I used it for about a year before a major relapse.
Make sure you wash it well (though it may not be enough) and there's no mold at the root or you can pick up all sorts of critters...That applies to any type of raw food.
http://bacteriality.com/2008/05/26/biofilm/
How else do we acquire biofilm bacteria?
As discussed thus far, biofilms form spontaneously as bacteria inside the human body group together. Yet people can also ingest biofilms by eating contaminated food.
According to
researchers at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada, it is increasingly suspected that biofilms play an important role in contamination of meat during processing and packaging. The group warns that greater action must be taken to reduce the presence of food-borne pathogens like
Escherichia coli and
Listeria monocytogenes and spoilage microorganisms such as the
Pseudomonas species (all of which form biofilms) throughout the food processing chain to ensure the safety and shelf-life of the product. Most of these microorganisms are ubiquitous in the environment or brought into processing facilities through healthy animal carriers.
Hans Blaschek of the University of Illinois has
discovered that biofilms form on much of the other food products we consume as well.
A biofilm on a piece of lettuce
“If you could see a piece of celery that’s been magnified 10,000 times, you’d know what the scientists fighting foodborne pathogens are up against,” says Blaschek.
“It’s like looking at a moonscape, full of craters and crevices. And many of the pathogens that cause foodborne illness, such as
Shigella, E. coli, and
Listeria, make sticky, sugary biofilms that get down in these crevices, stick like glue, and hang on like crazy.”
According to Blaschek, the problem faced by produce suppliers can be a triple whammy. “If you’re unlucky enough to be dealing with a pathogen–and the pathogen has the additional attribute of being able to form biofilm—and you’re dealing with a food product that’s minimally processed, well, you’re triply unlucky,” the scientist said. “You may be able to scrub the organism off the surface, but the cells in these biofilms are very good at aligning themselves in the subsurface areas of produce.”
Scott Martin, a University of Illinois food science and human nutrition professor agrees,
stating,”Once the pathogenic organism gets on the product, no amount of washing will remove it. The microbes attach to the surface of produce in a sticky biofilm, and washing just isn’t very effective.”
Biofilms can even be found in processed water. Just this month, a study was released in which researchers at the Department of Biological Sciences, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute isolated
M. avium biofilm from the shower head of a woman with
M. avium pulmonary disease.[
25] A molecular technique called DNA fingerprinting demonstrated that
M. avium isolates from the water were the same forms that were causing the woman’s respiratory illness.
