Public Health from The Center for Public Integrity

U.S. asbestos imports condemned by health experts, activists

United States — 2013-04-04T14:05:57-04:00

More than 50 countries have banned asbestos, a toxic mineral used in building materials, insulation, automobile brakes and other products.

The United States isn’t one of them. Last year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, 1,060 metric tons — more than 2.3 million pounds — came into the country, all of it from Brazil. “Based on current trends,” the USGS says, “U.S. asbestos consumption is likely to remain near the 1,000-ton level …”

Public health experts and anti-asbestos activists find this distressing.

Linda Reinstein, who lost her husband to mesothelioma, an especially virulent form of cancer tied to asbestos exposure, said she’s “appalled and disgusted that the United States still allows the importation of asbestos to meet so-called manufacturing needs.

“We’ve known for decades that safer substitutes exist,” said Reinstein, president of the California-based Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. “We’re facing a public health crisis where more than 30 Americans die every day from preventable, asbestos-caused diseases.”

To mark National Asbestos Awareness Week, Reinstein plans to hold a press conference in Washington today to highlight U.S. investment firms she says hold stakes in Brazilian asbestos mining and production. “It’s time we protect public health over the profits of these companies,” she said.

The World Health Organization estimates that 107,000 people worldwide die of asbestos-related diseases each year. A Center for Public Integrity investigation, done in tandem with the BBC in 2010, revealed that the global asbestos industry, with help from scientists and lobbyists, continues to aggressively market its wares in developing nations, putting millions at risk of disease. Russia remains the world’s biggest asbestos producer, followed by China and Brazil.

Asbestos use in the United States has plummeted from its peak of 803,000 metric tons in 1973. Still, attempts at a ban have failed. The Environmental Protection Agency tried in 1989 but was thwarted by an industry court challenge.

The USGS says the chlor-alkali industry — a segment of the chemical industry that makes chlorine and a caustic soda called sodium hydroxide – accounted for about 57 percent of domestic asbestos consumption in 2012. Forty-one percent of the imported asbestos went into roofing products and the rest into “unknown applications.”

In a statement, the American Chemistry Council, a trade association, said, "The chlor-alkali production processes that involve the use of asbestos are strictly regulated" by the EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“Diaphragms made of asbestos are a critical separation medium in the chlorine manufacturing process," the council said. "Chlorine is essential for manufacturing life-saving medicines, producing solar cells, and providing safe drinking water."

Chlorine producers "work to manage the risks and potential adverse effects to human health and the environment," the trade group said. "Workers potentially exposed to asbestos are protected by wearing appropriate personal protective equipment and following strict work processes. Employees in the chlor-alkali industry are given annual medical examinations to determine whether an employee has incurred any adverse effects due to any possible exposure.”

Nonetheless, authorities such as the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the International Labor Organization warn that there is no safe level of asbestos exposure.

Richard Lemen, an adjunct professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and a retired assistant U.S. surgeon general, said that until the U.S. bans asbestos, “Americans are still at risk of developing highly preventable asbestos-related disease.”

Asbestos deaths bring 16-year sentence

Italy — 2012-02-13T14:27:24-05:00

In a case followed around the world, two former executives of a Swiss building-products conglomerate were convicted in Italy Monday of causing the asbestos-related deaths of more than 3,000 people.

Each defendant — Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny, former owner of the Eternit conglomerate, and Belgian baron Louis de Cartier de Marchienne, a major shareholder in the firm — was sentenced to 16 years in prison on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.

Schmidheiny, 64, and de Cartier, 90, were accused of exposing workers at four Italian asbestos cement factories — as well as people who lived near the plants — to asbestos fibers, which can cause deadly diseases such as mesothelioma, a virulent cancer that attacks the lining of the lung or abdominal cavity.

In 2010, the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the BBC jointly produced an investigation into the global asbestos trade, “Dangers in the Dust”, which revealed the tactics used by makers of asbestos building materials to market their products in developing nations despite overwhelming evidence of the fire-resistant mineral’s lethality.

Several activists said that Monday’s verdict in Turin, Italy, which came after a two-year trial before a three-judge panel, could send a powerful message to corporate officials who fail to control toxic exposures. The World Health Organization estimates that 125 million people are exposed to asbestos on the job and more than 100,000 die each year of mesothelioma, lung cancer or asbestosis.

“I hope that this lesson resounds around the world — corporations cannot knowingly continue to poison workers and communities with such reckless disregard for human life and call it routine business,” Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, said in an emailed statement to the Center. “If a worker were to shoot his boss we would call it murder, but when the boss kills the worker with poison slowly over the years we call it a job.”

Linda Reinstein, president and CEO of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, a victims’ advocacy group in California, said in a statement, “The Eternit case sent a signal around the world today. It is criminal to knowingly and willfully expose workers and families to asbestos, a known carcinogen.”

The United States has not banned asbestos and imported nearly 1,000 metric tons of the mineral in 2011, wrote Reinstein, whose husband, Alan, died of mesothelioma in 2006.

In a press release, a spokesman for Schmidheiny called the verdict “totally incomprehensible” and said that Schmidheiny’s lawyers plan to appeal. Eternit made “substantial investments” in worker safety and modernization of the Italian plants in the 1970s and ‘80s, according to the release. “The technology for these safety measures was in accordance with the medical and scientific knowledge and the highest possible standards applied in the industry at the time.”

Schmidheiny has become well known for his charitable giving. A 2009 Forbes article dubbed him “the Bill Gates of Switzerland” and “one of the world's least known and most foresighted philanthropists” for his creation of a $1 billion trust designed to fuel entrepreneurship among the poor in Latin America.

The Italian arm of Eternit went bankrupt in 1986. Italy banned asbestos six years later.

Yet the company left a dark legacy.

A town in northern Italy, Casale Monferrato, was especially hard hit by asbestos contamination from one of the Eternit factories. “The deaths of our beloved were not from natural causes but by the greed of some people,” a widow from the town, Assunta Prato, said in a press release Monday. “We hope the judgment will deter the people who say the same lies now in other countries that were said in Casale 30 years ago.”

In Brazil, Eternit operated an asbestos cement factory near Sao Paulo for 54 years; former workers say conditions in the plant were deplorable and many died as a result.

“It was full of dust everywhere,” Eliezer João de Souza, who cut asbestos sheets and corrugated tiles, told ICIJ in 2010. “You could see it through the sunlight.”

Flawed state reporting leaves consumers vulnerable

2011-10-11T14:52:10-04:00

Inconsistent reporting of foodborne illnesses among states leaves large portions of the country vulnerable to the spread of potentially deadly outbreaks before health officials can identify their causes and recall contaminated foods.

