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XL bails, to be managed by JBS after E. coli mess

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Food safety ain’t simple, it’s hard.

So over a month after reports of illness and E. coli O157 positive samples started rolling in, weeks of outrage, political incompetence, condescending statements and corporate silence, and barely a mention of the sick people, the owners of the XL plant in Alberta have decided food safety is hard, and agreed to be managed by Brazilian-owned JBS USA.

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 president Doug O’Halloran told the Globe and Mail, “I think that, initially, it’s a good thing. I’ve been saying from the beginning that they either need new management or new ownership, because the Nilsson brothers were obviously out of their league in running this company.”

So if they were out of their league, why didn’t those 40 inspectors and six veterinarians notice over the years?

Apparently the Americans noticed.

The Ottawa Citizen reports inspectors with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) sent a series of audit reports to the CFIA between 2003 and 2008 detailing deficiencies they had found at Canadian processing plants, including XL Foods facilities.

These audit reports list findings at XL Foods plants that included sloppy record-keeping, equipment held together by duct tape and, in one case, a gruesome scene of animal blood dripping into edible meat products.

One audit in 2003 found non-compliance with food safety procedures serious enough that the company was temporarily delisted as an approved exporter to the U.S.

XL Foods did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Richard Arsenault, the agency’s director of the CFIA’s meat programs division, cautioned against reading too much into findings in the U.S. audits, stating,

“The writing of these reports often lends itself to conclusions that don’t reflect the overall system. Making sure everything is impeccably clean all the time is not the easiest thing to do. Plants are always going to have challenges.”

Good to know CFIA is on the job.

Three years ago, Brian and Lee Nilsson paid $145 million US to buy the Brooks packing facility and adjacent feedlot and fertilizer operations that made Edmonton-based XL Foods Inc. Canada’s largest domestically owned meat processor.

But amid the country’s biggest ever beef recall, the brothers are now handing the keys for their shuttered plant to multinational protein processer JBS USA, and offering to sell those assets, plus a packing plant in Nebraska and two other closed facilities in Calgary and Nampa, Idaho, to the industry giant for just $100 million US.

According to Meatingplace.com, beef industry experts saw JBS USA’s deal to first manage the Alberta, Canada XL Foods plant embroiled in a massive recall, then possibly purchase four plants, a feedlot and farmland for $100 million, as a brilliant stroke with very little downside.

“Its flat-out like finding a diamond ring and it fits your hand,” said one U.S. beef processing executive, noting the plants JBS stands to gain are modern facilities that will take little to no investment to continue operations. “Its as big a coup as I’ve seen in a long time. …

If anyone had the opportunity to buy 45 percent of all the beef in Canada in one afternoon without bidding against another company, I’d say that’s a hell of a deal,” said the beef industry executive, estimating the properties could have commanded $200 million or even $300 million before the recall.”

XL bails, to be managed by JBS after E. coli mess

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Food safety ain’t simple, it’s hard.

So over a month after reports of illness and E. coli O157 positive sample started rolling in, weeks of outrage, political incompetence, condescending statements and corporate silence, and barely a mention of the sick people, the owners of the XL plant in Alberta have decided food safety is hard, and agreed to be managed by Brazilian-owned JBS USA.

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 president Doug O’Halloran told the Globe and Mail, “I think that, initially, it’s a good thing. I’ve been saying from the beginning that they either need new management or new ownership, because the Nilsson brothers were obviously out of their league in running this company.”

So if they were out of their league, why didn’t those 40 inspectors and six veterinarians notice over the years?

Apparently the Americans noticed.

The Ottawa Citizen reports inspectors with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) sent a series of audit reports to the CFIA between 2003 and 2008 detailing deficiencies they had found at Canadian processing plants, including XL Foods facilities.

These audit reports list findings at XL Foods plants that included sloppy record-keeping, equipment held together by duct tape and, in one case, a gruesome scene of animal blood dripping into edible meat products.

One audit in 2003 found non-compliance with food safety procedures serious enough that the company was temporarily delisted as an approved exporter to the U.S.

XL Foods did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Richard Arsenault, the agency’s director of the CFIA’s meat programs division, cautioned against reading too much into findings in the U.S. audits, stating,

“The writing of these reports often lends itself to conclusions that don’t reflect the overall system. Making sure everything is impeccably clean all the time is not the easiest thing to do. Plants are always going to have challenges.”

