As usual, the common-sense natural approach takes a back seat to the needle and the miracle of modern medicine:

Jason Timmerman coaxed a balky calf into a chute on his feedlot one recent afternoon and jabbed a needle into its neck. He was injecting the animal with a new vaccine to make it immune to a dangerous form of the E. coli bacteria. . . .

Scientists are fairly sure that vaccines like the one Mr. Timmerman gave his cattle will not, on their own, wipe out the dangerous strain of E. coli known as O157:H7. But if they prove effective, they could significantly reduce the amount of harmful bacteria that cattle carry into slaughterhouses, which means that safeguards already in place there would have a greater chance of eliminating the remaining germs from the beef supply.

Mmm . . . a new vaccine to be added to the antibiotics and growth hormones already infesting your grain-fed beef.

Don’t want to worry about E. coli No. O157:H7? Really miss eating a juicy medium rare burger . . . or better yet, a tantalising beef tartare?

Simple: Eat grass-fed and -finished beef.

As Michael Pollan explained in his 2002 article in the New York Times Magazine:

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids—and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow’s gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain’s barriers to infection.

What really gets me, however, is this section from the former article:

. . . [I]n 2007, the number of E. coli-related beef recalls jumped sharply, alarming food safety advocates and some in the beef industry, who pushed for additional tools.

“I was looking for anything that could help us because people were getting sick and people were dying,” said Dr. Richard Raymond, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food safety from 2005 to 2008.

In early 2008, the department told the two vaccine companies that it would relax its requirements. This March, the agency approved sale of the Epitopix vaccine.

“The federal government was slow,” Dr. Raymond said. He called the 18-month lag while the Agriculture Department and the F.D.A. hashed out the jurisdictional dispute “pure wasted time.”

But in all that time no one in the F.D.A. or the Agriculture Department or the government thought to inform the public that eating grass-fed beef would significantly reduce the E. coli threat.

And to think that some still put their trust in Washington buffoons.