While storekeepers were frantically pulling E. coli-tainted cookie dough and beef from their shelves last month, scientists rolled out the country's first cattle vaccine to snuff out the potentially deadly bacteria.
A Minnesota veterinary pharmaceutical company, has received a conditional license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to market Escherichia coli Bacterial Extract, and the firm plans to release the vaccine to begin inoculating beef cattle in the fall. The vaccine can reduce the prevalence of cattle shedding 0157:H7 - the strain of E. coli responsible for food-borne illnesses - by as much as 85 percent, said scientists who have been testing the product.
Experts hail the discovery as a milestone that could go a long way toward wiping out the poisonous microbe that has contaminated everything from spinach and Odwalla juices to Jack in the Box hamburgers and, more recently, Nestle Toll House refrigerated cookie dough. Just this week JBS Swift Beef Co., the largest meat producer in the world, had to expand a recall now totaling 420,000 pounds of beef processed in its Greeley, Colo., plant because of E. coli 0157. So far, 23 people have reported becoming ill from the beef, including two who have suffered kidney failure.
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