Have you ever experienced this? About 12 hours after eating chicken you start to feel sick. This grows into sharp pains that keep shooting from your stomach to your back. Then you get explosive diarrhoea – you can’t hold it back and you’re never off the loo. Now you’re feeling really ill! You’re hot and you start to vomit. This goes on for a few days and then you feel tired for a couple of weeks. You swear you will never eat chicken again!

If your answer is yes then you’re probably one of the millions of people every year who’ve suffered from food poisoning. And the chances are that animal-based foods were cause.

Ninety-five per cent of all food poisoning is from meat, egg and dairy products. Even the odd little 5 per cent from fruit and vegetables is usually because of contamination by meat or manure. The bugs in animals are more likely to infect us than the bugs in vegetables simply because animals are biologically more like us. Many of the bugs which live in the blood or cells of other animals can also live quite happily in ours.

The bugs that cause food poisoning are bacteria and are so small they can’t be seen with the human eye. Some bacteria thrive and grow inside the living animals while others infect the meat after slaughter because of the way it’s kept or handled. Either way, we are increasingly catching diseases from the meat we eat and it’s becoming more difficult to cure them.

Every week in Britain alone, over a thousand people go to their doctor with one kind of food poisoning or another according to government health figures. That adds up to about 85,000 cases a year, which you might think isn’t that many out of a population of 58 million. But here’s the catch! Scientists estimate that the real number is actually ten to a hundred times more than this but people don’t bother to report it, they just stay at home and suffer. That’s at least 850,000 cases of food poisoning every year, from which about 260 people die.

The bacteria responsible for all this suffering have names that read like a medical dictionary but here are the ones most likely to infect you. Salmonella is responsible for about a hundred deaths a year in Britain and is found mostly in fresh chicken, eggs, ducks and turkeys. It leads to diarrhoea and stomach pains.

Another real nasty found mostly in chicken and other poultry is campylobacter. It’s the one I described at the beginning of the chapter – in fact it’s the most common form of food poisoning of all, but kills very few.

Listeria also kills about a hundred people a year and is found in processed and chilled foods – cooked chicken, salamis, soft cheeses and cook-chilled meals. It’s particularly bad for pregnant women and the flu-like symptoms can lead to blood poisoning and meningitis or even the death of the baby.

E. coli is known as the ‘burger bug’ because it thrives in burgers, mince and beef sausages. At the moment about fifty people a year die from it but it’s on the increase and it’s getting harder to stop. Doctors are so worried by it that it’s now being referred to as a superbug. It causes enteritis (inflammation of the intestines) and can lead to kidney failure.

One of the reasons it’s so difficult to control all the bacteria found in meat is that these bugs are constantly changing through a process called mutation. It’s the equivalent of evolution in animals – the only difference is that bugs do it much faster, in hours rather than centuries. Lots of these mutated bugs die out quickly but others are amazingly successful. Some even manage to fight off the medicines which used to kill their ancestors. When this happens, scientists have to find new drugs or treatments.

Since 1947, when penicillin and other drugs called antibiotics were discovered, doctors have been able to treat most infections caused by bacteria, including food poisoning. What seems to be happening now is that the bacteria have changed and they’ve learned how to avoid being killed by antibiotics. With one type of the E. coli infection there are virtually no drugs which will ill it. And it’s this which is worrying doctors because there are so few new drugs to take the place of the old ones which no longer work.

One of the reasons for the spread of bacteria in the meat we eat is the way animals are treated in slaughterhouses. The lack of hygiene, the water sloshing around all over the place, the roaring chainsaws that slice through carcasses showering blood, fat and bits of muscle and bone everywhere, all help to scatter bugs like confetti on a windy day. Professor Richard Lacey, a man who spends his working life investigating food poisoning, says: ‘When a perfectly healthy, bug-free animal goes into a slaughterhouse there is a good chance it will come out as a disease-ridden carcass.’

Because of its link with heart disease and cancers and because of worries about E. coli, more and more people are giving up beef, lamb and pork and are turning to chicken as the healthier choice. Healthier? In some food processing plants such as meat-pie factories, chicken preparation areas are separated off from the rest by big glass screens. The fear is that other meats might be infected by the chicken – that’s how bug-ridden it is.

In Britain, the government reckons that 43 per cent of all chicken meat is infected with the bacteria called salmonella. In fact, university tests show the number is actually much higher that this. Most birds naturally have small amounts of salmonella in their gut along with other bacteria. Because of the risk of disease in the sheds in which they’re reared, chickens are fed antibiotics everyday. This kills off some disease bacteria that might otherwise spread through the flock. However, it allows other bacteria to flourish and grow. Salmonella is one of these bacteria, and while it doesn’t harm the chickens it ain’t too good for us humans.

The way chickens are processed after they’re killed practically guarantees that salmonella and other bugs such as campylobactor, are spread from one bird to another. After throat cutting, the birds are dunked in the same scalding tank. The temperature of the water is about 50∞C, hot enough to loosen their feathers but not hot enough to kill bacteria, which breed in the water.

