As the bacterial outbreaks in Pennsylvania and California show, the USDA's food-safety division has trouble tracking down the slaughterhouses that produce tainted meat.
It all started with Little League baseball players in Napa County, Calif., in early April. Three of them, as young as age 9, ate hamburgers they purchased from snack vendors at the game. They each fell ill, complaining of cramps and diarrhea, classic symptoms of a potentially deadly bacterium known as E. coli O157:H7. Just a few days earlier, five people in four Pennsylvania counties became sick with similar symptoms in an apparently unrelated E. coli case. They had each recently ordered rare and medium-rare steaks at a local restaurant chain, Hoss’s Steak and Sea House.
The two separate E. coli outbreaks subsequently demonstrated both the strengths and ongoing weaknesses of the troubled federal food safety system, which has been under recent scrutiny because rising rates of E. coli sickness. Within weeks, nationwide recalls were announced for nearly 400,000 pounds of meat, and two local meat-processing facilities were temporarily shuttered. But federal food safety inspectors have not yet been able to track down the original slaughterhouses that probably caused the outbreak, leaving open the possibility that more contaminated food is still in the food system. Meanwhile, smaller meat-processing firms that are probably blameless bear the financial brunt of the recalls.
In both cases, state health officials sprang into action shortly after local doctors reported the illnesses. They took DNA samples from the sickened diners and conducted interviews to identify the source of the illnesses. “It’s pretty straightforward epidemiology work,” explained Richard McGarvey, a spokesman for Pennsylvania’s health department. Within a couple of weeks, the California and Pennsylvania agencies had traced the bacteria to meat that passed through two beef-processing facilities, HFX in South Claysburg, Penn., and Richwood Meat Co. in Merced, Calif.
Then the feds took over. The Food Safety and Inspection Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, arranged for voluntary recalls of hundreds of thousands of pounds of meat, which had been distributed by HFX and Richwood to five states. Official press releases were issued naming the facilities and warning consumers to discard the suspect meat. For the public, this is where the story ended. The recall faded from the headlines. The sick recovered. No new illnesses were reported.
But the biggest question remained. Who was responsible for contaminating the recalled beef with deadly bacteria? Meat industry experts agree that HFX and Richwood were almost certainly not the source of the contamination. Unlike many other food-borne illnesses, E. coli outbreaks arise from a very specific source: animal feces, which typically comes into contact with raw meat during the initial slaughtering process, not during the processing of beef into hamburger or steak. The two processing facilities named in the recalls do not slaughter, but instead buy USDA-approved packaged beef directly from other companies. “We don’t have any cow shit in this plant, unless it comes in on the boxed beef that we buy,” explained Tom Smith, the director of quality assurance at HFX.
The real culprits, therefore, are meatpacking companies who have yet to be identified, suggesting that meat contaminated with E. coli may still be in circulation. Nearly a month after the initial sicknesses and more than a week after the meat recalls, a spokesman for FSIS said the agency was still sorting through the list of suppliers that each processing facility used. “It takes some time to get to each of these places and look at the records,” said Steven Cohen, an FSIS spokesman. “We are in the process of doing sampling that is called for to tell us if any of the suppliers is more likely than the others.”
For critics of the meat-inspection system, the delay represents a major flaw in the federal food safety program, which has been rocked in recent months by a pet food scare and a major E. coli outbreak traced to spinach. In January, the Government Accountability Office declared the federal oversight of food safety to be a “high risk area” for the first time, noting that food testing and recall procedures were often flawed and inconsistent.
“The USDA cannot focus all of the enforcement actions on these innocent, downline non-slaughter plants,” says John Munsell, a former meat processor from Montana, who runs an advocacy group called the Foundation for Accountability in Regulatory Enforcement. He hopes the April recalls put more pressure on inspectors to require better supplier records when meat is ground and tested, a change that could allow for more immediate trace-backs. “Justice and equity demand that the noncompliant source plant which introduced the pathogenic bacteria must resolve the problem,” Munsell wrote in a recent e-mail to Salon, “not the downstream plant which is the unwitting destination of contamination.”