Since 2006, salmonella outbreaks from products such as eggs, cantaloupe and turkey burgers have sickened at least 6,000 people, resulting in more than 700 hospitalizations and 11 deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A News21 analysis of salmonella reporting practices found that differences across the country put residents of the worst-performing states at risk and undermine national outbreak surveillance by placing disproportionate responsibility on smaller states.

California, Texas, Florida and Illinois make up more than 30 percent of the U.S. population, but they contribute 15 percent to national salmonella outbreak surveillance. Meanwhile, Massachusetts and Missouri comprise 4 percent of the population and contribute nearly 9 percent to surveillance.

Disease reporting relies on highly variable state requirements. States like Colorado and Alabama that allow up to a week to submit a report for many illnesses, including salmonella and E. coli, may take longer to learn about an outbreak than states with more stringent requirements.

In the summer of 2008, one of the biggest and most widespread outbreaks in American history tested surveillance measures in 43 states and exposed weaknesses in the nation’s ability to identify and respond to outbreaks.

When it was over, salmonella-tainted jalapeno and serrano peppers had left two men dead in Texas, and around the country put 308 people in hospitals and made at least 1,500 others across the country sick enough to seek medical attention.

In large outbreaks, underperforming states prevent efficient responses and rely on the surveillance of other states. The same is true in smaller outbreaks; some of these elude surveillance entirely.

“There are multistate outbreaks out there that we don’t recognize and we don’t know about,” said Dr. Tim Jones, state epidemiologist for the Tennessee Department of Health. National outbreak surveillance depends on the collaboration of 2,800 state and local health departments subject to at least 50 different reporting requirements.

In some states, reports from doctors and hospitals go directly to the state health department, which handles large-scale outbreak surveillance. Reporting in bigger states is often more fragmented, with reports going to largely independent local health departments, which then report to the state.

For salmonella, E. coli and other bacterial illnesses, requirements for reporting can also include the submission of what is called an isolate to the state health department, which can be tested to identify outbreaks.

In the same way miners extract metal from certain rocks, laboratories can extract a salmonella isolate from a patient’s stool sample.

On May 22, 2008, the New Mexico Department of Health performed high-tech testing on isolates from four salmonella victims and identified the same genetic “fingerprint” on each of them: they were part of the same outbreak.

The New Mexico state laboratory uploaded the test results to a national database known as PulseNet. The next day, health officials in Texas and Colorado used the database to match fingerprints of local cases with those in New Mexico, proving they were associated with the outbreak.

Though PulseNet can identify local outbreaks, the network specializes in discovering widespread outbreaks associated with “industrial contamination events,” where the food is infected in the supply chain before reaching grocery stores and restaurants, said Dr. Ian Williams, chief of the CDC’s outbreak response and prevention branch. These outbreaks often result in a handful of reported cases in multiple states. Without PulseNet connecting the dots, epidemiologists have few leads to investigate the source of illness.

“PulseNet is the engine that finds [multistate] outbreaks,” Williams said, “and my group is the engine that investigates the outbreaks.”

Though the CDC coordinates investigations when these multistate outbreaks occur, it can only “provide guidelines and recommendations” as a non-regulatory agency, Williams said. Without a federal standard, each state has a unique set of disease-reporting requirements and practices.

For diseases that require reporting to the health department, the urgency and speed of response are at the discretion of each state.

In eight states, health departments must be notified immediately about cases of E. coli O157, which can cause kidney failure and death from eating contaminated foods, including raw milk, meats and vegetables. Seven states allow a week, the longest timeframe in the country, to submit the same report.

The breakdown between stringent and lax reporting requirements among states holds true for most illnesses, provided that requirements exist at all. CDC recommends reporting for 20 foodborne illnesses, but fewer than half of the states require reporting for all of them.

Though every state requires reporting for salmonella, 12 states and the District of Columbia do not require the submission of isolates to the state public health laboratory.

As the most populous state without the requirement, Texas received the third fewest isolates for its cases in the country before the 2008 hot pepper outbreak. Its contributions to national surveillance through PulseNet would be proportional for a state with 8 million fewer people.

By June 2, 2008, Texas reported the most cases of the hot pepper outbreak in the country. The Texas Department of State Health Services acknowledged the need to increase surveillance.

“We sent out a letter to all the clinical labs in the state and we asked them to please submit all salmonella isolates to the state lab,” said Dr. Linda Gaul, the foodborne epidemiologist for the Texas Department of State Health Services.

By simply asking, Texas received “twice as many isolates” for the rest of the outbreak, Gaul said. Over the next two months, the lab tested more than 1,200 isolates. In all of 2007, the state performed 1,835 of these tests.

By June 20, 2008, the number of cases reported in Texas doubled as a result of improved surveillance, according to CDC. Of 552 people sickened across the country, 264 were in Texas.

To begin the outbreak investigation process, epidemiologists interview victims about what they ate in the week before they got sick.

“It’s very difficult to [find the cause of an outbreak] from a single case,” said Dr. David Acheson, former associate commissioner for foods in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Because you’ve got one person’s memory and they say, ‘Well, I usually buy my tomatoes at Safeway,’ but unbeknownst to them, that week they stopped at a Food Lion.”

Localized groups of related illnesses called clusters offer epidemiologists clues. By interviewing victims of clusters, investigators may learn whether they all ate at the same restaurant or bought a certain food from the same grocery store.

Clusters are difficult to investigate when too much time passes between the illness and the interview. A survey conducted by the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, an organization of public health epidemiologists, found that “delayed notification from reporting sources was the most common barrier to investigation of foodborne…illness outbreaks.”

“If I line up six people and say, ‘Tell me what you ate a month ago,’ we’re going to have trouble figuring that out,” said the CDC’s Williams.

The time between getting sick, seeing a doctor, reporting the illness and testing isolates allowed two weeks to pass for more than half of the illnesses before they were identified as part of the hot pepper outbreak. From there, the speed of response and success of the investigation depend on a state’s health department.

“Minnesota is often the first out of the gate with the answer and that, in my opinion, is driven heavily by the fact that they move things through really quickly,” said Acheson. “If there were a barometer of how quick to do it, they’d be…the poster child.”

On June 23, 2008, the Minnesota Department of Health identified its first case of the hot pepper outbreak, which proved to be part of a cluster. Fifteen days later it had “unequivocally implicated jalapenos,” according to a congressional testimony by Dr. Kirk Smith, state epidemiologist in Minnesota.

