Hepatitis A Outbreak: How Does a Virus Get into Strawberries?
Fecal oral route of transmission from fruit and vegetable pickers who have dirty hands...or dirty sewage water is put on the on the plants and berries.
What you eat may have been handled by other people. I see warning labels on lots of fresh food to wash it, but I dont think it gets rid of feces contamination, unless it is scrubbed with soap.
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Nearly 90 people in seven states have become sick in an outbreak of
hepatitis A linked to frozen strawberries imported from Egypt, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But how does the hepatitis A virus get into strawberries?
Tomatoes, for example, are machine-harvested, so no hands touch them, he said. But berries are too fragile for machines, so each berry is handpicked, he said.
Because hepatitis A is spread through the "fecal-to-oral route," if workers picking berries were infected with hepatitis A and had not
properly washed their hands, they could transfer the virus from their hands to the berry, Chapman said. In parts of the world where hepatitis A is more common, this is definitely a risk, he added.
It's more likely, however, that the water used to irrigate the
strawberries was the source of the virus in this outbreak, Chapman said. And, yes, because of that fecal-to-oral route, that means sewage-contaminated water.
Berries of all types are actually a common conduit for viruses, said Benjamin Chapman, a food-safety specialist and an associate professor at North Carolina State University. Over the past decade, there have been several virus outbreaks linked to imported berries, he said.
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