The current problems can be traced to USDA regulations first put into place in 1994. Under those rules, small meat processors who mechanically tenderize or grind USDA-approved beef from outside slaughterhouses became legally responsible for any “adulterants” like E. coli in the final product. “Whoever grinds it gets stuck with the problem,” explains Bill Marler, a Seattle trial lawyer who specializes in food poisoning cases. “If the product has E. coli on it, they are on the hook. It is an unfair situation.”
The rules have resulted in inspectors who have historically shown little interest in finding the source of the contamination, with sometimes disastrous results. In 2002, E. coli-contaminated beef from a ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colo., sickened 46 people in 16 states and killed a woman in Ohio. But months before most of the illnesses became apparent, two small meat processors, including a plant run by Munsell, received positive tests for E. coli from boxed beef that had been sent from the Greeley plant. Federal meat inspectors blamed the processing plants and initially refused to trace the contamination back to its source. “Existing policy stated that the grinders should be held accountable for ensuring the product that they purchased was wholesome,” explained the USDA’s inspector general in a damning report about the incident. “FSIS was slow to react.”
In the end, the ConAgra plant recalled at least 18 million pounds of beef for suspected E. coli contamination, though only 3 million pounds were recovered. The inspector general’s report estimated that had federal regulators acted only a week faster, they could have prevented nearly 3.75 million pounds of suspect meat from entering circulation.
Since then, the FSIS has revised its rules, with uncertain results, since most of the trace-backs do not result in public announcements. Under the new rules, processing plants must turn over their supplier records in the event of a recall, and that information is entered into a database to track patterns. Inspectors return to the supplying plants to check records for past positive test results. Inspectors also have the option of requiring more tests from the supplying slaughterhouses. “I just don’t know whether any of it makes a difference,” says Felicia Nestor, a food safety expert at the advocacy group Food & Water Watch. “They say sometimes that they are going back to trace suppliers, but I would have to see it to believe it.”
In the meantime, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the rate of E. coli illness in the United States is again rising, after substantial declines in 2003 and 2004 that were credited to improved slaughtering and testing procedures in meatpacking plants. The reasons for the increase are, according to the CDC, “not known,” but they may be tied to the contamination of other types of food, like spinach or lettuce. Cohen, the FSIS spokesman, said that recent federal beef testing reveals lower rates of E. coli contamination than testing before the ConAgra recall.
For meat processors, however, the impact of an E. coli recall can be devastating. Munsell says the financial stress of the 2002 ConAgra recall forced him to sell his family-run plant. At HFX, for most of the past two weeks, plant officials have been working with federal inspectors to reopen their plant. They have decided to eliminate some of the meat-injection processes, which can push E. coli contamination into the center of a steak from the surface, even though plant officials admit that they have very little control over the meat that they buy from slaughterhouses. HFX officials provided a list of their suppliers to the inspectors but have not heard about any further enforcement actions. “From the questions that they asked, the top priority, to my knowledge, was not to try to isolate where the meat came from,” said Smith, the quality assurance director at HFX.
For Smith, the real lesson of the HFX recall is that consumers should not trust their meat to be safe unless it is fully cooked, a process which kills the E. coli bacteria. “It comes down to personal responsibility when you eat,” said Smith, who recommended against ordering rare or medium-rare beef. “The only way to make this safe is to cook it.”
Barring further improvements at FSIS, that lesson may apply nationwide. Since the suppliers of the E. coli-contaminated beef have yet to be found, the recalls from last month are potentially incomplete. There is, as yet, just no way of knowing how much more contaminated meat remains in the food chain.
Turkeys are flying off the shelves as Cargill races to recall 36 million pounds after a salmonella outbreak in California was tied to the company's poultry.