The next step in the process is just as bad. The intestines of any animal are teeming with bugs. With slaughtered chickens, the intestines are removed automatically with the same spoon-shaped tool. It scoops out the insides of one bird after another – every bird on the production line – spreading disease as it does so. Even when the chicken carcasses go into the freezer, the bacteria aren’t killed, just prevented from breeding and increasing. But as soon as the meat is defrosted, the bugs start to breed again.

The official story is that if chicken is cooked properly there isn’t a health problem because the salmonella will be killed – and there’s a lot of truth in this. But it’s not the full story because when you unwrap an uncooked chicken or chicken pieces, you will almost certainly get some salmonella on your hands and this bacteria can grow on almost anything else you touch, including work surfaces.

The way meat is handled in shops can also cause problems. I remember listening once to someone who worked in a supermarket talking about her work. She said the thing she hated the most was the ‘peppermint creams’. I couldn’t think what she meant until she explained that peppermint creams were the little round, creamy-looking, bacteria-ridden, pus-filled abscesses which they often came across when they were cutting up meat. And what did they do with them? Well, they simply scraped away the pus, cut that particular piece of meat off and chucked it in the bin. The waste bin? No, the mince bin!

There are plenty of other ways you can eat diseased meat without even realising it. Over the last few years, all kinds of discoveries have been made by newspaper and television journalists about the way in which meat id treated. Poor old cows, passed as unfit for human consumption because they’re full of disease or drugs, have finished up in meat pies and other products. Of course it’s illegal and the meat is dyed bright green to stop this kind of thing, but it sometimes fails. (So what you thought was parsley in your meat pie . . .)

There have also been cases where supermarkets have returned meat to their suppliers because it had gone off, and all the suppliers did was cut off the pieces which looked bad, washed the rest, then chopped it up and resold it as fresh, lean meat. You can’t tell if meat is okay just by looking at it. Why do suppliers do it? Let the Head of the Environmental Health Institute give you the answer: ‘Imagine the profits that can be made from buying a dead, condemned animal for £25 and selling it on as fit meat worth at least £600 in the shops.’

No one knows how widespread this practice is but on the evidence of those who have investigated it, it is widespread and getting worse. The most worrying thing about all this is that the poorest, cheapest and often most diseased meat finishes up being sold to those who buy in bulk as cheaply as possible – hospitals, old people’s homes and schools, where it finishes up in dinners.

A new frightening disease is caused by the ‘thing’ which causes mad cow disease or, to give it its proper name, bovine spongiform encephalopathy – BSE for short. The reason I say ‘thing’ is because scientists don’t know what it is. There are all kinds of theories about what the BSE bug might be and the most common is that it is a prion – a weird bit of protein that can change its form, one minute being as lifeless as a grain of sand and the next being alive, active and deadly. But no one knows for sure.

Scientists aren’t even sure how this thing suddenly appeared in cows. Some say it was caught from sheep, who have a similar type of disease, but others disagree. One thing over which there is no argument is how it spreads. BSE is common in Britain because it was there that cattle, who left alone would eat nothing but grass. Plants and leaves, were given ground-up bits of other cattle and sheep in their feed, including brains in which the bug is thought to have been present. In this way, the disease spreads.

There is no cure for BSE. It kills cows and it can kill other types of animals such as cats, mink and even deer who are fed on infected beef. There is a similar human disease called CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) and there has been a big argument over whether this is the same as BSE and whether humans can catch it from eating BSE infected beef and other bits of cows. For ten years after BSE was first discovered in 1986, the British government said humans couldn’t catch it and that CJD was a different disease – therefore beef was perfectly safe to eat. As a precaution, they eventually said that brains, certain glands and the nerves which run through the spine shouldn’t be eaten. Previously these bits had been ground up and used in things like burgers, pies and stock cubes.

Between 1986 and 1996, at least 160,000 British cows were known to have caught BSE. These animals were destroyed and not used for human food. However, one scientists estimates that a further 1.5 million cattle were also infected but didn’t exhibit any symptoms. Even the UK government’s own figures show that for every cow with BSE that they knew about, there were two more they didn’t. These cattle, although infected, were all eaten.

In March 1996, the British government had to make an admission. They said that it looked as though they had been wrong all and humans could catch BSE from cattle after all. This is a frightening mistake to have made because millions of people have eaten infected meat. There was even a four-year-period before food manufacturers were told not to use brains and nerves, when these highly infectious parts of cattle were being eaten regularly.

Even after admitting its mistake, the government still insisted that it had made sure all the dangerous parts of cattle were being removed and that it was therefore safe for people to go on eating beef. But in a recorded telephone conversation, the chief vet of the Meat & Livestock Commission – the national organisation responsible for selling red meat – admitted that the BSE bug is in all beef meat, even lean steaks. It knows what effect eating small quantities of infected meat over a long period of time will have. All we know now is that it takes between 10 and 30 years for humans to show the symptoms of SBE or CJD and it always ends in death after a year or so.

You will be pleased to hear that I don’t know of anyone who has ever died of carrot poisoning.

The World’s First Literary Reference to BSE?

Sir Andrew Aguecheeck: Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has: but I am a great eater of beef and I believe that does harm my wit.
Sir Toby: No question.

From Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare