Pounds of meat recalled for E.coli contamination through July '02
WASHINGTON -- The Agriculture Department, barred by a court order from shutting down meat plants when it detects salmonella in their products, said it would use high salmonella levels as a guide to identify problem facilities and take action against them in other ways.
A federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled in December that the USDA lacked legal authority to shut down plants where its tests showed high levels of salmonella, a potentially dangerous bacterium causing food poisoning. Rather than appeal the ruling, the USDA developed a new policy for responding when its inspectors find high salmonella levels in a particular plant's meat. The detailed procedures were released this week.
The USDA said while it can't shut the plant down for high salmonella levels, the various reviews triggered by the salmonella tests could lead them to other problems at the plant, allowing them to close it.
Consumer advocates said the plan -- which involves a lot of letter-writing -- doesn't have the teeth to force companies to improve. "There is no certainty of an action to be taken by a set time," said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America. Ms. Foreman said testing can take months to complete and "during this time the company is going to turn out meat stamped 'USDA Approved.' "
The American Meat Institute, an industry trade group based in Washington, D.C., said the plan makes only some procedural changes. "We agree with the way the department has characterized its current view of positive test results under the Salmonella performance standard. They are like a noise under the hood that suggests a need to take a closer look," said Janet Riley, an AMI spokeswoman.
Salmonella bacteria are found in feces and can contaminate meat during processing. Infection can cause diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps, and the bacteria infects about 1.4 million people a year. The USDA's plan comes after a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report in June found that 47 people in five states were sickened this spring by a strain of salmonella that had become resistant to some antibiotics.
Under its new policy, the USDA said inspectors should immediately report high salmonella test results to their supervisor, who will write a letter to the plant about the problems. Inspectors would also check the plant's inspection system, called a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP, to see if part of it isn't working.
Every plant has a different HACCP plan and plants can change their HACCP plans. If a second round of tests again finds salmonella, the supervisor will send another letter to the plant asking them to fix the problem. After the plant has tried to fix the problem a team of USDA inspectors will again check the plant's system in a so-called in-depth verification review, which is more intensive than a normal evaluation, and decide if more tests are needed.
If a third set of tests still find high levels of salmonella, the supervisor will write another letter and again check the plant's HACCP system to see where it isn't working and see if more tests are again necessary and if other action can be taken.
Why did it take three months for Con-Agra Foods Inc. to recall potentially tainted meat?
The answer has to do with the way meat recalls are made, a procedure that is now under review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Flaws in the process are highlighted by the ConAgra case -- a recall of 19 million pounds so tardy that most of the meat in question had already been consumed.
Starting in mid-April, the Omaha-based company detected a virulent E. coli strain -- O157:H7 -- in some meat produced on 24 separate days at its Greeley, Colo., plant. Federal meat inspectors are stationed in the plant, but it isn't clear when senior USDA officials learned about the pattern. The USDA sounded no alarm until June 30 and took 19 more days before it persuaded ConAgra to launch the nation's second-largest meat recall.
The recall applied to meat sold as far back as April, but shoppers typically consume ground beef within a few days of buying it. The official toll: 29 people sick in eight states, including five children with permanent kidney damage. (E. coli can be killed if meat is thoroughly cooked; see article2.)
"Our customers have returned to us hardly anything -- less than hundreds of pounds," says Barry F. Scher, a spokesman for Giant Food Inc., which operates 188 supermarkets on the East Coast. At Kroger Co., asked about the amount of ground beef returned to the chain's 2,429 supermarkets, spokesman Gary Rhodes says: "It is a very, very small amount."
A big reason for the delayed effect is that current rules call for the USDA to move into action only when it becomes clear that E. coli has escaped a meatpacking plant. Thus, the tests on 24 separate days that showed batches with the E. coli infection at the ConAgra cattle-slaughtering plant weren't enough for the government to alert the public. It was only when the pathogen was detected in a random test outside the plant -- and on the way to consumers -- that regulators acted. Those procedures are now under review.
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Pounds of meat recalled for E.coli contamination through July '02 |
E. coli O157:H7 lives in cattle manure, which can fall into meat during the slaughtering process. In healthy adults, the bacterium causes bloody diarrhea but children are at much greater risk. In 1993, an outbreak tied to Jack in the Box Inc.'s hamburgers sickened hundreds of people and killed four children. The following year, the Clinton administration responded by beginning random tests.
Last year, the USDA announced 19 E. coli recalls, up from three in 1994. But the actions have come too late to recover most of the meat. Only 14% of the meat recalled since 1998 for E. coli contamination was actually retrieved, according to data supplied by the Food Safety and Inspection Service, the USDA branch responsible for meat safety.
"We are seeing more recalls but not less E. coli cases in humans," says Michael P. Doyle, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that E. coli O157:H7 continues to sicken about 73,000 people a year, a rate health officials think has changed little since the early 1990s.
In the most recent outbreak, public-health authorities say that many of the victims were infected by the bacterium weeks before the government raised its first public alarm. Even after a government laboratory confirmed the presence of E. coli on June 19 in a sample of meat randomly collected from one of ConAgra's customers, the USDA waited 10 days to confront ConAgra. The agency has apologized publicly for that delay.
TRACKING THE OUTBREAK
Meat producers generally test some of their ground beef for E. coli at the behest of several fast-food chains and retailers. Since the Jack in the Box outbreak, the government also tests for E. coli inside meatpacking plants, or lets the companies do the testing on its behalf, which is the case with ConAgra. Some testing experts estimate that the meatpacking industry screens roughly 15% of its ground beef.
The hardest problem is getting accurate test results in time to do any good. Today's testing procedures take days, and meatpackers typically ship the vast majority of their meat untested. If they waited, the shelf life of their product would shrink.
E. coli O157:H7 is hard to find. It is easily mistaken for other organisms, and just 10 E. coli bacteria in one gram of meat is dangerous to children. But the quickest type of test -- based on antibody technology -- won't reliably detect a problem unless there are roughly 100,000 organisms present in the sample.
One of the most popular rapid tests is Reveal. Its maker, Neogen Corp. of Lansing, Mich., instructs users to incubate the sample for at least eight hours in order to increase the E. coli population to a detectable level. Any positive sample is then subjected to elaborate laboratory analysis.
ConAgra uses the Reveal test and then takes two days to confirm with additional lab work whether its beef is contaminated, says company spokesman Jim Herlihy. Until the recall, ConAgra didn't wait for results before shipping out much of its ground beef and the scraps it supplied to other companies. ConAgra says that it now tests every lot of meat used to make ground beef at its six cattle-slaughter plants and that it waits to ship the meat until it gets a full laboratory report.
The move reduces the shelf life of its hamburger by a few days. Industry executives say it isn't clear whether other meatpackers intend to follow suit.
ConAgra's tests began to detect a problem in the Greeley plant on April 12, and its employees detected the E. coli pathogen on 24 different days in at least one lot, the company says. A lot is equal to roughly 10,000 pounds of meat.
ConAgra stored only the lots it tested. If a lot eventually was confirmed to have the pathogen, ConAgra destroyed the lot or heated the meat at a high enough temperature to kill the organism so it could be used in cooked products. The untested lots, however, left the meatpacking plant as quickly as they were produced. Federal rules require only that a meatpacker withhold from circulation the raw ground beef it knows to contain E. coli O157:H7.
It was only after the Centers for Disease Control learned July 8 of an E. coli outbreak in people that the USDA persuaded ConAgra to recall the untested lots of meat produced on days in which any E. coli was found inside the Greeley plant.
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