There may be nothing more viscerally unsettling than the idea that our food is tainted and could make us seriously ill. Those anxieties were stoked this morning when Cargill, the third-largest turkey producer in the country, announced the recall of 36 million pounds of poultry for fear of salmonella contamination. The scare was precipitated by an outbreak in California — which left at least one person dead and more than 70 sick — which was traced back to Cargill’s products. The recall is one of the largest recalls of meat in American history.
What’s particularly alarming is that the salmonella in question is resistant to antibiotics, at a time when drug-resistant bugs, of all stripes, are generating increased public attention. Just as Cargill was pulling its meat off of store shelves, French scientists released a report detailing the emergence of another drug-resistant strain of Salmonella, called “S. Kentucky,” in Europe. (The California strain is “S. Heidelberg.”) S. Kentucky made nearly 500 people sick across the continent between 2000 and 2008, and researchers suspect that it hopped over the pond to the U.S. and Canada.
The threat isn’t only limited to poultry, either. In May, British researchers detected a new type of drug-resistant staph bacteria — MRSA, a well-known menace in hospitals that has more recently spread into non-clinical settings – lurking within milk products.
Taken together, these cases highlight an area of growing concern among scientists and critics of the agricultural industry.
The birth of “super-bugs”
While the source of the current salmonella outbreak remains murky, we can reasonably speculate about the genesis of the bug’s drug-resistance: the reportedly endemic overuse of antibiotics by the agricultural industry.
Drugs are given to livestock for multiple reasons. An obvious one is for the treatment of diseases. When livestock are sick, veterinarians administer a significant dosage in hopes of eliminating the animal’s affliction. Another reason is preventative. Animals in close quarters are more susceptible to infection, so farmers will often administer medicine to healthy animals in order to nip anything nasty in the bud. Most controversially, though, members of the agricultural industry use antibiotics for the express purpose of promoting livestock growth.
It’s a well-known, if not entirely intuitive, fact that healthy animals who are fed small, or “sub-therapeutic,” doses of antibiotics will wind up larger than their unmedicated counterparts. In many such cases, these drugs are given to livestock through their feed or water, and without the prescription or oversight of a veterinarian, according to Dr. Gail Hansen, a senior officer at the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming.
An estimated 80 percent of all antibiotics in the U.S. are given to food-producing livestock, according to the FDA. And approximately 83 percent of that medicine is “administered flock- or herd-wide at low levels for non-therapeutic purposes, such as growth promotion and routine disease prevention,” according to a lawsuit filed against the FDA in May. These figures could have very real consequences for public health, because the Catch-22 of this antibiotic abandon is the widespread development of drug-resistant bacteria, colloquially referred to as “super-bugs.”
“Bacteria can learn to become resistant,” Hansen said. “And when we give low levels of antibiotics, it’s a perfect formula for getting resistant bacteria. [The dosage is] not enough to kill them, and it’s a case of ’whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’”
The drugs used vary, but they are, in many cases, significant to the treatment of human diseases. As the Independent notes:
[T]hree kinds of drugs described by the World Health Organization as ”critically important in human medicine”, are being used on animals as much as 800 percent more than a decade ago, despite a fall in the number of farm livestock.
And the result? According to a report published by the FDA in 2009, nearly 80 percent of the salmonella found in ground turkey meat was resistant to at least one type of antibiotic — while 26 percent were immune to more than three. Overall, the bug appeared in more than 10 percent of all the turkeys tested. And the repercussions, should the practice of using sub-therapeutic doses continue, could be disastrous:
“Doctors will have to go to antibiotics that are more expensive, or have more side-effects,” Hansen said. “And when we keep running into the problem of feeding animals antibiotics that are used to treat human diseases — we’re going to run out of antibiotics.”
In 2006, the European Union banned all use of antibiotics on livestock for growth promotion. And the U.S. Senate will consider similar legislation this year. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., reintroduced the “Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act” last month, which would significantly rein in agricultural drug use, and strictly prohibit the application of sub-therapeutic doses of drugs that have benefits for humans.