Mediocrity rises in Canada; despite E. coli scandal, it’s business as usual for XL Foods

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André Picard, the long-time health reporter for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, writes this morning that XL Foods, whose unsanitary, licence-violating practices over five days resulted in at least 15 people being poisoned with E. coli and sparked the largest red-meat recall in Canadian history, plans to be back in the slaughtering business by week’s end and shipping meat to stores again within 10 days.

By all appearances, there will be no fines, no sanctions, no extra scrutiny, no public inquiry.

Don’t we teach our children that, when you screw up, there are consequences?

Apparently that is not the case in Canadian agribusiness.

Instead, we are supposed to feel sorry for XL Foods because its infamous Establishment 58 was shut down for three weeks while it cleaned out the crap – literally, not just figuratively – and mopping-up operations were carried out across the country.

More than 2,000 food products were recalled in every province and territory. It is dumb luck, more than anything else, that so few people became seriously ill.

Gerry Ritz, the federal Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, whose job – presumably – is to ensure the safety of the Canadian food supply, seems to think that we should prostrate ourselves before the cattle and beef industry.

On the weekend, when XL Foods laid off 2,000 workers – a gesture that was arguably aimed at putting political pressure on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to speed up its work so production could resume – Mr. Ritz took the bait whole hog.

“My thoughts are with the workers and the community affected,” he said.

The comments were eerily similar to those of the company’s co-CEO Brian Nilsson: “XL Foods is committed to the cattle industry, our employees, the city of Brooks and all affected by the idling of the Brooks facility.”

Clearly, the two protagonists in the sad affair can’t bring themselves to utter the c-word – consumer.

Shouldn’t consumer safety, not restarting the production line, be the paramount concern?

There have also been attempts to pass the buck to consumers. Repeatedly we have been told that E. coli is not a threat if you cook your meat properly.

That is not entirely true. In 1994, the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service reclassified E. coli as an “adulterant” that is not allowed in food. This change occurred after four children died and 600 other people were sickened by E. coli after eating Jack in the Box burgers. The beef was cooked but not enough to kill the pathogen.

“Just cook it doesn’t cut it,” says Doug Powell, a professor at Kansas State University who tracks food safety problems on his blog, barfblog.com.

Business as usual shouldn’t cut it either.

Or as Pat Atkinson of the Star Phoenix wrote this morning, Ministerial mediocrity seems to have risen to a new level in Canada.

Talk is cheap; XL wants to talk food safety, prove it

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Over a month after E. coli O157 was linked to XL Foods, a slaughterhouse in Alberta, and sickened at least 12 people across Canada, one of the owners has finally made a public appearance and said sorry, it won’t happen again.

I want to know who stocks XL meat so next time I’m in North America, I’ll know not to buy it.

Michael McCain may have been praised for his risk communication prowess during the Listeria outbreak of 2008 that killed 23, but basic food safety risk analysis is that it takes good assessment, management and communication to deliver safe food; fail at one, fail at all. Maple Leaf screwed up at the assessment and management part, which made their communications lame (despite lotsa praise from people with lips firmly planted). I won’t buy Maple Leaf.

XL, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the inspectors’ union, outside auditors, buyers, retailers, and pretty much anyone involved in the Alberta-based outbreak have failed at assessment, management and communication.

According to Sarah Schmidt, a contrite Brian Nilsson, who along with his brother Lee serve as co-chief executive officers of Canada’s largest beef processing company, told Postmedia News this means XL Foods will invest whatever is needed to make sure the food safety gaps at the plant never recur.

He spoke just as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency announced the company was able to resume limited operations at its Brooks, Alta. facility. Nilsson called the development “a strong first step to moving back to a more normalized operation” after CFIA suspended the plant’s licence on Sept. 27.

“We absolutely take full responsibility and apologize to all those affected,” Nilsson said. “We’re totally committed to making sure that this doesn’t happen again and investing and doing what is necessary to bring that forward.”

Nilsson and his brother have stayed under the radar until now, nearly a month after CFIA announced the first recall of XL beef products on Sept. 16. It has since ballooned to over 1,800 products, many sold under the store brand of some of Canada’s largest retailers and grocers. Nilsson, who has weathered blistering attacks in the press for remaining mum for so long, admitted the sweeping recall and related  E. coli cases came “very much” as a surprise to him because he thought the plant had rigorous safety protocols in place.

“We had an extensive testing program in the plant and it really was a surprise to us,” Nilsson told Postmedia.