Texas reported the same results earlier that week - more than a month after its first cases in late May - taking more than twice the time to reach the same conclusion. On July 9, 2008 with evidence mounting, the CDC issued a nationwide alert advising consumers to avoid jalapeno and serrano peppers, following indications that tomatoes played a role early in the outbreak.

The News21 analysis found that Texas experienced significant underreporting of salmonella isolates before the hot pepper outbreak, handicapping its ability to identify clusters and respond to outbreaks.

With nearly 8 percent of the country’s population, Texas provided 5 percent of the nation’s salmonella surveillance through PulseNet between 2001 and 2007. Over that same time, Texas reported the fourth fewest salmonella outbreaks per 100,000 people, suggesting outbreaks went unidentified or unreported more frequently in Texas than in 46 other states.

These underreporting practices characterized Texas’ salmonella surveillance before the hot pepper outbreak. As it spent the first weeks of the investigation relying on data from insufficient reporting, the outbreak continued to spread.

When it was over, the outbreak had sickened 1500 people in 43 states, Washington, D.C. and Canada, hospitalizing 308 and resulting in two deaths.

Since the outbreak, Texas has continued to request that all isolates be submitted to the state lab and increased its contribution to national outbreak surveillance to a level more proportional to population.

State health officials are discussing how to include mandatory isolate submission for salmonella in Texas’ disease reporting requirements, Gaul said.

If the requirement is added, Florida would replace Texas as the most populous state without mandatory isolate submission for salmonella.

Since 1998, the Florida Department of Health has received isolates for less than 20 percent of its cases, the lowest percentage in the country and less than half that of Nebraska – the state with the second lowest submission rate. Florida’s contribution to national salmonella outbreak surveillance accounts for less than a third of its population.

With a large population, disproportionately low participation in national outbreak surveillance and no isolate submission requirement, Florida’s salmonella surveillance mirrors Texas before the hot pepper outbreak. While Texas was able to improve its surveillance by asking for isolates, budget constraints limit Florida’s surveillance capacity, said Richard Hopkins, the state epidemiologist for the Florida Department of Health.

“If somehow, by some magic, Florida hospitals started sending the other 80 percent [of isolates] to the state public health lab, they wouldn’t have the capacity to do the [testing] that they do,” said Hopkins.

Funding issues are not limited to Florida, with health departments hurting across the country, said the CDC’s Williams. Without sufficient funding, departments have fewer resources to test isolates, conduct interviews and undertake investigations.

Foodborne outbreaks are more likely to go undetected in states lacking those surveillance and response mechanisms. While most of them will be small, localized clusters of illness, some with the scope of the hot pepper outbreak will also slip through the cracks, Tennessee’s Jones said.

“It’s just Russian roulette, waiting for enough bad things to line up,” he said, “And it’ll happen again.”

Farmers markets thrive, as do concerns

2011-10-06T00:03:01-04:00

Against the backdrop of San Francisco’s skyline, investment banker Ali Dagli strolled through rows of fresh-picked produce, chatting with farmers as he carefully packed his purchases into a canvas bag slung casually over his shoulder.

“It’s great to see these guys who are passionate about the food that they bring here,” said Dagli while shopping at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on a recent Saturday morning. “If I go to Safeway, it has no heart. There is heart here at the farmers market.”

He’s not the only one who feels that way. Dagli is part of a fast-growing consumer trend: Demand for local food is expected to reach $7 billion by 2012, nearly doubling since 2002, according to the Agriculture Department. And with more than 6,000 farmers markets currently operating in the United States — a 40 percent jump in the past five years — they are an easy place for consumers to go to get their fresh-food fix.

But the rise in popularity is accompanied by a parallel rise in concerns about how best to keep these local consumers safe from the same pathogens responsible for nationwide outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli in commercially produced foods, News21 reports.

Although the fare sold at farmers markets often is perceived as more wholesome than what’s available on grocery shelves, there is no evidence that it is less prone to cause foodborne illness — and it generally receives less federal and local oversight.

While few pathogen outbreaks have been linked to farmers markets, most sources of foodborne illness are never identified, and small outbreaks often go unreported. For instance, for every confirmed case of salmonellosis, at least 29 cases go unreported, according to federal estimates.

Congress exempted small farms from the more rigorous safety requirements of the new Food Safety Modernization Act. The exemption applies to farms that gross under $500,000 annually and sell the majority of their products directly to consumers, restaurants or stores in their state or within 275 miles of the farm.

State and local governments have jurisdiction over farmers markets. But while health inspectors may visit once or twice a season, most markets are left to set their own rules. Only 14 percent of market managers reported state government regulation of market rules and bylaws, according to the 2006 USDA National Farmers Market Manager Survey. Just 20 percent reported city, county or municipal government involvement.

That leaves whether and how to oversee food safety largely to the markets’ managers and vendor-operated boards of directors.

Each farmers market organization develops its own policies and means of enforcement, according to Stacy Miller, executive director of the Farmers Market Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes farmers markets, representing more than 3,500 markets. Prospective vendors may be required to submit an application, present proof of insurance and any relevant licenses, and be inspected, she added.

The Ferry Plaza Farmers Market features 80 local farms and attracts some 25,000 shoppers over the three days each week that it is open. The variety of produce on display is rivaled only by the variety of people who shop there: home cooks, gourmet chefs, health nuts, tourists and food devotees known as locavores.

Because space is limited and very popular with vendors, the market has exceptionally tough requirements. Farmers wishing to join must complete an application up to 17 pages long, be screened for several months and undergo an on-site examination by market managers regarding the farm’s food safety and sustainability practices concerning soil, crops, water, pests, waste, harvest, storage, energy, labor and sales.

Managers who conduct these inspections have a general understanding of agriculture and handling guidelines for food safety from USDA and the Food and Drug Administration, but they are not specifically trained, said Dave Stockdale, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, which has operated the market since 1999.

California requires all farmers markets to be certified through the local county health department’s agriculture commissioner. Market managers must make sure that vendors are following state health codes and farmers are selling only food they grew themselves.

“Food safety is a concern,” Stockdale said. “In the state of California, there are no specific on-farm food safety certifications that people must possess. That’s one of the reasons we ask so many questions and have such a long application, because it helps us understand what to look for when we go visit a site.”

Elsewhere, vendor selection is not always as strict.

In Arizona, for example, the Phoenix Public Market has a one-page application for prospective sellers wanting to join the 120 vendors currently active in the semi-weekly open-air market and accompanying grocery store, which are operated by Community Food Connections.

“Somebody from here tries to get out and visit the different growers,” said Cindy Gentry, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, but sometimes farms aren’t inspected until after they start selling at the market.

When conducting farm visits, Gentry looks for production quantity to match growing capabilities, and also analyzes worker sanitation, farming methods, processing and distribution.

