I have a question. If E.Coli is present how would one contract it? If you have e.coli in the bag, would cooking/washing the food get rid of the possibility of it?
Not necessarily. It takes just a very few bacteria to cause an infection.
E Coli is present in the bowels of animals, mainly cattle, where it does them no harm. (There are theories out there that if they ate grass like they were supposed to, instead of cheaper "grain", E Coli bacteria wouldn't have evolved like it has. There are different strains of E Coli, but 0157:H7, the one commonly found in hamburger, produce and petting zoos is the deadliest. It can cause kidney failure, stroke and even death.) If during the slaughter process the contents of the animals' bowels gets on or ground into the meat, then it stays there to comes home to you.
Once home, just a drop of the bloody meat on the counter is enough to be transmitted and cause illness. Making hamburgers with bare hands using contaminated meat, as one could imagine, could spread it to all kinds of places - a dish towel, countertops, sink handles, cabinet handles, etc, if one's not careful about not touching things with adulterated meat on their hands.
Even if one is careful about handling contaminated raw meat, eating is a whole other ball of wax. In theory, meat needs to be cooked to 160 degrees in order to kill bacteria. But whether this is an exact science is highly questionable, as people still get E Coli illnesses even when food is cooked "properly".
Once ingested, they settle in your bowels, grow there, and give you a nasty GI infection. The scary part about 0157:H7 has a toxin that releases into the bloodstream as it dies off. This causes a cascade of problems in the body involving clumping of red blood cells which then travel through organs and cause big problems there, kidney failure, or hemolytic uremic syndrome, being the most common, especially in children and the elderly (as if the extremely painful illness isn't enough).
Many times when there's an illness, it's not known exactly how the illness was contracted, but studies have been done in actual microbiology labs to try to prevent spread of infection of E Coli using techniques a typical homemaker would use, and microbiologists were unable to prevent the spread of E Coli around the "kitchen". If they couldn't, that's a big problem for the rest of us. FYI E Coli also survives the freezing process.
When there's an "outbreak", they actually go in and study the DNA of the bacteria [that's come out of people] in order to identify other cases and a
source, as you see recalls when there are a large number of cases. And yes, cases in an outbreak came from one source, ie one cow, maybe another, whose bowel contents spilled on the meat during the slaughter process and was never caught via testing of said meat (which is another ball of wax, most don't test in the first place, yet there you have a USDA stamp on the package saying it's safe to eat).
An important point to ponder is that a recall is a failure of the system. We basically shouldn't be seeing recalls if food was inspected and tested properly. Food safety needs an overhaul, and there are people working on it, but the process is slow, and unfortunately people are getting sick and dying from food in the meantime.
As for things like produce, cookie dough, petting zoos, raw milk, again, the bacteria is transmitted by the fecal-oral route, which means that animals' stool contents are eaten, basically, as gross as that sounds. Produce is washed with water that may have been runoff from fields where animals are; petting zoos, well, animals get stool on their fur when they lay down and we touch them then touch our mouths (which is why they have Purell now at most petting zoo stations), and cookie dough, last I checked, is still unknown how E Coli got in there (but it had to come from stool somehow), and raw milk gets bacteria in it during the milking process and then is not pasteurized.
If all this makes you really nervous, you shouldn't. It's very rare. But it is around and it is increasing. Everyone needs to know how to protect themselves from it. It is spread very easily, and person to person transmission via the fecal-oral route is high once someone's harboring the bacteria in their system.
A word about hamburger. Be very careful about it. It's usually the culprit in an outbreak. Ground beef is made from cheap cuts of meat that may come from different cows and all ground together without testing of individual components. Often it is then washed with ammonia to kill off any E Coli that might be present, and again, not tested before sending out to consumers. If it's "undercooked" (and not just meaning with pink centers), you win the illness. Steaks and other muscle cuts are usually (but not always) safe because if there is bacteria on the outside of the meat, it will probably be cooked off. With hamburger, the inside isn't always cooked enough to kill it.
The only other thing I want to add, is that I've seen people say they're going to buy steaks and have their butcher ground them themselves, etc. You will still have a potential problem if there's E Coli on the outside of that steak, it is then ground into the inside, and it's not cooked thoroughly. You also have the handling issue of contaminated beef. I've also seen people say they're going to buy organic beef, but that can be an issue as well. They're rare, but organic farms do have E Coli outbreaks, and Whole Foods even had an E Coli 0157:H7 outbreak recently which at first they denied ("not us!"), but DNA testing confirmed it was from them. Turns out their grass fed, well loved cows were slaughtered at one of the nastiest slaughterhouses our country has when the facility they normally use was closed down, and consumers were unaware. So you just basically have to be very careful about eating beef.
(Which is why I'd tend to be skeptical about these findings, especially if it was commissioned by the plastics industry, lol .) 
If this were really a problem I think we would see a jump in such illnesses in countries that use the bags often.
