Date:  14 March 2001

THAT  OLD  E.CO-LIE  AND  OTHER  SCURRILOUS  NONSENSE

Craig Sams on the "scurrilous nonsense" that just keeps on cropping up on Prakash's AgBioView
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Date: 13 Mar 2001 19:32:38 -0000
From: Craig Sams <cs@csams.demon.co.uk
Subject: Re: AGBIOVIEW...

I have refrained from responding to the conspiracy theories about why Europeans reject biotech food, sinister plots by Greenpeace and the wholefoods industry to discredit biotech in order to boost sales of organic food and the speculation about mycotoxins in non-GM food (as a
peanut butter manufacturer I regularly test peanuts and the organic ones are consistently lower in mycotoxins because the plants are that muchhealthier.

I can't comment on corn but think it's always dangerous to generalise from a limited base of information)  Which brings me to the reason for this posting. Yet again the  scurrilous nonsense that organic food carries an E.coli health risk because of the use of manure as a fertiliser has been published on you site.

Yet again I make the statement that nobody can challenge, not even Dennis Avery, the author of the original falsification, namely; "There is no known case of E.coli O157:H7 arising from certified organic production practices."

The quote from Hindu Business Line repeats this daft canard, which you might expect from Hindus who may be unfamiliar with the unhygienic practices in US feedlots and slaughterhouses which are where the actual fatalities, sickness and disablement arising  from mutant E.coli originate.  I am reluctant to criticise them as their analysis of the havoc wrought by the pesticides that accompanies the Green Revolution are shocking, but I have made it my life's mission to continuously rebut this one misstatement of fact about E.coli.

I have learned a lot about science and scientific judgement and integrity as a result of following the GM saga and for that I am grateful, but please stop giving airtime to this particular lie.

If some anarchist crank came up with cooked up 'evidence' that GM soybeans made your ears fall off and this nonsense was successfully rebutted, would you continue to repeat it ad nauseam? Of course not. Why not do the same on E.coli?

Craig Sams
President, Whole Earth Foods Ltd.