The ongoing outbreak of Salmonella Saintpaul has drawn outcry from the media, predictable knee-jerk proposals from lawmakers, and understandable fear and confusion among consumers. As with past outbreaks, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and food processing plants and farmers continue to take the blame for tainted food making us ill. But maybe our All-American sick gut deserves some blame as well.

While our attention is focused on farm-to-table food safety and disease surveillance, the biological question of why we got sick is all but ignored. And by asking why an individual's natural defenses failed, we insert personal responsibility into our national food safety strategy and draw attention to the much larger public health crisis, of which illness from food-borne pathogens is but a symptom: our sick, leaky guts.

The CDC warns, "The elderly, infants, and those with impaired immune systems are more likely to have a severe illness" associated with tainted food (and water). By "impaired" the CDC is saying that within the complex network of specialized cells and organs that work together to defend against attacks from foreign invaders such as Salmonella, something has gone wrong.

A critical component of a properly functioning immune system is a healthy, and balanced, population of bacteria. Bifidobacterium and lactobacillus, and other natural inhabitants of the human intestinal tract make it their evolutionary job to fight invaders by competing for nutrients (which the invader needs to survive), competing for attachment sites on our intestinal walls (which the invader must find to cause harm), producing organic acids (which the invader does not like), and changing the pH of the intestinal ecosystem (which the pathogen does not like either, but is quickly learning to adapt to).

This germ-on-germ warfare is fought daily. When the good guys lose, we know this as diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps - or worse. And, while this germ warfare has raged in the human gut as long as humans have been around, the rules of war are changing as humanity has shifted to a highly processed diet that has altered the nutrient supply that friendly microbes depend on.

The irony of the public avoiding the fruits and vegetables suspected in an outbreak, is that these foods contain dietary fiber essential to our gut bugs to fight the good fight. Our change in diet, coupled with uncontrolled use of antibiotics, may be adversely altering our organic relationship with our most important weapon against food-borne pathogens.

Increased gut infections are possibly having an irreversible impact on our entire gastrointestinal system. Like a siege of cannon fire on the walls of a fortress, the barriers begin to crumble and allow invasion. Mounting evidence suggests acute and chronic infection by pathogens damage the delicate mucosal barrier that separates trillions of bacteria in our intestinal system from the sterile environment of our blood. As more battles are lost, the barrier and our immune system become impaired, resulting in inflammation and movement of pathogens (and endotoxins) into our sterile blood. An impaired and leaky gut plays a role in a range of maladies, such as irritable bowel disease, some cancers, sepsis, organ failure, heart disease, and a cascade of other metabolic disorders.

By inserting personal responsibility and some basics of host-pathogen germ warfare into the strategy for addressing food-borne threats, we may start to realize that we may not simply be experiencing a mathematical rise in food-borne illness as a result of sloppy farming and poor government oversight, but rather a tectonic shift in our nutritional landscape that has opened the pathogens' door just enough to glimpse the future of human suffering. Just the thought makes my gut ache.

Germ warfare

To learn more about the connection between a disrupted microbial population in the gastroinstestinal tract and disease, read more:

Is irritable bowel symptom an inflammation?

Improving microbial balance of the intestinal system associated with health benefits.

Pathological colonization of the GI tract is associated with septic morbidity.

Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine