By Frank Pecarich
Retired Soil Scientist

Well, the season for growing leafy vegetables in Salinas Valley is mostly over until the spring. According to the history of the past 10 years, we will again see an outbreak of deadly E. coli 0157H: 7 sometime this coming summer of fall. We can safely say that because nothing of substance has changed since the furor over the 3 deaths and over 200 sickened citizens in the Fall of 2006.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans suffer 6.3 million illnesses per month, 27,000 people are hospitalized each month, and 416 die each month from something they ate.

We are being told that future attention to pathogen prevention in Monterey County will be mainly focused on animal grazing areas being too close to cultivated fields. That is because the primary “host” animal for E. coli 0157H: 7 is an animal like a cow. What isn’t appreciated is that when the pathogen E. coli 0147H:7 is ingested by a human, we humans are the “host” for that organism until it passes from our body.

In this last outbreak, there were 200 such humans who were harboring E. coli 0157H:7 plus all the others who were infected but did not report the disease. It has been estimated by pathologists and medical specialists that for every reported incident of E. coli 0157H:7 there are 9 more that are not reported. Those people then aided in the pathogen getting to another source of contamination, the sewer and ultimately, the local waste water treatment system. In the Monterey County incident, there may well be 2,000 people out there that were adversely impacted, not just the 200 as oft reported.

How Does It Get From Cows to Humans?

In addition to humans who are sick with drug resistant pathogens such as E. coli 0157H:7 passing their contaminated feces into the sewage system from their homes and the hospitals, blood and fecal material are flushed away from animal slaughter houses that can be contaminated with pathogens, like E. coli 0157H:7. Add to that source, the hospital treatment centers that have their sewage flushed into the local waste water treatment facility and you have a deadly toxic “Witch’s caldron” environment in the local sewer treatment system.

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BY John Stauber, July 9, 2010

The celebrity chef Alice Waters is probably the world's most famous advocate of growing and eating local, Organic food. In February 2010 her Chez Panisse Foundation chose as its new Executive Director the wealthy "green socialite" and liberal political activist Francesca Vietor. Vietor's hiring created a serious conflict of interest that has married Waters and her Foundation to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and its scam of disposing of toxic sewage sludge waste as free "organic Biosolids compost" for gardens.

San Francisco's Mayor, Gavin Newsom, appointed Francesca Vietor as one of the five Commissioners who run the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in 2008, just a year after the SFPUC began giving away toxic sewage sludge as "organic Biosolids compost." San Francisco, often dubbed the green city with a green mayor, was seemingly providing free "Organic compost" to urban gardens. It sounded too good to be true, and it was. While San Francisco does have an admirable program to collect vegetable waste and turn it into valuable garden compost, the city sells that stuff, the good stuff, Organic with a capital "O." What the city gives away for free as "organic Biosolids compost" is actually hazardous waste, sewage sludge, from San Francisco and eight other counties.

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* By Ronnie Cummins & Alexis Baden-Mayer
Organic Consumers Association, February 4, 2010

Greg Kester, Natalie Sierra and Liz Ostoich, along with municipal governments across the U.S. in need desperately of getting rid of the noxious stuff called sewage sludge, want Americans to believe that that toxic brew is good for you. Specifically, these operators are waging a massive PR campaign to get farmers and gardeners, including school gardens, to “fertilize” their veggies with sewage sludge. Their campaign would have us believe that the chemicals in sewage sludge—thousands of them present in every degree of hazardous and toxic combination—are somehow magically gone from sewage sludge once you “apply” it to your garden.

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What you don’t know about sewage sludge, aka biosolids, could change your life and those of your family forever through exposure to its deadly coliform, bacteria, viruses, helminths, protozoa, fungi, organics, synthetic organics and inorganic heavy metals. Sewage sludge is the biological active aggregates (bacterial biofilms-pathogens-residual-organics-solids of the secondary biological sewage treatment process. In 1981, EPA, FDA
and USDA signed a Statement of Federal Policy and Guidance allowing sludge to be used as a fertilizer on fruits and vegetables. Most people, including medical doctors, those with Ph.D's, regulators, politicians, judges and especially farmers, have been convinced by EPA that sewage sludge is safe for use as a fertilizer. They are unaware there has never been a risk assessment for the dangerous toxic chemicals, pathogens, or metals in sludge.

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— By Josh Harkinson | Thu Mar. 4, 2010 3:45 PM PST

Activists wearing face masks and haz-mat suits dumped a pile of sewage sludge on the steps of San Francisco's city hall today to protest the city's practice of marketing the material to home gardeners as "organic compost." The US Department of Agriculture's organic standards explicity prohibit organic produce from being grown on sludge-treated land. "The City of San Francisco owes an apology to all of the food consumers in California who have been eating non-organic food grown on sewage sludge," said Ronnie Cummins, president of the Organic Consumers Association. He was wearing a haz-mat suit on which he'd written a message to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: "Organic gardens aren't toxic waste dumps."