Then do what Maple Leaf and the vaunted Michael McCain never did; stop hiding behind government inspection; make food safety data public rather than keep it hidden; advocate for labeling on needle tenderized roasts and steaks, and install video to prove that your employees are doing what you say they do.

Food safety culture is key for XL; but these comments are great

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I don’t know Alex Stanoprud but he writes in the Montreal Gazette this morning as someone who has worked for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency his entire career,

“I wanted to set the record straight on the recall of contaminated beef from the XL Foods plant in Alberta.

“Readers should know that E. coli contamination comes from excrement. When animals are slaughtered, there is excrement on their hides. (Go to any farm and you will see animals with some excrement on them.) If precautions are not taken during the removal of the hide in the slaughtering process, the excrement can be spread from the hide to the meat carcass.

“The article “Butchers troubled by recall” (Gazette, Oct. 2) quotes a Montreal restaurateur who says that because the beef he serves is kosher, it is less likely to have E. coli contamination. But kosher practices for slaughtering animals have nothing to do with how the hide of the animal is taken off. The same abattoir, same personnel, and same way of removing the hides and the intestinal tract, are involved.

“Comments by the head of the union that represents federal meat inspectors, suggesting more inspectors are needed to prevent such outbreaks, are misleading. Of course the union wants the government to hire more inspectors; that will put more revenue into the union coffers. But an increase in the number of inspectors does not mean more contamination will be discovered.

“Can an inspector identify a steak that has been contaminated? Absolutely not. Can the inspector take samples? Yes, but in all likelihood that one contaminated steak will be missed in his or her sample-taking. There is no way that even an army of inspectors can detect bacteria on a product once it gets there. Testing will give a snapshot of bacterial conditions, but it will not prevent food-borne illness unless you test every piece — and that’s impossible.

“The U.S. and Canadian inspection agencies are aware of this fact. That is why they have introduced a system called Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points for meat plants. Under HACCP, inspectors use a document that contains a checklist of items that need to be evaluated in order to determine whether companies have, and use, all the necessary recourses to prevent food contamination. In the case of the XL Foods contamination, we can only assume that this system failed. Why? We can only speculate that neither the company nor the inspectors did their job.

So let me set the record straight. The problem has nothing to do with whether meat is fresh or frozen, whether it is organic, or whether it is kosher. And it not merely through more testing — and definitely not through the hiring of more inspectors — that we will prevent foodborne illness. The solution is for Ottawa to send qualified auditors into the plants on a regular basis, to see if the companies, and the inspectors, are doing their job.

All of a sudden there is an outbreak and a team of experts from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is being sent to find the culprit. Maybe, instead of adding more inspectors and spending taxpayers’ dollars to no avail, this team should have a permanent place in the industry.”

Our version on this is available here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956713512004409?v=s5

Food Control

D.A. Powell, S. Erdozain, C. Dodd, R. Costa, K. Morley, B.J. Chapman

Abstract

Internal and external food safety audits are conducted to assess the safety and quality of food including on-farm production, manufacturing practices, sanitation, and hygiene. Some auditors are direct stakeholders that are employed by food establishments to conduct internal audits, while other auditors may represent the interests of a second-party purchaser or a third-party auditing agency. Some buyers conduct their own audits or additional testing, while some buyers trust the results of third-party audits or inspections. Third-party auditors, however, use various food safety audit standards and most do not have a vested interest in the products being sold. Audits are conducted under a proprietary standard, while food safety inspections are generally conducted within a legal framework. There have been many foodborne illness outbreaks linked to food processors that have passed third-party audits and inspections, raising questions about the utility of both. Supporters argue third-party audits are a way to ensure food safety in an era of dwindling economic resources. Critics contend that while external audits and inspections can be a valuable tool to help ensure safe food, such activities represent only a snapshot in time. This paper identifies limitations of food safety inspections and audits and provides recommendations for strengthening the system, based on developing a strong food safety culture, including risk-based verification steps, throughout the food safety system.

11 sick; E. coli outbreak in Canada grows, plant wants to reopen

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With 11 people now confirmed sick from E. coli O157 linked to XL beef, and the plant wanting to reopen, the whole incident demonstrates the rise of mediocrity in Canada.

Strive to be excellently OK.

And that’s not good enough for people who got sick, especially the little kids.

And the Canadian Food Inspection Agency? They’re going to do a walk through of the plant, apparently with magic goggles that can see bacteria, as part of a “pre-resumption of operation inspection.”

This is systemic failure all around.

This is the rise of mediocrity.