“It’s been a learning curve for me,” she said, adding that she has received some on-the-job training from farmers who sell at the market regarding proper agricultural and handling practices used to ensure food safety.

Gentry said small farms should not be held to the same government standards as commercial farms due to their limited resources and the greater level of transparency in direct sales between farmer and consumer.

However, Richard Molinar, small farm program adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Fresno, thinks the local food movement will put pressure on local farms to develop food safety plans.

“Certainly more people are wanting to buy fresh and buy local; that doesn’t mean that they’re not concerned about food safety,” said Molinar, who helps small farmers develop scaled-down food safety manuals. “When you go to swap meets or farmers markets, I think at some point consumers are going to want to see or know if those farmers have some kind of policy in place.”

Elizabeth Armstrong has already reached that point. The Indianapolis mother two represents an exceptionally motivated local food devotee.

In 2006, her then-2-year-old daughter nearly died of kidney failure after eating commercially produced spinach contaminated with E. coli. As a result, Armstrong refuses to buy grocery store produce, instead serving her family vegetables from their own garden and fruits bought at farmers markets just minutes from their home.

“What’s important for us, as a consumer, is just to have the transparency that the farmer will tell us how he is producing his food and what steps he’s taking to ensure that it’s safe,” she said. “Then it’s our choice.”

Food-safety issues abound near U.S. Capitol

Virginia,United States — 2011-10-07T09:46:04-04:00

Outside the Department of Agriculture headquarters on Independence Avenue, government workers and tourists shop for fresh produce, poultry, popcorn, baked goods and hot lunches.

Like farmers’ markets across America, this one sponsored by the USDA is thriving, propelled by a national craving for fresh food and the perception that locally grown food is healthier than food mass-produced by big agriculture and sold in grocery stores.

But commercial tests found pathogens on raw chickens sold by a Virginia farmer at the USDA market that could be harmful if the poultry were not properly cooked, according to an investigation by News21, a national university reporting project at the University of Maryland. The same was true of poultry sold by a Pennsylvania farmer at a Vermont Avenue market nearby.

Both farmers were exempt from USDA inspections because they process fewer than 20,000 chickens a year, although farmers operating under the exemption are not permitted by USDA regulations to sell their products across state lines, officials said.

A USDA spokesman said the department has suspended poultry sales by the vendor at its market as it conducts an investigation.

The director of FreshFarm Markets, the nonprofit organization that operates the market on Vermont Avenue, said that FreshFarm requires USDA inspection of all meat being sold at the market. Ann Yonkers, the director, said she was unaware that the farmer’s chickens were exempt from inspection and asked him to stop selling them.

The findings from both markets highlight seams in the federal government’s efforts to keep the country’s food supply safe through a maze of federal, state and local laws that can be confusing even for the people charged with enforcing them. They also illustrate the danger for consumers who think they can find refuge in markets selling food grown locally.

Despite the interest in food from local growers, scientists say small does not mean safe. “From a food safety point of view, there’s no inherent reason why large production is, on balance, more dangerous than a small family farm,” said Bill Keene, senior epidemiologist at the Oregon Public Health Division.

Benjamin Chapman, a food safety specialist at North Carolina State University, said in some cases small farms may be less safe. “We’re finding that there’s less pressure on a vendor at a [farmers’] market to implement risk reduction because the perception is that the product is safe already,” he said. “At a grocery store, growers have all these specifications they have to hit, but that’s absent in the farmers’ market.”

Tests conducted for News21 by the Baltimore division of Microbac, a federally certified laboratory with locations nationwide, found salmonella in three samples of chicken being sold at the USDA market by J&L Green, a farm in Edinburg, Va.

“Our process as a whole is sanitary when operated correctly,” said Jordan Green, one of the farm’s owners. “Mistakes do happen.”

Green did say that he had recently noticed problems with his plastic bags of fresh chicken leaking at the farmers’ market. He said it was hard to keep bags from tearing and that he was moving away from fresh and toward frozen poultry as a result.

Leaky poultry juices present a particular cross-contamination hazard at a farmers’ market, where shoppers may also be buying peaches or lettuce and placing their purchases in the same canvas bag. Since produce is often eaten uncooked, any pathogens would not be killed.

At the market on Vermont Avenue, Microbac found campylobacter on chicken sold by Garden Path Farms, from Newburg, Pa. Emanuel Kauffman, the farm’s owner, said he believes his farming practices are safer than big agriculture’s.

It is not against the law to sell raw chicken with salmonella or campylobacter. Regulators instead have placed the responsibility on consumers to understand the importance of cooking thoroughly and avoiding cross-contamination of other foods on the way from market to oven. A USDA official said the department’s consumer education efforts are vigorous and ongoing.

But the government’s efforts have failed to reduce the number of salmonella infections in 15 years, even as other food-borne illnesses have dropped.

Salmonella, which doesn’t discriminate between small and large farms, is a pathogen sometimes found in the intestinal tracts of birds and other animals. On chicken farms, it can spread from bird to bird or can be introduced by wild animals. And during slaughter and processing, salmonella on one chicken can contaminate many more.

Salmonella is invisible, odorless and tasteless, so even the most careful farmers might not know their chicken carries the bug unless they test for it themselves.

The same goes for campylobacter, another pathogen that is even more prevalent in chickens. It is one of the leading bacterial causes of diarrheal illness in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Microbac also found salmonella or campylobacter in chicken parts sold by another local vendor and two grocery store chains a short distance from the U.S. Capitol.

Altogether, five out of seven markets and grocery stores tested positive for campylobacter, and two of the five also tested positive for salmonella.

The findings demonstrate how relatively easy it is to find pathogens—no matter which market or grocery store you patronize.

In 2009, an annual FDA retail meat study found 21 percent of chicken breasts contaminated with salmonella, and 44 percent with campylobacter.

The findings come at a time of increased federal concern over food-borne infections linked to the two pathogens, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says are two of the most commonly reported causes of food-borne illness.

A 2011 CDC study estimated 1.8 million people are sickened, 27,000 are hospitalized and 400 die each year from both pathogens combined.

Because J&L Green, the Virginia farm selling chickens at the USDA market, operates under the exemption for small farms, no government inspector had ever looked at the way Jordan Green and his wife, Laura, raise and slaughter chickens, he said. The USDA agency generally reviews exempt operations only if it receives a complaint.

Farmers are the ones who decide whether they want to operate under an exemption from inspections. They do not, however, have to notify the USDA that they have claimed the exemption, so the agency does not keep track of them.