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Belmont, N.Y.
By Harrison Haas
hhaas@citizen.com

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Belmont Planning Board voted in favor of placing the proposed zoning amendment to prohibit the land application of all biosolids in all zones on the town warrant.

During a workshop session on Monday evening, board members also unanimously voted to not recommend the petition warrant article looking to adopt the state regulations on biosolids and allowing certain types.

Board members discussed both amendments among themselves at Monday's workshop, which did not allow public participation.

In December the Planning Board held two public hearings on the proposed zoning amendments that are to be placed on this year's ballot — meetings that brought out several individuals from Belmont and surrounding towns. One amendment deals with the use of biosolids and sludge, a substance that has been quite controversial across the country, as well as a petition warrant article looking to allow the material with certain regulations.

Chairman Peter Harris said the board has had a good deal of discussion on the topic from the previous public hearings. Monday night the Board had to vote to recommend or not recommend the petition and vote on whether it wants to see the amendment, which would ban biosolids outright, on the town warrant.

"I believe safety is something we should caution right now," board member Jon Pike said. "My fear is that once it's dumped on the land, we could have a problem. Maybe not the first year, but possibly the second or third year and then the finger pointing starts."

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The attached testimony by Dr. Caroline Snyder is worth reading and posting. The EPA also knew in 1982 that sewage treatment plants generated antibiotic resistant bacteria (see below). The author is an EPA scientist, the paper was peer reviewed, and after the EPA started promoting land applications of sewage sludge---the study was suppressed and no longer available at the EPA, DHHS or the CDC.

We found this paper on microfiche at one of the EPA libraries scheduled for closure in 2007. Drs. McGowan and Snyder have attempted to get the EPA, CDC, USDA, DHHS, and FDA to respond to "what they knew--and when they knew it" prior to the EPA regulations 40 CFR Part 503 effective January 1993.

The 1982 EPA study by Meckes notes that sewer plants and their byproducts spread pathogens and antibiotic resistance into the environment at large, see: 1982 EPA paper http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/43/2/371.pdf .

Also see the email from Dr. McGowan below to all federal agencies about sewage treatment plants generating antibiotic resistant bacteria and sludge spreading that further moves the pathogens via the air into human lungs. Dr. McGowan is a retired physician and hydro-geologist with 40 years experience with the World Health Organization. He is one of our strongest advocates and a ready source of information to assist us with local problems.

Dateline: Monday, October 12, 2009

by Holly Dressel

In November of 2006, the tiny municipality of Elgin, Quebec, comprised of only a few hundred people, passed a by-law prohibiting the spreading, storage or transport of municipal or de-inking sludge on its territory.

The people living in Elgin, about 60 km southwest of Montreal, understood that Canada's water treatment systems are not able to remove many toxic elements intrinsic to sludge, such as:

* pathogens like H1N1 or E. coli;
* dangerous chemicals like flame retardants;
* medications;
* hormones; or,
* the heavy metals that get into sewage systems from small industries and the de-inking process of paper recycling mills.

Farmers in the area were particularly worried about the heavy metals in de-inking sludges, which can sterilize soils, rendering the soil useless and in fact dangerous for crop production in a relatively short period of time. Such material can be trucked in from distant, large cities and cannot be traced.

Elgin's by-law was passed in order to "protect public health and the environment."

"... Lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation."

The local farm wishing to spread the sludge took the village to court, on the grounds that the process is not only legal in Quebec and across Canada but encouraged by provincial regulations. They were backed by a huge multinational waste management company, GSI, which makes its money by taking human and de-inking sludge off the hands of overwhelmed municipalities, calling it a crop fertilizer, and selling it to farmers at much cheaper rates than regular chemical fertilizers.

On October 1, 2009, to the surprise of many, Quebec's Superior court upheld the town's bylaw. Judge Steve J. Reimnitz invoked the well-known Supreme Court ruling in the case of Hudson, Quebec's similar ban on cosmetic pesticides.

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Farming is a global business these days — what happens on the far side of the world often impacts what farmers in the Southeast plant and how they market their crops.

Farming is also a local business and how the public perceives agriculture goes a long way toward influencing state and federal elected officials, who make the laws that govern agriculture. For the most part our elected officials don’t really understand what farming is all about and don’t have unified voice to explain it to them.

Food safety is a big public issue, yet the estimated 6-7 million tons of potentially toxic municipal waste that goes on farm land each year is not a public issue — at least not yet.

In Virginia, for example, there are about 8.5 million acres of farmland, but only 55,000 acres are treated with biosolids, a legal, but euphemistic term for municipal sludge.

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