Still, the agricultural industry disputes data about its use of antibiotics and the rise of super-bugs, and it has aggressively fought efforts to legislate the matter. As a result, it’s hard to tell how far the legislation might proceed.
What you can do to protect yourself
Dr. Martin Wiedmann, a professor of food science at Cornell University, points out that the most important way to keep yourself safe from a salmonella infection is proper food preparation:
This outbreak wouldn’t have occurred if people would have appropriately cooked and handled raw food in the kitchen. It’s important to reiterate that you need to cook food to the appropriate temperature — which for turkey is 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Always use an accurate meat thermometer to measure the temperature inside the product. You also have to be careful about cross-contamination. When you use utensils or your hands or plates to touch raw product, don’t use them again before washing. Every surface needs to be clean. We are all responsible for public health.
Consumers are advised to check for Cargill products in their homes. The AP has put together this helpful breakdown:
All of the packages recalled include the code “Est. P-963,” according to Cargill, though packages were labeled under many different brands. Many of the recalled meats are under the label Honeysuckle White. Other brands include Riverside Ground Turkey, Natural Lean Ground Turkey, Fit & Active Lean Ground Turkey, Spartan Ground Turkey and Shady Brook Farms Ground Turkey Burgers. The recall also includes ground turkey products packaged under the HEB, Safeway, Kroger, Randall’s, Tom Thumb and Giant Eagle grocery store brands.
A product subject to meat giant Cargill's recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak is shown in Redwood City, Calif., Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2011. Cargill said Wednesday that it is recalling fresh and frozen ground turkey products produced at the company's Springdale, Ark., plant from Feb. 20 through Aug. 2 due to possible contamination from the strain of salmonella linked to the illnesses. The packages were labeled with many different brands, including Honeysuckle White and Kroger. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)(Credit: AP)
Meat giant Cargill is recalling 36 million pounds of turkey after a government hunt for the source of a salmonella outbreak that has killed one person in California and sickened dozens more.
The Agriculture Department and the Minnesota-based company announced Wednesday evening that Cargill is recalling fresh and frozen ground turkey products produced at the company’s Springdale, Ark., plant from Feb. 20 through Aug. 2 due to possible contamination from the strain of salmonella linked to 76 illnesses and the one death.
Illnesses in the outbreak date back to March and have been reported in 26 states coast to coast. Both the Agriculture Department and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are still working to identify the source. Meanwhile, the Agriculture Department has warned consumers to properly cook ground turkey.
Just before the recall announcement Wednesday, CDC epidemiologist Christopher Braden said he thought health authorities were closing in on the suspect. He said some leftover turkey in a package at a victim’s house was confirmed to contain the strain of salmonella linked to the outbreak.
In announcing the recall, Cargill officials said all ground turkey production has been suspended at the Springdale plant until the company is able to determine the source of the contamination.
“Given our concern for what has happened, and our desire to do what is right for our consumers and customers, we are voluntarily removing our ground turkey products from the marketplace,” said Steve Willardsen, president of Cargill’s turkey processing business.
The Minnesota-based company said it was initiating the recall after its own internal investigation, an Agriculture Department investigation and the information about the illnesses released by the CDC this week.
All of the packages recalled include the code “Est. P-963,” according to Cargill. The packages were labeled with many different brands, including Cargill’s Honeysuckle White.
According to food safety attorney Bill Marler, who publishes a database of outbreak statistics, the ground turkey recall is one of the largest meat recalls ever.
A chart on the CDC’s website shows cases have occurred every month since early March, with spikes in May and early June. The latest reported cases were in mid-July, although the CDC said some recent cases may not have been reported yet. The CDC said the strain is resistant to many commonly prescribed antibiotics, which can make treatment more difficult.
The states reporting the highest number sickened are Michigan and Ohio, with 10 each. Texas has reported nine illnesses; Illinois, seven; California, six; and Pennsylvania, five.