Do Canadians get tired of repetition? Walkerton, Maple Leaf, and now XL; or will they go back to sleep after Thanksgiving turkey

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“I’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years, and I’m getting sort of bored about reading the same thing over and over. They don’t learn. They all say the same thing about how food safety is the No. 1 priority. But, against economics, it doesn’t stand a chance.”

That’s what I told the Globe and Mail yesterday. Amy says I’m grumpy; I say experienced.

There’s nothing boring about people getting sick, and it has now spread to Newfoundland with a lab-confirmed case of E. coli O157:H7 linked to XL Foods in Alberta; what’s boring is the political nonsense, just like in Walkerton and Maple Leaf.

Canadians do like to hold really tight to their myths.

“Doug Powell, however, says it’s XL that should be in the spotlight, not the CFIA. The Canadian-born Kansas State University professor of food safety co-authored a study this year titled “Audits And Inspections Are Never Enough,” and says food safety is up to plants. “It’s not a function whether it’s big or small, whether it’s local or global. It’s that you know about microorganisms and take steps to reduce them, or you don’t.”

Meanwhile, questioning the beef sector is tantamout to treason in Alberta. Premier Alison Redford has unequivocally backed the sector, saying last weekend that beef was “safe” despite some “regulatory challenges.” Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason called it the “most foolish and irresponsible comment on food safety since ‘shoot, shovel and shut up,’” referring to former premier Ralph Klein’s infamous message to farmers during the mad-cow crisis.

“It’s time that the government stopped playing PR for the beef industry,” Mr. Mason says.

 Powell worries the plant will reopen, and production will continue to increase, with the same attitude authorities have taken for a century – trust us, it’s safe – and no data to back it up.

As Sarah Schmidt of Post Media reported, when the opposition asked Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz about the sweeping beef recall last week, the veteran minister stood up in the House of Commons to declare that no illnesses had been linked to the virulent strain of E. coli found in meat from XL Foods Inc.

“We have actually done a tremendous job,” Ritz told the NDP’s deputy agriculture critic Ruth Ellen Brosseau at the time, saying he was in daily communication with officials at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency about the “status of this recall and on the work forward to get back into that lucrative American market.”

The answer was bad timing. Ritz, who was worried about trade after the Americans shut the border to the company, turned out to be wrong about the growing food-safety issue that soon ballooned into Canada’s largest-ever beef recall, spanning all provinces and 41 states. Government scientists confirmed that very day a genetic match between tainted steak from the XL plant, and four cases of human illness in Alberta. Public health authorities are now testing whether a spike in E. coli cases in Saskatchewan is also linked to tainted XL Foods beef.

Oh, and CFIA admitted Friday its 40 inspectors and six vets failed to notice during routine inspections that the plant at the centre of Canada’s largest-ever beef recall had not properly implemented its own plan to control food safety risks.

As E. coli meat recall widens, experts wonder why gaps in food safety haven’t been closed

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When the bunch of us were writing our paper on the failures of audits and inspections, we had several disagreements about what was an audit, what was an inspection, what should be included, and so on.

I insisted that to consumers, it didn’t matter, and there were failures in both kinds of systems, we should highlight both and not get to hung up on the distinctions.

Sometimes you just have to get stuff out the door.

And sometimes you have to be an asshole (guilty).

Hopefully Canadian media is moving beyond its infatuation with political and company-versus-union rhetoric on food safety issues and starts asking, why aren’t farmers, processors, everyone, taking responsibility for their slice of food safety?

XL Foods has been silent and it’s disgraceful.

I would never want to buy their meat if they can’t stand behind it; but, as a lowly consumer, I have no way of knowing what meat is what at retail – large or small – and that’s why firms need to start marketing their food safety efforts to shoppers (but only if they can back it up, with data).

Sarah Schmidt of Postmedia writes in papers across Canada this morning that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has vowed again to tighten the rules at slaughterhouses, as the country’s largest ever beef recall expanded Tuesday to more than 1,500 products.

But as the government continues to grapple with the massive recall of meat from the XL Food Inc’s facility in Brooks, Alberta, experts are probing why, four years after the federal government vowed to fix problems of food safety following a deadly listeriosis outbreak in deli meats, big gaps in the food safety system still exist.

This time, Canada’s second-largest slaughterhouse is at the centre of the potential E. coli O157:H7 beef contamination of hundreds of products, now linked definitively to five cases in Alberta of people becoming sick after eating tainted beef. Saskatchewan public health officials, meanwhile, are investigating whether a spike in E. coli cases in that province is connected to the Alberta plant.

