacter in the developed world? No one knows why, but it may just be our reporting rate is more efficient than other countries.
In 2005, exactly 13,839 poor bastards in this country were reported as having campylobacter. I sympathise with all of you. That's like every man, woman and child in Tokoroa simultaneously writhing in agony, rushing to the bathroom, vomiting, having diarrhoea, suffering headaches and fever, sometimes for weeks. In 2005, 871 of these poor sods were hospitalised and, in the past nine years, 11 people have died from campylobacter.
In 2005, 115 road deaths were reported as having alcohol as a factor. And while even one boy racer fatality is tragic, I know they haven't made nearly 14,000 people physically ill in any one year.
According to Nigel French, a scientist at New Zealand's Hopkirk EpiCentre, 2006 was the worst year on record for cases of campylobacter with some 16,000 human cases, and he reckons that's an under-reporting of a staggering 800 per cent.
Think of the strain on the nation's sewerage systems. Consider the economic costs of people off work. NZFSA estimates some $60 million annually is lost due to campylobacteriosis: 73 per cent of the total economic costs of food-borne infectious diseases in New Zealand. And that's not counting the kids kept home from school, many of whom these days wouldn't be able to spell diarrhoea when they send a note to the teacher.
And why are we so sick? The main reason is personal hygiene. Campylobacter bacteria are found in poultry, raw milk, offal and other foods. It doesn't make animals sick, and needn't affect us in such unacceptably high numbers. We can be exposed by patting our pets, drinking untreated water (only 4 per cent), eating undercooked chicken or chicken pate (one of the main culprits), eating undercooked barbecued sausages and cross-contamination from tuna in a salad. Freezing won't completely kill the bacteria on infected food, but cooking to 55C will. A two-year survey by Environmental Science and Research (ESR), beginning 2003, of diced meat at retail outlets found 89 per cent of chicken crawling with the stuff, 9 per cent of pork, 7 per cent of lamb/mutton and just 3 per cent of beef. Don't think you're protected by eating free-range organic chicken because they're no more raised in sterile environments than are battery broilers.
Why? Because people from all walks of life don't bother to wash their hands. I've been in the Koru Club bathroom when women have flushed the toilet and left without washing their hands. Just because men don't sit down to pee doesn't mean they shouldn't wash their hands, but many don't bother. I've bought meat from butchers who wear gloves, then leave them on when they give you change or handle the Eftpos machine.
In restaurants, chefs take a cigarette break, then resume preparing food without washing their hands. In kitchens, cooks use the same chopping boards for dicing meat as for slicing lettuce. Simple, basic common sense cleanliness habits have disappeared because we're lulled by legislation to believe food that's double-wrapped in clingfilm, smothered in polystyrene, or delivered to the table on Villeroy & Boch, is safe.
Most of us will never be threatened by boy racers, but no one is safe from people too lazy to wash their hands. It's enough to make you puke.