Twenty states have one to three reported illnesses linked to the outbreak, according to the CDC. They are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
The CDC estimates that 50 million Americans each year get sick from food poisoning, including about 3,000 who die. Salmonella causes most of these cases, and federal health officials say they’ve made virtually no progress against it.
Government officials say that even contaminated ground turkey is safe to eat if it is cooked to 165 degrees. But it’s also important that raw meat be handled properly before it is cooked and that people wash their hands with soap for at least 20 seconds before and after handling the meat. Turkey and other meats should also be properly refrigerated or frozen and leftovers heated.
The most common symptoms of salmonella are diarrhea, abdominal cramps and fever within eight to 72 hours of eating a contaminated product. It can be life-threatening to some with weakened immune systems.
Cargill executive Willardsen said, “Public health and the safety of consumers cannot be compromised.”
“It is regrettable that people may have become ill from eating one of our ground turkey products,” he said, “and, for anyone who did, we are truly sorry.”
The police are not here to deal with your delivery mix-up.
How many times has this happened to you? You go home and try to enjoy a nice dinner of Chinese food delivery. But when your meal arrives, they’ve got the order completely wrong!
Do you:
A) Call back the restaurant and ask for a refund;
B) Just eat the food and promise to deal with it next time;
C) Call the police
If you answered C, you are not alone. A woman in Savannah, Ga., called 911 to rectify her dinner order yesterday. This was the result:
Sadly, these kinds of calls aren’t as uncommon as you might think. In March 2009 a woman called the police after being given the wrong order of McNuggets at McDonald’s.
Regardless, it’s 2011 now and we’re all grown-ups. That doesn’t mean we expand our 911 repertoires to calling in about botched Chinese food orders. It means that we stop tying up the police phone line unless we actually have an emergency that doesn’t involve a delivery service.
Even short of a catastrophic meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, serious questions remain about the ongoing crisis’s effect on health, particularly with food exposed to radioactive material. Officials have warned about contaminated spinach and milk. Now, hauls of fish pulled in by commercial fishermen near the plant are showing amounts of radioactive iodine-131 double current standards — prompting the Japanese government to regulate radiation levels in seafood. How worried should people be?
Salon talked to Stephen Frantz, director of the Reed College Research Reactor, about the threat.
What does radiation in food do to people?
When you ingest radioactive material, as the material decays, some of the radiation will hit the cells in your body and perhaps do damage and increase the chances of cancer — if there’s a sufficient amount of materials. “Radioactive” does not mean it’s deadly or dangerous. We’ve been eating radioactive materials all our throughout human history. It’s the levels you have to worry about.
At what level does radioactive material become dangerous to consume?
Governments set standards such that if you were to eat that food all of your life, there would be no observable health effects. When the food in Japan is exceeding that limit by just a little, or even a factor of two — if you eat it for a month or two, it’s probably not dangerous. If someone eats one fish that was too high, it’s not like it’s a death sentence. Nobody in the U.S. should be concerned at all.
Is radiation in food a bigger threat than radioactive particles in the air or water?
Yes, it’s the long-term accumulation of the materials in the body that’s probably the bigger risk. If you stand in the rain, you were exposed for a couple of minutes. If you eat the food, the material will stay in you — maybe for years.
Are there certain foods that are more likely to pose a health hazard due to radiation?
Milk is probably the highest risk. At Chernobyl, the biggest health effect was from radioactive material deposited on the grass. Cows ate the grass. Outside of the plant, the biggest death toll was children who drank the milk. If they had dumped the milk or put the animals on stored feed or something like that, it would’ve saved hundreds of lives there. I’m glad to see the Japanese are at least forthcoming enough to say don’t drink this milk, don’t eat this food, don’t do the fish.
Is there anything you can do to clean radioactive food or otherwise render it safe?
I don’t think heat, washing or brushing helps. It depends mostly on the half-life. If it’s radioactive iodine, which has a half-life of about eight days, then if you wait enough days there will be almost nothing there. The thumb rule that radiation protection people use is ten half-lives; but ten half-lives on eight days means you’re waiting three months. The trouble with milk is cesium, and the cesium half-life is 30 years. You’re going to have to dump the milk.
