Save Tables Our Priority, or S.T.O.P., held a rally in front of the U.S. Department of Agriculture building on Thursday, March 18, before meeting with officials there to demand that they “prevent further deaths and devastating illness.” Now I consider Nancy Donley and Donna Rosenbaum to be good friends, and well-meaning and passionate advocates and allies for improving food safety, but I find some of the proposals they will present to be somewhat off base and even misleading. We met almost monthly when I was Undersecretary for Food Safety at USDA, and we agreed on a lot of things of substance, but we continue to also disagree on a few. Somewhere middle ground needs to be found.
First of all, it is unfortunate that in 14 months the Obama Administration still has no one in the position of Undersecretary for Food Safety at USDA for these advocates to even meet with. Nothing will change until they have an advocate for their cause that has the power to create change.
Secondly, asking for mandatory recalls is just feel good fluff that is not needed. The Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) at USDA has never had a company refuse to perform a recall when asked. The FDA will get mandatory recall if the current proposed food safety bills are passed by Congress, but if you ask FDA if a company has ever refused their request for a recall, they will say yes, a cat food company once refused them “but it could happen again, and with human food”.
Thirdly, I wish advocates and politicians that want to create a false sense of crisis to create change would stop throwing out the “each year, some 76 million Americans are sickened by food borne pathogens” claim at us. That number is from a Center for Disease Control report published in its “Emerging Infectious Diseases” Volume 5, No. 5, September 1999 and can be read in its entirety at (www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/Vol5no5/mead.htm).
This report is based in part on FoodNet data from 1996 and 1997, when FoodNet was still in its infancy stages of data collecting. Illnesses from E. coli O157:H7 and Listeria alone have been decreased by up to 30-40% since those years. Plus, in this report, CDC multiplies each confirmed case of food borne illness from pathogens by a factor of 38 for most, and by a factor of 20 for O157 and Shigella, to come up with their numbers. We are really talking about a large number of assumptions being made here, and these numbers are estimates at the best. For instance, CDC added Norwalk-like viruses to the list of pathogens causing foodborne illness for the first time for this report and assume they account for 67% of illnesses attributed to known pathogens. CDC further concluded that 81% of foodborne illnesses are from unknown agents.
So why camp out in front of USDA if most of the illnesses are of unknown origin or a viral source? That will not be an area that caused 76 million foodborne illnesses last year. Now, if we are talking just E. coli O157:H7, that’s an estimated 76,000 cases annually, and that includes illnesses from produce, drinking water, petting zoos, farm ponds and person to person contamination as well as illness from ground beef AND whole, intact cuts of beef.
So expansion of the list of meat adulterants, and expansion of the types of meat from just ground beef to all cuts of meat, are noble causes, and I certainly support their efforts here. A recent recall of blade tenderized steaks linked to an outbreak of O157:H7 is proof of that need, as are cases of O157:H7 caused by cross contamination such as the death of the young girl who consumed tainted watermelon at a Sizzlers restaurant. Or the Nebraskans who fell ill from O157 present in the prime rib they ate at a fund raiser. Likewise, the recent outbreak of illnesses from non-O157 STECs in Oklahoma remind us that there are more forms of E. coli than just E. coli O157:H7 that can make us ill. But please stop calling this the hamburger bug. In confirmed sources of origin in E. coli outbreaks, only 33% are from ground beef, while 34% are from produce. People need to know how to handle and cook their beef, just as they need to know how to safely handle fresh produce.
S.T.O.P. members’ personal loss stories provide compelling reasons for improving food safety. They don’t need to use these inflated, ancient numbers. I also think S.T.O.P. should strongly think about beginning to support and promote some of the initiatives that will help save others from having to go through what they have gone through. Initiatives like approving whole carcass, low dose irradiation as a processing aid, which will markedly reduce the pathogen load on carcasses, thus reducing the pathogen presence in ground beef and other cuts of meat. Or supporting wide-spread vaccination of cattle for E. coli O157, which would not only reduce the pathogen load in the packing and processing plants, but in the environment as well, helping protect us from other sources of illness.
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Editor’s Note: Dr. Richard Raymond is a former USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety, serving from 2005 to 2008. He presents his views on food safety in this interesting commentary:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Richard Raymond is the former undersecretary of agriculture for food safety. In that role at USDA from 2005 to 2008, he was responsible for setting food safety policy related to the meat industry. At a time of climbing rates of E coli 0157:H7 in ground beef testing and Salmonella in poultry testing, coinciding with increased numbers of beef recalls associated with human illnesses, Dr. Raymond worked to focus USDA inspection activities on vulnerable points in the food safety system and to implement a more risk-based inspection system. Dr. Raymond is currently an affiliate professor at Colorado State University and an industry consultant and public speaker on food safety and public health issues. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Life Sciences Institute NA. Prior to joining USDA, Dr. Raymond was the chief medical officer for the state of Nebraska. Before that, he established and directed a family medical practice residency at Clarkson Hospital in Omaha, Neb. after 17 years as a rural family physician in the O’Neill, Neb. area. He served as president of the Nebraska Medical Association in 1988 and president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials in 2004. Dr. Raymond received his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Nebraska College of Medicine in 1972.