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Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP, file
White-tailed deer similar to this one were the source of an odd outbreak of E. coli food poisoning among students in a Minnesota high school science class.
A Minnesota high school science project that involved hunting and butchering deer -- including one road-kill capture -- and turning the meat into venison kabobs backfired when 29 students were sickened with a rare kind of E. coli food poisoning, investigators say.
The 2010 incident just now reported in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases highlights the risks of E. coli contamination, not just from factory-produced meat, but also from small, local providers.
Doctors first knew they had a problem in December 2010 when two kids from the same high school turned up at a Minnesota hospital with abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. Fearing they had a food poisoning outbreak on their hands, they quickly called in the state’s top-notch public health officials.
Both teens had taken part in a school environmental science and outdoor recreation class that involving hunting, shooting and butchering six white-tailed deer, explained Joshua Rounds, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Public Health. A seventh deer was harvested after being hit by a car, the report says.
The deer were processed on school grounds and then grilled and eaten in class a few weeks before the students got sick.
Epidemiologists interviewed 117 kids in five class periods and found that 29 definitely had become ill, but not with E. coli O157:H7, the strain commonly associated with food poisoning from ground beef.
Rounds suspected the deer might have carried another E. coli strain that also produces poisons known as Shiga toxins. He was right. Samples from the students and the deer meet turned up E. coli O103:H2, which is part of a larger category of non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bugs, known as STECs.
Scientists also turned up another E. coli strain, E. coli O145:NM that didn’t produce Shiga toxins.
STECs are becoming a more worrisome form of E. coli, so much so that federal agriculture officials are poised to begin banning six strains of the possibly lethal bacteria from some forms of beef in the nation’s food supply starting next spring.
Under the new regulations, the bacteria will be considered adulterants and it will be illegal to sell beef contaminated with the bacteria collectively dubbed “the big six,” including Shiga-toxin producing E. coli O103 and O145.
In the case of the Minnesota deer hunters, the source of the problem was clear.
People don’t usually get sick from eating hunks or steaks of muscle meat, Rounds said. In this case, however, the meat had been skewered and cooked only to medium rare. The skewers had dragged contaminants from the meat’s surface down to the center of the kabobs, which hadn’t been cooked to a high enough temperature to kill the bacteria.
Unless the entire hunk of meat is cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, there’s a risk of food poisoning, Rounds said.
Another factor was hand-washing when handling meat -- or the lack of it, Rounds said.
Not everyone in the class was as fastidious about cleaning their hands as they could have been.
“If you think about high school males, they’re probably not the best when it comes to food safety practices,” he said. “So you can have cross-contamination.”
The case is a reminder, Rounds said, that all meat, no matter where it comes from, should be treated with careful precautions.
Related stories:
Six new strains of E. coli banned from nation's beef supply
A second chance for faulty food? FDA calls it 'reconditioning'
Leave a Comment:
That's a fail for the science project. One of my lifes rules is not to eat road kill.
They didn't say who was the control group and who was the "road kill" group. I would like to know more about the experiment.
And if you eat road kill - cook it good.
They should have stayed with that old staple, possum stew.
Who thought this was a good idea???
Uncle Jed was the teacher's name and Jethro Bodine provided the road kill samples.
they forgot to clean the meat with granny's tonic before they cooked it.
This is sick. A project on hunting and butchering wild life? I'm sure there are more useful things to teach high schoolers these days?
Actually, in that neck of the woods, I wouldn't doubt knowing how to hunt and clean a kill isn't a good thing to know. It's probably not a good class for LA.
These kinds of projects are common in areas of the US (especially among American Indians who use buffalo). Many schools are in areas where deer hunting and eating deer meat is common. Hunters often process the deer for meat themselves. Some take the deer to a paid processor. Deer steaks, deer burger, etc. Deer stew is often delicious and cheaper then store bought meat.
There has never been any report in the news media of anyone getting food poisoning from deer meat in this area. Unfortunately - sometimes the people in charge of these projects are not as well educated in the process as they should be - especially when in comes to roadkill. While roadkill can be safe - it is wise to harvest those that you pretty much see killed yourself.
Road kill?! I'm going to vomit.
Actually it's not all that uncommon. Some states have lists you can sign up on that notify you of fresh road kill. The one's I've heard of required you to show up within the hour and claim your kill or they called the next guy on the list. A lot of people use these programs for subsistence food and truly there is generally a lot of good meat left after you trim away the damaged meat.
I've helped a friend claim his kill. That deer make a surprisingly large dent in his food bill for that year. Personally I don't care for deer but if you like it why not?
The article is lame enough that it doesn't describe the condition of the deer, nor the length of time since it was killed by the vehicle.
If it had been cleanly struck by a vehicle, and recent enough, there is absolutely no reason why it could not have been butchered.
Of course, everyone has their own mind made up when they conjure up images of "roadkill" just as you have. I'm sure it wasn't scraped off the pavement with a shovel!
Cheers!
Very interesting, Gneisenau! I like deer but like MRI stated, the word roadkill did bring up an image or two. On that note, I'm getting a little hungry for a bite of lunch. :-)
The contaminants might not have even come from the roadkill. They could have come from the teenage boy's unwashed hands even. The problem was the cooking method used. Had the meat been cooked to the proper temperature, the bacteria would have been killed. You can just as easily get sick from undercooked store-bought meat.
