On Sunday, The New York Times ran a detailed front-page investigative story from reporter Michael Moss about pathogens in ground beef and the consequences for public health. The piece led with the tragic details of Stephanie Smith, a former dance instructor from Minnesota who ate a hamburger at age 20 and is now paralyzed. It is a chilling report that shatters the assumption that government is carefully monitoring the integrity of the food supply, especially in a global economy where a single hamburger may be pieced together from parts of different cows from throughout the world. I asked The HSUS’s director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture, Dr. Michael Greger, for his thoughts.

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E. coli O157:H7, the strain that nearly took Stephanie Smith’s life, is a relatively new pathogen. First discovered in 1982, its emergence and spread has been blamed on three factors: the beef industry's transition to factory farms, the routine mass feeding of antibiotics to cattle, and the stress associated with trucking these animals as many as a thousand miles to slaughter.

E. coli O157:H7 remains the leading cause of acute kidney failure in U.S. children. Tens of thousands of Americans are sickened every year from this bacteria. And dozens die. But shockingly, the devastation caused by this pathogen is far from the worst of what emerges from today’s factory farms and food processing system.

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By comparison, millions of people contract “extraintestinal” E. coli infections—urinary tract infections (UTIs) that can invade the bloodstream and cause an estimated 36,000 deaths annually in the United States. That’s more than 500 times as many deaths as E. coli O157:H7. We know where E. coli O157:H7 comes from—fecal matter from the meat, dairy, and egg industries—but where do these other E. coli come from?

When medical researchers at the University of Minnesota took more than 1,000 food samples from multiple retail markets, they found evidence of fecal contamination in 69 percent of the pork and beef and 92 percent of the poultry samples. Half of the poultry samples were contaminated with the UTI-associated extraintestinal E. coli bacteria.

Scientists now suspect that by eating chicken, women infect their lower intestinal tract with these meat-borne bacteria, which can then creep up into their bladder. In addition to the traditional hygiene measures aimed at preventing urinary tract infections, now women can add avoiding poultry as a way to help fend off UTIs.

In chickens, these bacteria cause a disease called colibacillosis, now one of the most significant and widespread infectious diseases in the poultry industry due to the way we treat these animals. Studies have shown infection risk to be directly linked to overcrowding in chicken factory farms. In caged egg-laying hens, the most significant risk factor for flock infection is hen density per cage.

Researchers have calculated that affording just a single quart of additional living space (about equivalent to a 4-inch cube) to each hen would be associated with a corresponding 33 percent drop in the risk of colibacillosis outbreak. This is one of the reasons our efforts to improve the lives of farm animals are critical not only for animal welfare, but for the health of humans and animals alike.