Irradiation best way to end E. coli threat 

Betsy Hart / Scripps Howard News Service 3sep97

The recent move by Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman to recall 25 million pounds of beef that may have been contaminated with the potentially deadly E. coli bacteria terrified hamburger eaters and their mothers everywhere. Naturally, it's led to calls for stricter food safety regulations, and demands that the power of the USDA to oversee food processing be increased.

But now that we've all checked the hamburger in our freezers to make sure that it didn't come from the suspect Hudson foods, it's time to take a longer look at the food safety issue.

The United States has the safest food supply in the world. Still millions of Americans are sickened by food poisoning every year, and thousands die from it.

Given the recent hysteria over just the dozen or so illnesses that led to this recall, it's clear that some folks would be willing to pay an enormous price in terms of dollars and a massively increased government bureaucracy to guarantee that every food processing plant in the country were far cleaner than their mothers' kitchens. And came equipped with a team of inspectors performing expensive tests on all raw meat.

But instead of looking for E. coli and other bacteria, ditching the meat they are found in and hoping all the while that none slips by the "food police," why not eliminate the threat by eliminating E. coli and other dangerous bacteria from raw meat to begin with?

A process called "irradiation" could do just that. According to Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, a respected nonprofit scientific research firm in New York, irradiation is the safest and most effective way of killing food-borne pathogens. An unfortunately scary sounding word, the process simply and quickly uses ionizing energy to pasteurize food in a way that does not change the taste or quality of it, but destroys the dangerous germs it can carry (There is no irradiation "residue" left on the meat as some critics suggest, any more than there is a microwave "residue" on your morning coffee after you've reheated it.)

In fact, irradiation does wonderful things for a host of different foods. It destroys trichina in pork, and salmonella in chicken. Whelan explains that when used on strawberries, it destroys mold spores, allowing the berries to stay fresh up to two weeks. It keeps potatoes from sprouting, delays rotting in bananas, and has similar benefits for many other fruits vegetables, grains and spices. (Though heat pasteurizing is still the most effective method of killing germs and bacteria in dairy products.) Let's not forget that fruits and vegetables have been the source of many recent food scares, including E. coli and other dangerous parasites.

In fact, the USDA itself estimates that for every one dollar spent on irradiation (and it is a very inexpensive process) consumers would get back two dollars because their food would stay fresher longer and they would have fewer illnesses. Irradiation would also translate into healthier eating habits as it would make it much easier to stock fruits and vegetables and keep them fresh at home. Though the USDA has not yet approved the use of irradiation for beef, it has for chicken, pork and some fruits, like strawberries.

So with all these benefits, why isn't irradiation being widely used in the United States? It certainly is overseas. Whelan points out that 40 other countries regularly use it to treat foods like onions, fish, wheat, cereal grains and spices. Japan alone irradiates some 15,000 tons of potatoes a year.

Whelan says the unpopularity of irradiation to date in the United States is not based in science, but is due to anti-technology advocates who circulate unfounded claims that it poses a health hazard. Such groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Health Research Group, a Ralph Nader affiliate, have been instrumental in delaying approval of irradiation for beef, for starters. They've also so scared food processors that few are willing to use it on those products where it's permissible, for fear these advocacy groups will ignite an emotional public backlash over it.

But look, I'm a mom. And I well remember the mothers who stopped school buses to confiscate their kids' lunch boxes during a recent scare about grapes. So there's no doubt in my mind that when moms and other consumers learn about the safety and other benefits of irradiation, the only "consumer backlash" out there is going to be unleashed on the folks who don't use it, or toward the FDA until they allow the expansion of it.

Betsy Hart, a former White House spokesman, is a weekly commentator on MSNBC television news.