The Food and Drug Administration will hear a panel today to examine a possible link between artificial food coloring and hyperactivity in children. Though no one actually expects the FDA to ban the dyes, the panel provides a great opportunity for reporters to dig up hand-wringing parents … and strike fear into the hearts of many more.
According to the New York Times, the petitioner, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is seeking either an outright ban or, at the very least, a prominent warning label. European companies have had to put warning labels on artificially colored products for years, and many have switched to natural dyes, such as from beets. Should the U.S. follow suit?
The dye debate has been raging since the 1970s, with very little conclusive evidence to settle for either side once and for all. The FDA previously stated that there was no reason to fear the dyes, but since the use of artificial coloring has skyrocketed in recent years, scientists have been examining this claim, with little success. The most convincing evidence comes from a 2007 study headed by University of Southampton professor Jim Stevenson. In the study, children were fed a daily fruit juice containing different concentrations of dyes and the preservative sodium benzoate, and noted a small effect on behavior. It isn’t clear whether the dyes, the preservative or the combination caused the effect.
Basically, scientists don’t know what the cause of hyperactivity is, but children are still going cuckoo. FDA scientists released a report speculating that while many children are probably not adversely affected, those already with conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have their behavior problems exacerbated. In all probability, the two-day panel will conclude that it needs more research to reach any conclusions.
It’s tempting, of course, to try to finger a culprit for a disorder that affects a large number of children, even if the science doesn’t support it. Faced with uncomfortable ambiguity, the Times found a concerned mother to weigh in on the debate:
Renee Shutters, a mother of two from Jamestown, N.Y., said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that two years ago, her son Trenton, then 5, was having serious behavioral problems at school until she eliminated artificial food colorings from his diet. “I know for sure I found the root cause of this one because you can turn it on and off like a switch,” Ms. Shutters said.
NPR’s “Morning Edition,” meanwhile, found its own worried mother of a hyperactive child to refute the claim. After her daughter used blankets to slide down the stairs, Christine Woodman adopted a familiar mantra:
“What is natural is good; what isn’t natural was bad,” she remembers.
On the advice of friends, Christine decided to start by cutting out foods with artificial coloring, but Dawnielle didn’t really go for it. She missed her favorite oatmeal with little red-colored dinosaurs in it. Christine tried a substitute. “You know, I made the oatmeal with blueberries and soymilk and thought you would be happy with it,” she says to Dawnielle.
For Dawnielle, however, the problem was only solved once she was diagnosed by a doctor and given Ritalin.
So, despite the media’s best efforts, even the anecdotal evidence is inconclusive.
“Dyes are often used to make junk food more attractive to young children, or to simulate the presence of a healthful fruit or other natural ingredient,” Jacobson said. “Dyes would not be missed in the food supply except by the dye manufacturers.”
Even so, the dyes alone are not the main attraction. Sure, kids might enjoy the rainbow hue of Lucky Charms cereal, but we all know they’re really in it for the marshmallows, no matter what color they are. Ultimately, artificial dyes are the media’s hot new distraction from the real target. Eliminate dyes, and you’re still left with highly processed, sugary foods that pretty clearly increase your child’s hyperactive behavior. They’ll just be a little less colorful.
Turkeys are flying off the shelves as Cargill races to recall 36 million pounds after a salmonella outbreak in California was tied to the company's poultry. 
A product subject to meat giant Cargill's recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak is shown in Redwood City, Calif., Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2011. Cargill said Wednesday that it is recalling fresh and frozen ground turkey products produced at the company's Springdale, Ark., plant from Feb. 20 through Aug. 2 due to possible contamination from the strain of salmonella linked to the illnesses. The packages were labeled with many different brands, including Honeysuckle White and Kroger. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)(Credit: AP) 
The police are not here to deal with your delivery mix-up. 