State governments may have their own rules. Virginia, for example, requires farmers to fill out a two-page application form — which Jordan Green said he didn’t know about but has now submitted. He also has paid for his own salmonella tests.

When the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service accepted J&L Green into its farmers’ market this year, officials failed to catch that he was not registered for the Virginia exemption he claimed and that he was breaking federal and state requirements by transporting exempted poultry across state lines for sale.

The farmers’ market manager, Velma Lakins, said that she was aware that J&L Green Farm labeled its chicken as exempt. She thought exempted chicken could be transported across state lines, as did two regional USDA officials interviewed by News21.

Also at the USDA market, C&T Produce of Fredericksburg, Va., another vendor, was observed selling unrefrigerated eggs, even though egg cartons bore USDA-mandated labels stating they should be refrigerated.

Lakins, the market manager, said in an interview that she saw the eggs in coolers with ice packs. But Craig DeBernard — who co-owns C&T with his wife, Tracy — said he hadn’t known the eggs had to be refrigerated and did not do so. C&T has stopped selling eggs at farmers’ markets during hot summer months and will sell them in an iced cooler in the fall.

Organic food no guarantee against foodborne illness

2011-10-05T00:09:01-04:00

Eating organic may limit your exposure to pesticides. It may make you feel environmentally conscious. It can help support local farmers.

But scientists warn it won’t necessarily protect you against foodborne illnesses. Organics, like conventionally farmed foods, can harbor dangerous pathogens including E. coli and salmonella, News21 reports.

A 2006 study in the Journal of Food Science did not find a significant difference in the prevalence of E. coli between organic and conventional produce. And a 2009 Kansas State University study did not find a difference in the prevalence of E. coli between organically and conventionally raised cattle.

Organic foods have caused their share of outbreaks of disease. Last winter, for example, sprouts from an organic farm in Illinois infected at least 140 people in 26 states and the District of Columbia with salmonella. And over a three-month period in 2011, a massive outbreak of a deadly strain of E. coli linked to sprouts from an organic farm in Germany killed 50 people and sickened more than 4,300 in several countries.

Organics are a big business in the U.S. Sales of organic food and beverages totaled $26.7 billion in 2010, according to the Organic Trade Association, with sales of fruits and vegetables up nearly 12 percent over 2009.

Consumers buy organic for a number of reasons, including to avoid certain pesticides, to encourage smaller farms and to support agriculture that doesn’t introduce harsh substances into the environment. In a June 2011 health survey by Thomson Reuters and National Public Radio, 58 percent of respondents said they preferred organic over nonorganic foods. The most popular reasons cited: to avoid toxins and support local farmers.

Despite the public’s favorable perceptions, however, “the science doesn’t show a difference,” said David Lineback, senior fellow in food safety at the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the University of Maryland.

Federal organic standards set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture do not include explicit requirements for food safety, nor are they intended to. The primary purpose of organic farming is not to prevent foodborne illness but to practice and promote environmentally sustainable agriculture.

“We don’t purport that organic is healthier than conventional food,” said USDA spokeswoman Soo Kim.

“The organic standards do not directly address issues of food safety but instead production and processing and handling methods of agricultural products,” Kim said in an email. But, she added, “organic certification by the USDA doesn’t preclude any operation from having to meet the food safety and environmental requirements” of two other federal bodies: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Organic labeling standards are based on the percentage of organic ingredients in a product.

For crops, this means growing on land without the application of any prohibited substances (as defined in the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990) and without the use of genetically modified organisms, most conventional pesticides or sewage sludge, for example. Organic livestock must be raised without hormones, fed 100 percent organic feed without byproducts and given year-round access to the outdoors.

Carrie Vaughn, vegetable production manager of the recently certified organic Clagett Farm in Upper Marlboro, Md., said she believes the food safety risks are lower on her farm because of strict standards for manure composting that come with organic certification.

USDA’s organic program requires composted manure to be heated to at least 131 F for a minimum of either three or 15 days (depending on the composting system) in order to reduce pathogens.

Vaughn said the close relationship she has with her buyers and their families motivates her to be vigilant about food safety in the field. “It’s terrifying for me as a grower to think that I could grow something that could kill a small child,” she said. ”So we’re careful on the farm, and we also work directly with our customers. … If something ever happened, it would be so easy to trace that contamination back to us.”

Lineback, at JIFSAN, remains skeptical of what he calls consumers’ “I-know-the-farmer” attitude. That trust, he said, is rooted not in science but in consumers’ feelings about food and a distrust of corporate agriculture.

There is even debate over whether organic food is more nutritious, as proponents maintain. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported in 2010 that a study of 50 years of academic articles on the topic found that organic and conventional foods are nutritionally comparable.

So, which is better for you: organic or conventional? In the end, as Lineback noted, “it’s a matter of choice and what people believe.”

Laws haven’t kept deadly pathogens out of meat, poultry

2011-10-05T13:57:59-04:00

Almost 9 million pounds of meat and poultry was recalled in 2010 because of the potential for foodborne illness after it had already been approved under America’s strictest food regulations.

While most of what Americans eat is the responsibility of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Food Safety and Inspection Service within the U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees meat and poultry.

Every USDA-inspected food on the market – including steaks, chicken potpies and frozen pepperoni pizzas – carries a government seal indicating the food is “safe, wholesome and correctly labeled.”

The stamp was on the 8.9 million pounds of meat and poultry products 21 companies recalled last year because of fears it contained deadly pathogens. Five of the recalls were linked to 312 illnesses reported nationwide.

The safety of these products is largely in the hands of the companies that bring them to market. Since 1996, all meat and poultry slaughter and processing plants have been required by the federal government to develop Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points plans. These plans outline how each product could be tainted and what the company will do to avoid or rectify contamination.

Federal inspectors are responsible for seeing that companies follow the hazard control plans. In slaughterhouses, other inspectors check each carcass on the production line.

Flaws in this complex system of industry self-regulation and government oversight were to blame in several outbreaks and recalls over the past five years. Consumers get sick when companies don’t account for major health risks in their food safety plans, workers don’t follow those plans or federal reviews overlook problems, News 21 reports.

Unseen Pathogens

After four children in Washington and California died in 1992 and 1993 from eating E. coli O157-tainted Jack in the Box hamburgers, the government required safety plans that account for pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella.

At the time of the burger outbreak, carcass-by-carcass physical inspection in slaughterhouses was the main government safeguard for meat and poultry.

The deaths exposed the weakness of carcass inspection: Pathogens can’t be seen, smelled or touched.