Richard Arsenault, CFIA’s director of meat inspection, said Tuesday the agency will establish a firm threshold that requires companies to divert or dispose of beef trimmings if positive test results for E. coli O157:H7 reach a certain percentage on “high event days” — i.e. days when higher than normal detections of E. coli O157:H7 are made. (Beef trimmings are material taken off the carcass that is not suitable for steak and is used for hamburger.)

“Nobody could agree on that number, so we essentially asked people to keep on eye and look at it. But there wasn’t a lot of structure about how people went at that,” Arsenault told Postmedia News. “I’m fairly confident we’re going to have that as well, I just don’t know what the number is going to be.”

The commitment to establish a threshold follows a pledge Monday by CFIA that it will also bring in a rule requiring companies to analyze test results of beef trimmings so they can identify emerging food-safety problems. “There certainly was no requirement to start looking inside the data to see trends within a day’s production, and that’s something that definitely would have made a big difference if we had had that,” Arsenault said.

But food-safety experts say the latest developments beg the question: Why do gaps still exist after the government announced last fall it had made good on all 57 recommendations that stemmed from a probe of the 2008 listeriosis outbreak. That outbreak was linked to Maple Leaf foods of Toronto.

Doug Powell, professor of food safety at Kansas State University, said Canada has no reason to brag about food safety, saying it’s in reactive mode — “and it’s largely driven by the U.S. All this food safety stuff, you think it’s about human health, really it’s about trade,” said Powell.

The XL Foods plant at the centre of the storm remains shut following an in-depth CFIA investigation at the plant. “The in-depth review determined that the company’s decision document requires updates and modification to address the disposition of production high event days,” CFIA said in a statement Tuesday.

CFIA’s move to suspend XL’s licence, announced on Sunday, followed a decision by U.S. officials to bar shipments from the Brooks plant on Sept. 13.

An independent audit of the Brooks plant commissioned by XL Foods last May found that the facility considers an “event day” for the purposes of product disposition if more than 10 per cent of tests are positive for E. coli. Under the N-60 sampling program, companies are required to test at least 60 pieces of beef trimmings per lot. This means that whether a lot weighs 4,500 kg, 2,000 kg or 100 kg, 60 sub-samples must be collected from the lot to be tested.

In the United States, the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) released a compliance guide in May for operators of large slaughterhouses, saying five per cent should be the threshold for the diversion of a batch of beef trimmings.

“FSIS intended to identify criteria that would indicate exceptional events of poor processing. FSIS did not select a higher target (e.g., 10%) because such a target we believe could result in many cases where poor processing, as defined by most in the industry, would not be detected as a ‘high event period,’ ” the U.S. report states.

Powell says government should be establishing minimum standards for all food-safety practices — and farmers, companies and restaurants should “go far beyond” these standards.

“You have to lower pathogen loads all the way through the system, and the way to do that is for everyone to take their food safety responsibility seriously, and that’s why we focus on a culture of food safety. Everything that I’m seeing in Alberta is ‘process as much meat and make as much money,’ ” said Powell.

“I watch these political debates emerge every time there’s a really tragic outbreak. People get really sick. There’s a four-year-old kid in the hospital with kidney damage. Nobody’s talking that. They’re talking about beef farmers losing money,” Powell added.

Kevin Allen, a food microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, says Canada should look south of the border for answers. He said, “Something wasn’t working right” at the XL foods plant, overseen by 40 government inspectors and six veterinarians.

“When you look at U.S. policy, they have a zero tolerance. They will simply not tolerate the presence of this organism in their beef and I think that’s a much more proactive approach, where food safety and the possible consequences are put first and foremost,” said Allen.

Rick Holley, a professor of food science at the University of Manitoba, disagrees with Allen on a zero-tolerance policy on E. coli 0157:H7, but he’s clear on one thing: beef eaters shouldn’t take huge comfort when the government talks about how much better equipped it is to prevent, detect and respond to potential food safety risks because it implemented all of the food-safety recommendations from four years ago.

“We’re no different from where we were four years ago,” said Holley.

This sounds familiar: CFIA admits analysis of beef tests inadequate in E. coli outbreak

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With the Public Health Agency of Canada late to the public scene as usual, Sarah Schmit of Post Media reports the Canadian Food Inspection Agency conceded Monday it was a mistake not to require companies to analyze test results of beef trim to “connect the dots to get the big picture.”