In the last four months, I've hit two deer - both high yield head impacts. I didn't have the ambition for that much work but they were gone by day's end.
Of course I have to turn it political by claiming the Game Commission keeps the herd excessively high in eastern Pennsylvania to support itself at the expense of motorists and garbage-picking, neighborhood-scrounging, dog-chased whitetails.
Note to self...."disembowel, trim cartilidge, scratch nuts, lick fingers, make kabobs! I am with you Jlew....who thought that this was a good idea?
There is rules about this....wow...crazy teacher!
What might have been the purpose of this project? "Why we need properly regulated food processing"? I'm adventurous when eating, but I'd pass on any food that was killed, processed and prepared by my highschool classmates. You know, the ones responsible for throwing the "stink-pellets" in the main hallway between classes, reaching there hands in someone else's pants to give 'em a "wedgie" or that booger-pickin' kid? Yeah... where's my deer meat!?
And yeah... ROADKILL?!?! (Tire rubber adds flavor!)
YUCK! It serves them right!
Just because they got EColi doesn't necessarily mean the science was a failure.
Yeah, the teacher got himself 29 petri dishes out of the deal. That's science!
Acutally, this class was a very good idea. They just didn't cook the meat properly when they made the kabobs.
More young people should know how to kill and process deer and other mammels. Alot of the time, they learn from their parents but not all parents are hunters so kids that have non-hunting parents got to learn in school. This is entirely appropriate for kids in Minnesota to learn in school. I wish I would have had a class like this when I was in high school.
What? Deer meet (sic)? Is that where the buck pick up the doe?
"...Samples from the students and the deer meet turned up E. coli O103:H2..."
Ha! Glad to see I wasn't the only one who noticed that the writer of the article relies too heavily upon his/her spellchecker! :)
Cheers! :)
Moral of the story: DO NOT EAT BAMBI.
Or at least cook it throughly. And WASH YOUR HANDS before (And after) working with food. All this could have been avoided if they had done these two things.
Hey Darren D. I would suppose that the students learned one of life's great lessons in this particular project.
Guess the teacher skipped over the part about proper hygiene when cooking. ALL people trained as chefs/cooks are REQUIRED to take food prep. hygiene courses. Hopefully this is the last year for this 'experiment'.
If they have determined something is not good for the public, why wait until spring to enforce it - enforce it today, immediately.....anything they call possible lethal bacteria does not belong on our dinner tables ever.
On more reason to require irradiation of meat products, which kills all the bacteria.
So you want charbroiled meat all the time? That is the only way to kill all the bacteria, as some strains are able to with stand far more radiation that most mammals.
I've never made anyone sick from deer meat. But, I do wash hands constantly when serving others. I don't get that carried away when processing my own venison. So, I bet it came from the kids hands and not the meat or the skewer process. Those skewers conduct heat unless they are wooden.
IDK. Not a good story for the venison cause. Again, like most everything else I blame the people not the meat, study, teacher, etc. Although, it is a strange idea for a school project given the current state of mind of the general public.
Mother Nature: 29
Science Class: 6
You forgot:
Vehicle: 1
;)
They can hunt like foxes, but can only cook like Larry, Moe and Curly.
And why is a project like this even being assigned in a school setting? A bad idea, and a very unsafe one at that.
I guess the deer has the last laugh... I'm glad no one died.
“If you think about high school males, they’re probably not the best when it comes to food safety practices,” he said. “So you can have cross-contamination.”
"EWWW!"
What a weird high school project.
I only have one thing to say about the whole thing
Oh dear!
(or borrowing the original author's spell checker, perhaps 2 things)
Oh deer!
I hope all these students turn vegetarians now-not that I am one- for the sake of the Animals !
Just another example of the direction this country is going in. Backwards not forward. This school probably prohibits the teaching of safe sex but allows students to have a class on killing a deer or eating road kill. Hey wake up it is 2012 not 1850. You don't need to kill a deer or pick up road kill to eat. Sickening.
You must not be from western Pennsylvania, Pissed. Many families here supplement their food supply by harvesting deer and other wildlife. Some do it for pleasure, others out of necessity. The valuable lesson learned here was about food safety and food-borne illness, which can happen even with factory farmed or organic, free-range animals, not just wild harvested creatures. I'm glad that no one died as a result of this incident.
When we were growing up, road kill would have been welcomed. My mom used to buy meat with expired dates on them at a discount. They tasted awful, but if cooked thoroughly, it is safe and nutritious. Some people just live a pampered life. To them, suffering is having their cable TV disconnected.
That would suck.
For everyone talking about how schools shouldn't be teaching this kind of thing, first of all, it was an environmental science & outdoor recreation class. This wasn't just a random Biology assignment. Secondly, it's in Minnesota, where hunting and other outdoor activities are a major part of the communities. Would I personally take the class? Probably not. But it probably taught kids who were going to be hunting and fishing, etc. anyway some good lessons that they might not have necessarily learned from their parents (or whomever was teaching them to hunt). This experiment certainly didn't turn out well, but maybe next time make venison jerky or something that's WELL cooked.
The problem here was not cooking the meat thoroughly. I cook everything but hand cut beef steaks well done, and especially wild game needs to be cooked until it is well done! Epic fail on the part of the school to make sure safe food handling and cooking was observed.