Federal carcass inspectors, who do not review safety plans, still do the physical checks all day, every day. Their goal is to spot signs of disease and feces on the meat, but some inspectors and consumer advocates say rapid production speeds make it almost impossible to find contamination. At plants that process 140 birds a minute, inspectors have less than 2 seconds with each carcass. Beef inspectors have between 6 seconds and 20 seconds, depending on which carcass part they’re inspecting at the time.

Other government inspectors, whose jobs are to verify that companies abide by their own safety plans, visit slaughterhouses and processing plants, including those that produce deli meats, chicken tenders and ground beef, every day.

Inspectors check cooking and cooling temperatures, take pathogen tests, monitor sanitation and review records companies use to prove they follow procedures. Inspectors can document violations but can’t force a company to change its plan, even if they think it’s a faulty one.

This system “puts the responsibility of food safety in the hands of people trying to make a profit,” said Timothy Pachirat, an assistant professor of politics at The New School in New York.

Pachirat spent five months in 2004 working undercover at a slaughterhouse in Omaha, Neb., for his book “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight,” scheduled for release in October 2011.

Contaminated meat and poultry kill more than 600 people and sicken 2.9 million others in the U.S. annually, according to a 2011 University of Florida Emerging Pathogens Institute analysis.

Inconsistent Oversight

Back-to-back recalls in 2008 showed how inconsistent federal oversight and a company’s resistance to revise its safety plan can lead to outbreaks.

In July 2008, Omaha-based Nebraska Beef recalled 5.3 million pounds of meat linked to 49 E. coli O157 illnesses in seven states. Then in August 2008, the company recalled 1.4 million more pounds associated with a different outbreak of E. coli O157 that sickened 27 people in 10 states and Canada, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Before the recalls, Food Safety and Inspection Service reports tracked years of violations at Nebraska Beef. In 2002, the government temporarily shut the Omaha plant for not following its own sanitation procedures. In 2003, Nebraska Beef sued the USDA and individual inspectors, arguing that numerous food safety citations were a conspiracy against the company. The plant passed three federal food safety reviews in 2004 and 2005, according to FSIS inspection reports.

But after failing three E. coli O157 tests in 2006, Nebraska Beef came under heightened government scrutiny for eight months as the plant repeatedly violated its own sanitation procedures, according to the records. And despite the confirmed presence of E. coli O157, the company’s safety plan didn’t acknowledge the pathogen was a health risk in beef trim, one of the most common places to find E. coli O157.

In the three months leading up to the first 2008 recall, inspectors were assigned to review Nebraska Beef’s sanitation procedures, safety plans and pathogen testing protocols 269 times, according to a News21 analysis of millions of federal records.

Data from 2008 provided to News21 were incomplete and did not include the field that says whether inspectors actually fulfilled their assignment. But an analysis of complete records from 2007 shows inspectors performed their assigned duties 98 percent of the time.

That means government inspectors likely okayed Nebraska Beef’s safety regimen numerous times only shortly before the company’s product sickened more than 75 people. In a scathing post-outbreak report, Food Safety and Inspection Service officials told Nebraska Beef its pathogen tests did “not give you or us any assurance that your system is working as designed.” That report said the plant’s testing failed to find any E. coli O157 in June 2008, while an outside lab identified it 19 times that month.

Inspectors were supposed to have scrutinized Nebraska Beef’s testing program nine times between April and June 2008, News21 found.

In response to the FSIS evaluation, Nebraska Beef said it would reduce production line speeds, use different cleaning sanitizers and have a third-party lab test more of its beef for pathogens. The pages outlining changes Nebraska Beef ultimately made to its safety plan were redacted in a copy of the FSIS report obtained by consumer safety advocate Tony Corbo of Food & Water Watch. Corbo made the report available to News21.

Nebraska Beef did not return calls seeking comment. The Food Safety and Inspection Service declined several requests for interviews.

Potpie Recall

ConAgra Foods’ potpie recall in 2007 also highlights the potential for critical errors.

Recalled beef, chicken and turkey potpies from a ConAgra plant in Marshall, Mo., resulted in more than 400 illnesses reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 41 states between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2007.

Amy Eberle’s then 23-month-old son ate a salmonella-contaminated potpie, causing bloody diarrhea that filled more than 90 diapers a day. Her son, now 5, lost 40 percent of his body weight in three weeks.

“By the third week, I just remember standing there thinking, ‘You have no control,’” said Eberle, an assistant quality assurance manager for an aerospace composite manufacturing company in Minden, Neb. “You don’t know what’s going on.”

After the outbreak, the Food Safety and Inspection Service sent ConAgra a letter threatening to temporarily shut the plant. A copy of the letter was given to News21 by Seattle attorney Bill Marler, who represented Eberle in a 2007 lawsuit against ConAgra. The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum.

The letter said workers weren’t thoroughly inspecting equipment for cleanliness, which the company’s safety plan required. It also questioned whether cooking instructions on the boxes were sufficient to ensure that consumers would get the potpies hot enough to kill salmonella. ConAgra’s safety plan left the responsibility for eliminating pathogens to consumers cooking at home, FSIS said. (See related Conagra records.) Federal inspectors reviewed ConAgra’s safety plan 138 times in the three months before the October recall, according to News21’s analysis of inspection data. They never cited the company for having a problematic plan during that span.

After the recall, ConAgra sent out a press release saying it would more rigorously test final products and ingredients from vendors for contamination. It also changed cooking instructions on the potpie packages.

Safety Plans

A company has to prove it’s following its safety plan, and inspectors rely heavily on company-generated records when determining whether plants are abiding by regulations.

Unreliable paperwork prompted two recalls totaling almost 5 million pounds of food in 2010 at California companies Huntington Meat Packing and Autentico Foods, according to a Feb. 12, 2010, FSIS news release. A criminal investigation at Huntington determined plant records central to the company’s food safety plan could not “be relied upon to document compliance with the requirements,” according to a recall notice. Food Safety and Inspection Service reports on the 2010 cases were unavailable.

“It may be true that there are plants in which the letter of (the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system) is followed,” said Pachirat, the New School professor, “but the point is there’s a fundamental problem with a food safety system that depends for its regulatory effectiveness on self-reporting.”

Pachirat said workers in his plant, which he did not identify in his book or in an interview, falsified paperwork claiming meat was free of contamination and lied to inspectors about remedying food safety violations.

In the 15 years since the introduction of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system, illness from the six main foodborne pathogens, including E. coli O157, campylobacter and listeria, has decreased 23 percent, according to the CDC.

“The significant reduction in foodborne illness associated with meat and poultry products is the proof” the system is working, said Thomas Billy, a former Food Safety and Inspection Service administrator who was a government and industry consultant after he retired in 2003. “The numbers don’t lie.”