Richard Arsenault, the agency’s director of meat inspection, confirmed changes are coming so companies will need to do more than test for E. coli and start analyzing data as part of a statistical process control.

The testing requirements were “fairly rigorous” but “in terms of connecting the dots to look for these pictures” they didn’t have to do that, Arsenault said in an interview Monday. “We didn’t think that was something that would have been useful. We now know that it is, so that’s why we’re going to change it.”

Hundreds of beef products have been recalled since Sept. 16, and the CFIA has indicated the recall is likely to expand. CFIA has since temporarily suspended the operating licence of XL Foods Inc.’s facility in Brooks, Alta. The plant, the second largest slaughterhouse in Canada, is also no longer allowed to ship product to the United States.

Under the N-60 sampling program, companies are required to test at least 60 pieces of beef trimmings stripped from the carcasses that go into hamburger meat, regardless of the size and weight of the lot.

“If they don’t put the dots together to get the big picture for the day, they may be missing something. And that’s where we have an improvement and we’re going to make something happen,” added Arsenault.

Bob Kingston, the Public Service Alliance of Canada Agriculture Union president, said CFIA’s new commitment seems “to fly in the face of what the CFIA promised to Canadians after the Maple Leaf outbreak that companies are required to test, analyze and report results showing contamination. It would appear that the CFIA forgot this requirement. This is troubling to say the least,” said Kingston, referring to the deadly listeriosis outbreak of August 2008.

NDP leader Tom Mulcair picked up on this theme during question period Monday, when he chastised Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz.

“This is the same minister who mishandled the listeriosis outbreak in 2008, and joked about ‘death by a thousand …. cold cuts.’ It was not funny then, and it is not funny now. Is this the best they have to offer Canadians who are worried whether the food they are giving their kids is safe?”

Speaking on behalf of the government, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Ritz “is working very hard and is working sincerely to ensure that this issue is dealt with appropriately, including ensuring we have more food inspectors and more meat inspectors. It goes further than that, we have new legislation that has been introduced, safe food for Canadians, to help CFIA respond to food safety situations quickly,” MacKay said in the House of Commons.

In the case of the XL Foods facility in Alberta, 40 CFIA inspectors and six veterinarians are stationed at the plant full-time, split in two groups to cover two production shifts at the massive facility. The plant produces about one-third of Canadian beef.

It’s quintessentially Canadian to complain about the government and frame food safety things using political filters, but why hasn’t the company, XL Foods, which has received hundreds of millions of tax dollars over the years, not  been out on the public communication frontlines?

E. coli ‘can really screw you; I know’ Victim says delay in Canadian action ‘unacceptable’

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The Calgary Sun reports that the idea a simple ground-beef patty could condemn you to life in a wheelchair wouldn’t even occur to most people — and it certainly didn’t occur to Stephanie Smith.

It was 2007 when the 20-year-old dance instructor ate a hamburger at a family dinner, an event so innocuous that even a bout of stomach cramps hours later were shrugged off by Smith as no big deal.

But what Smith suspected was stomach flu grew worse, and five days after the family meal, the healthy young woman was rushed to a Minnesota hospital in agony, suffering from bloody diarrhea and kidney failure.

Smith was a worst-case scenario for the bacteria now causing a public-health debate in Canada, with E. coli attacking her entire system and forcing doctors to induce a nine-week coma to control seizures.

She survived, though barely, and five years later Smith’s life is an endless regime of doctor’s visits, therapy and learning to deal with daily life in a wheelchair.

In Canada, the stink over bad beef from the XL Foods plant in Brooks is growing, with over 1,100 products now recalled and involving 50 retailers.

E. coli was first detected at the Brooks plant on Sept. 4, but it wasn’t until three weeks later that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) suspended the meat factory’s licence.

That delay is at the centre of the controversy, with nine suspect cases of E. coli diagnosed in the gap between detection and someone finally sounding the alarm.

The patients include four-year-old Sarah Demoskoff, who remains in a Calgary hospital after suffering kidney failure linked to the bacteria.

Alberta Premier Alison Redford urged consumers on Sunday to keep buying the province’s beef; she hasn’t reached out to any of the nine who have fallen ill due to privacy concerns, her staff said.

Smith, speaking on the phone from her home in Minnesota, says the delay in the Canadian recall and outbreak is unacceptable.

“I think that’s just sickening. They need to take this seriously,” she said.

“It can really screw you. I know.”