The feds are still looking for the E. coli
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.
By Michael Scherer
Read more: Politics, News, Michael Scherer, Food and Travel
May 1, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- 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."