Yet the number of salmonella cases has increased, and poultry is the leading cause of foodborne salmonella infections, according to the University of Florida analysis.

And another News21 report found many public health experts question the extent of E. coli O157′s decline because of changes in clinical testing procedures.

“I certainly don’t buy that we should throw up our hands and say a few deaths here and some kidney failure there is part of having the cheapest meat in the world,” Marler said. “The failure of the food safety system is the failure to put public health first.”

The food safety overhaul President Barack Obama signed in January 2011 applies only to the Food and Drug Administration and does not affect meat and poultry regulation. However, USDA announced in September that it will ban the sale of ground beef, beef trim used for ground beef or machine-tenderized steaks that contain any of the "Big Six" strains of E. coli that together cause roughly 113,000 illnesses in the U.S. each year, according to the CDC. Previously, only E. coli O157 was illegal.

Is kosher meat safer?

2011-10-05T00:09:01-04:00

Many people think that kosher food, prepared according to Jewish dietary laws under the supervision of rabbis, reduces the incidence of salmonella, E. coli, listeria and other foodborne pathogens.

“I like to think it’s watched more carefully,” said Avigayil Ribner, 23, a research fellow for St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City, who has kept kosher all her life.

But not so, said Sarah Klein, staff attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group. “People think kosher food is safer. We have no evidence of that. None. There’s no data.”

However, the rules for preparing kosher food closely parallel the recommendations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for proper food handling. So while research hasn’t proven that kosher food is safer to eat, the way in which it is prepared may reduce the chances of spreading foodborne illness, News21 reports.

The main difference between kosher and non-kosher meats is the way in which animals are slaughtered. For food to be kosher, animals have to be killed individually by a specially trained Jew known as a shochet. Another trained expert then inspects the carcasses for signs of disease. But these steps have no real effect on food safety.

The meat then has to be salted to draw out and remove any blood. One USDA study of poultry found that the salting process weakened the bonds between salmonella bacteria and chicken skin, helping eliminate bacteria. But another USDA study found that kosher and organic poultry had a “high incidence” of contamination by salmonella and listeria bacteria.

Any possible gains from salting are offset by rules that prevent kosher meat from being immersed in scalding water, which helps kill bacteria but makes draining the blood more difficult. Non-kosher meat does receive this added antibacterial step.

A study by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology showed that because kosher poultry is not scalded, the chickens have to remain longer in the defeathering machines. This increases the risk of contamination with listeria, particularly nasty bacteria that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists among the top five causes of death from foodborne illness.

None of these studies factored in the final step in keeping kosher: how the meal is prepared. This is where additional food safety practices come into play.

Every government food safety organization recommends keeping raw meat separate from vegetables to prevent cross-contamination, a point re-emphasized in a new USDA-Ad Council public service campaign.

“If possible, use one cutting board for fresh produce and a separate one for raw meat, poultry and seafood,” the USDA’s Safe Food Handling website advises.

This is done almost automatically by people who keep kosher, who have separate dishes, silverware, sponges, cutting boards and sometimes sinks for meat and dairy. And kosher cooks will often have a third set of cutting boards and other utensils for parve foods – items that are neither dairy nor meat, such as vegetables.

In kosher restaurants and retail stores, a trained staff member known as a mashgiach oversees the kitchen and ensures that all meat, dairy and parve utensils are kept separate. Rabbi Dovid Frost is the mashgiach for KosherMart in Rockville, Md., a store that includes a dairy bakery, a meat deli and a restaurant. Frost explained that part of his job is to ensure that this separation exists.

“The basic thing,” he said, “is that these things don’t get mixed from one area to another.”

Joy Gold of Silver Spring, Md., started keeping kosher almost 35 years ago when she was pregnant with her first child, but not for food safety reasons. The requirement for Jews to keep kosher is a chok, a law from God that has no explicit explanation or logic.

“We don’t necessarily know why we do it, but we do,” said Gold, a former publications director at the Board of Jewish Education of Greater Washington. She recognizes there could be safety benefits as well, adding: “It seems like it makes sense.”

Inspectors struggle to keep up with flood of imports

2011-10-05T16:45:23-04:00

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Inside the giant warehouse, past the labyrinth of cubicles and corner offices, behind the security door marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” the smell isn’t all that bad today.

“Sometimes it’s unbearable,” said Denise Williams, a supervisor in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Division of Import Operations here in Southern California.

The warehouse is one of several in the Los Angeles district where Williams and FDA investigators spend their days sorting and inspecting thousands upon thousands of boxes that fill an area larger than four football fields.

There’s Cambodian rice by the ton, tapioca pearls from the Philippines and tea biscuits and bean curd from China.

The shipments were flagged for inspection as they came in through one of the 24 ports of entry in and around Los Angeles More than a half a million food shipments came through the district last year alone, making it one of the busiest in the U.S. About 3,500 of them were refused entry because the food was contaminated with filth, pesticides, drug residues or traces of salmonella. Some of it contained unsafe color additives or was mislabeled. And some was poisonous.

The FDA reported that in 2010 it refused nearly 16,000 food-related shipments out of the more than 10 million that arrived at over 320 U.S. ports.

“If it comes in here and it’s bad,” Williams said, “we’re gonna get ‘em.”

Except when they don’t.

Myriad critics, including the U.S. Government Accountability Office, say the FDA is simply not up to the task of ensuring the safety of food imports, which are entering this country in ever-growing numbers. The FDA expects 24 million shipments of FDA-regulated goods to pass through the nation’s ports of entry this year, up from 6 million a decade ago.

During that time, the number of FDA investigators stayed constant at about 1,350. The agency began adding investigators in 2009 and now has about 1,800 — still far short of the number required to keep up with the pace of imports.

In 2010, FDA inspectors physically examined 2.06 percent of all food-related imports. The agency expects only 1.59 percent of all food imports to be examined this year and even less — only 1.47 percent — next year, according to its Office of Regulatory Affairs.

This summer, the FDA gave News21 unusual access behind the scenes of its largest operating district to show the ways in which front-line operations attempt to keep unsafe food from reaching American supermarket shelves and dinner tables.

Sensory Tests

“The Nose” prepares to sniff his way down a mahi-mahi fillet.

Steve Angold works out of a narrow lab at the FDA’s new $40 million testing facility in Irvine, Calif. He is one of about 25 FDA specialists across the country who rely on their senses of sight, touch, taste and smell to detect decomposition or filth in food products.

“It’s either pass or fail,” Angold said. “Ocean grimy smells would be passing; even stale or fishy odors would be passing.”

But if the food smells like turnips or cabbage, it’s probably spoiled, he said.

