Gilbert Gutknecht: “One can die. In fact, I had a friend who got salmonella. He was virtually blinded. He can still see, and I do not know…”

“One can die. In fact, I had a friend who got salmonella. He was virtually blinded. He can still see, and I do not know what his vision level is, but he almost died, and he ended up with a severe loss of vision from salmonella. I did not know until this particular episode how serious it was, and that one of the consequences can be a loss of vision. This is a study done by the FDA in 1999. They analyzed 1,003 samples of produce items coming into the United States from other countries. I have the numbers here in terms of how much we import from different countries. From Canada, for example, the latest year we have, we imported 335,000 metric tons of beef into the United States. We imported 322,000 pounds of pork. We imported from Mexico a grand total of 3.1 million metric tons of fruits and vegetables from Mexico. We imported from South America over $742 million worth of fruits and vegetables from South America. Now, we import a lot of food into this country every single day. Here are the numbers. According to their study, the total percentage of food that was contaminated with either salmonella, shigella, and I am probably not saying that right, or E. Coli, the total percentage of that sample that they took was 4.4 percent. Now, we know people get sick every single day in the United States. I have had food poisoning twice in my life. We know there are thousands of people who get sick from food poisoning, from salmonella. We know that is serious.”