Nine Australians Catch Hepatitis A from Chinese Produce

Do any of us really know what’s in our food these days? Ever since the world moved away from small farms and into industrial agricultural, we’ve lost touch with the food on our dinner plates. We don’t really know how it’s made, or what goes into it. Heck, we don’t even really know who makes it, aside from the corporate logo on the packaging. Many of us just assume that what we buy in the grocery store must be safe. Even if we know it’s not healthy due to GMOs, pesticides, and preservatives etc, surely our food distribution system is capable of filtering out the foods that can outright kill us?

Unfortunately, that simply isn’t true. As food becomes more industrialized, it also becomes harder to track. Your typical meal travels thousands of miles and changes hands countless times before it arrives at your grocery store. This makes it difficult to catch unscrupulous farmers and vendors who don’t really care about food safety.

Last week, nine Australian citizens learned this the hard way, after they contracted hepatitis A from consuming berries that were grown in China.

Manufacturer Patties Foods has recalled four products including the Nanna’s and Creative Gourmet brands of mixed berries and Nanna’s raspberries after infections in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales.

They are all sold nationally in major supermarkets, having been packed in China.

The hepatitis A cases are linked with Nanna’s Frozen Mixed Berries, with three other brands pulled off shelves as a precaution.

“Hepatitis A virus infection is uncommon and normally associated with travel to countries affected by endemic hepatitis A,” said Rosemary Lester, chief health officer in Victoria state, where three cases have been reported.

“The only common link between the cases is consumption of this product — there is no overseas travel or common restaurant exposure.”

Poor hygiene among Chinese workers and potentially contaminated water supplies in China are likely to have caused the outbreak, experts said.

“Poor Hygiene” is a bit of an understatement. Hepatitis A is usually transmitted through water that is contaminated with human waste. That means these berries were either grown or “cleaned” with raw sewage. How in the hell does someone let that happen?

Well in China, it happens all the time. Two years ago, Natural News blew the whistle on the dangers of so called “organic” produce that is grown in China.

China is a nation that has virtually no environmental regulation enforcement. In China, anything goes: You can dump mercury into rivers. You can spray raw human sewage sludge on crops. You can produce factory-made chemicals and blow the waste products right into the air through smokestacks. In China, many rivers are so toxic that, from time to time, they actually catch on fire and burn.

And since they export food across the globe, this isn’t just a problem for Australia. It’s nearly impossible for the average American consumer to avoid food imported from China. While produce and meats typically have a “country of origin” label, anything that is packaged with multiple ingredients (i.e. 90 percent of the crap in your grocery store) is going to be a mystery. They’ll tell you where the product was processed, but they don’t necessarily have to label where each ingredient was sourced from.

So keep that in mind the next time you go to the grocery store. Almost everything you find there could have been produced in one of China’s many toxic cesspools, and has the potential cause both chronic and acute health problems. And if you can, always buy local. In this day and age, knowing exactly where your food comes from and who grows it, is the only surefire to protect your health.