You may want to reconsider how you prepare those bagged salads from the grocery store.  Even though the bag says "prewashed," the people who put out Consumer Reports, Consumers' Union, warned today that their independent tests show excess levels of bacteria in the greens.

They measured bacterial load the same way we do in the hospital: in terms of colony forming units on a plate of agar.  Here's a chilling quote: "23% had more than 10,000 colony forming units (CFU) per gram of the bacterium enterococcus."  For example, if urine has more than 100,000 colony forming units, we consider that a bladder infection.  If it was between 10,000 and 100,000, we would have to give a serious thought to antibiotic treatment, in the setting of urinary white blood cells, of course, as the infectious diseases people will tell you.

So this means that if prewashed lettuce were a bladder, we would think about giving antibiotics to clean it up 23% of the time!

Kudos to the always outstanding Consumers' Union, which has done outstanding independent testing for years.

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/food-poisoning/news/20100203/prewashed...