Tag Archives: Adulterant

A magazine report still isn’t peer-review: Times wants Salmonella an adulterant

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Americans, according to this editorial in the N.Y. Times, eat more than 50 pounds of beef per person each year. That’s a lot of beef. It’s also a lot of risk, because about half — or more than two billion pounds — is ground beef, which can too easily harbor dangerous bacteria.

beef.processingA report, issued by Consumer Reports with the Pew Charitable Trusts, said that between 2003 and 2012, 1,144 people grew sick from beef contaminated with E. coli O157; 316 people were hospitalized and five people died.

The editorial says the Agriculture Department, which now allows beef to have salmonella in up to 7.5 percent of samples, should instead label it an “adulterant,” which would restrict it further. The industry needs to further curb its use of antibiotics for cattle, which contributes to development of drug-resistant bacteria. And cattle feed regulated by the F.D.A. should not include residue from chicken coops and other contaminants.

Government knew about salmonella at Cargill; should have warned public earlier

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Federal officials said in recent days that they turned up a dangerous form of salmonella at a Cargill Inc. turkey plant last year, and then four times this year at stores selling the Cargill turkey, but didn’t move for a recall until an outbreak killed one person and sickened 77 others.

Bill Tomson of The Wall Street Journal reports Cargill and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the recall of ground turkey from the Cargill plant in Springdale, Ark., on Aug. 3. The USDA said the third-largest meat recall in history affected 36 million pounds of ground turkey.

Food-safety specialists said the delay reflected a gap in federal rules that don’t treat salmonella as a poisonous contaminant, even if inspectors find antibiotic-resistant forms such as the Heidelberg strain implicated in the latest outbreak.

"We have constraints when it comes to salmonella," said Elisabeth Hagen, the USDA’s top food-safety official, in an interview. She said that unlike E. coli, salmonella isn’t officially considered a dangerous adulterant in meat unless that meat is directly tied to an illness or death.

Meat plants are expected to pass a performance standard that allows up to 49.9% of tests to come back positive for salmonella. A Cargill spokesman said the Arkansas plant has passed all USDA performance standards despite what he called "routine" findings of salmonella Heidelberg.

Government agencies were "clearly too slow" in informing the public that there was a contamination in ground turkey, said Doug Powell, Kansas State University professor of food safety. He said the USDA should have contacted Cargill earlier about the contaminated store samples.

The USDA didn’t contact Cargill about suspected contamination of ground turkey until July 29, officials said.

I also told reporter Tomson, but it didn’t make it into the story, that Cargill and its customers – in this case Kroger – should be doing their own testing and striving for continuous reduction in salmonella levels, from farm to processing. For Cargill to say it met government standards is like Ford saying its Pinto automobiles, which had a tendency to blow up when struck from behind, met all government standards. Government standards for food is are minimum, the lowest common denominator. Consumers should demand that food folks do better, but they can’t because food safety is not marketed at retail.
 

Non-O157 STEC meeting

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US Food Safety and Inspection Service is co-hosting a public meeting on non-O157 E. coli tomorrow.

FSIS’s press release from October states: "Currently only one strain, E. coli O157:H7 is considered an adulterant in meat. The CDC has reported an increase in the number of non-O157:H7 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) infections from 2000 to 2005. Outbreaks from these organisms have been reported in the U.S. since 1990, and foodborne exposures have been suspected in many of these outbreaks.
The purpose of the meeting is to solicit input from academia, consumers, other public health and regulatory agencies and industry on the issue of whether non-O157:H7 STECs should be considered to be adulterants as E. coli O157:H7."

This meeting strikes me as a cool thing — publicly discussing whether to increase the adulterant list in an open and transparent way.  This meeting has led to us to pull together a selection of non-O157 outbreaks (not just the STEC ones), which can be found below, and the USDA has posted a table of 13 non-O157 STEC outbreaks (page 40), which we have reproduced below.

Wonder how the conagra pot-pie outbreak recall/non-recall would have played out had strains of Salmonella been declared adulterants, or if the Topps outbreak driven recall would have changed if  E. coli O157:H7 wasn’t an adulterant.

For barfblog readers in the D.C. area the public meeting will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007, from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., at the George Mason University Arlington campus, 3401 N. Fairfax Drive, Room 244, Arlington, Va., 22201.