“The worst ones are fecal,” Angold continued, the fish inches from his face. “Some people refer to it as baby diapers. I don’t have kids, so …”

Reaching the tail, Angold laid the fish on a sterilized countertop.

“There’s nothing wrong with this fish,” he announced. “It’s pretty good.”

Organoleptic testing is one of several methods the FDA uses to determine the safety of food products. Others include chemical and microbiological tests as well as tests to detect insects.

A few doors down from Angold, entomologist John Sedwick placed a sample of sugar cane under a microscope. He moved the petri dish slowly under the lens until he spotted black ants — some whole, some cut in half, all dead — among the particles of sugar.

The FDA is tolerant of ants and other field insects that get mixed in with foods prior to harvesting because they pose little threat to human health. If investigators are uncertain, they can consult the “Food Defect Action Levels,” a manual that sets out exactly how many insect parts, larvae or animal hairs are acceptable.

“Other things like blowfly maggots, cockroaches, they carry a whole host of foodborne pathogens,” such as bacteria and viruses as well parasites, Sedwick said, “so there’s a very low tolerance for those kinds of insects.”

Entomologists also look for “anything that a human would find repulsive or aesthetically displeasing,” he said.

“I’ve had samples where I’ve found rat hair, shrew hair, bat hair … beetles, maggots … all in one sample,” he said.

Those are the food products the FDA rejects, either ordering the food to be destroyed or returned to the country it came from.

Circumventing the System

At a warehouse in East Los Angeles, FDA investigators Arnold Shih and Dennis Hoang watched as 50 boxes of preserved bean curd from China were emptied into a grinding machine.

The monstrously loud apparatus worked its way through 1,800 glass bottles, grinding the glass and spitting out a stream of chunky yellow ooze. This ooze is then collected, treated and disposed of in the sewer system.

Investigators had decided the bottles of bean curds were improperly heat-sealed and thus were susceptible to harmful bacteria like botulism, which can be fatal.

The case of the bean curds was relatively straightforward: They had been flagged as suspect as soon as they arrived in port and were sent directly to an FDA warehouse for testing.

That’s not always how it happens.

In order to avoid holding up commerce, food shipments often are allowed to proceed directly from a port to the importer. The FDA may decide to physically inspect a shipment only after it has been moved.

But once food products are in the hands of the importer, there are more opportunities for fraud. To thwart investigators, importers may re-label a shipment or swap out the original product for something more likely to pass FDA inspection, Williams said.

Importers also have been known to circumvent orders to destroy or return shipments to their home countries, she said. For example, they might place contaminated food on top of a shipment and load the bottom with rocks or debris, hoping that federal inspectors — who must be present during export or destruction — will check only the boxes on top.

Sometimes, importers mislabel products they know will get scrutiny.

“And they do get clever,” Williams said.

A section of the Long Beach warehouse called “the museum” houses hundreds of confiscated items that importers tried to slip into this country by calling them something other than what they are.

The counterfeit Nike shoes piled onto one table were labeled rice sticks, Williams said. These will be passed to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which might slap the importer with a fine.

FDA investigators admit they can’t catch every risky import. There’s just too much to catch.

Rising Imports

Food imports to the U.S. have been increasing steadily for nearly a decade, and there are no signs that they will slow any time soon.

In 2002, the Los Angeles district handled about 930,000 shipments subject to FDA oversight. That rose to almost 1.4 million shipments in 2010, and the agency expects the number to hit 1.5 million this year.

“The numbers are staggering,” said Dan Solis, the FDA’s director of import operations for the L.A. district. “For example, in the Port of L.A., over 40 percent of shipments coming through are food … so yes, the volume is a continual challenge for import operations nationally.”

The FDA outlined some of the ways it is trying to keep up in a special report issued in July 2011 titled “Pathway to Global Product Safety and Quality.” In the report the agency said it has opened offices in several large food-exporting countries, including China, India and Costa Rica, and has boosted the number of inspections in other countries in an attempt to stop problems at the source.

Still, the report paints a gloomy picture of the FDA’s ability to cope. “Despite … recent improvements, FDA does not — nor will it — have the resources to adequately keep pace with the pressures of globalization,” the report states.

Carl Nielsen, former director of the FDA’s Office of Regulatory Affairs Division of Import Operations and Policy, said the biggest problem the FDA faces is an antiquated structure that focuses mostly on domestic food.

The FDA has about 1,800 investigators who oversee more than 44,000 U.S. food manufacturers and more than 100,000 additional registered food facilities, such as warehouses and grain elevators.

At the same time, the agency is responsible for nearly 200,000 foreign food facilities that have registered with the FDA in order to import the millions of food shipments that arrive in the U.S. each year.

With numbers like that, “Where would you want the people?” Nielsen said. “Would you want some people at the border? Well, there’s very few.”

FDA Public Affairs Officer Patricia El-Hinnawy said the number of investigators assigned to examine imported food shipments nationally is 277 full-time equivalents. That’s just five more than in 2009. These employees do field exams, sample collections and conduct security reviews, among other things, at ports of entry around the country.

Nielsen said the FDA’s food import operations are “still a bastard child” within the agency. Until the FDA sets up a separate, well-financed division devoted to food imports, inspections are “not going to happen effectively for a very, very long time,” he said.

Challenges

The Food Safety Modernization Act, passed earlier this year, gives the FDA a new mandate to make certain food is safe for U.S. consumers. Among the requirements are stricter rules for imported foods and more inspections.

The law places more responsibility for food safety on foreign manufacturers. And it calls for the FDA to inspect at least 600 foreign food facilities within the next year and double those inspections every year for the next five years. That would mean 19,200 foreign inspections in year six.

The FDA inspected 354 foreign food establishments in 2010 and estimates it will inspect 994 in 2011.

In its July report, the FDA said the 2011 goal might be attainable but not the rest.

“It would be impossible for FDA to complete 19,200 foreign food inspections in year six without a substantial increase in resources or a complete overhaul in the way it operates,” the report said.

More resources also are needed for intelligence-gathering and technological improvements, such as a global data-information sharing system, the FDA report said.

Technology, Nielsen said, has long been the biggest weak spot in the FDA’s ability to monitor food imports. In 2000, FDA officials came up with a list of 10 things they needed to better monitor imports, and seven of them had to do with technology, Nielsen said.

“And I promise you, they’re still not done,” he said.

Additional resources are unlikely as Congress cuts spending in an effort to reduce the nation’s debt. A measure in the U.S. House of Representatives would cut $285 million from the agency’s 2012 budget, with $35 million coming from food safety, according to the Agriculture Appropriations Bill.

Los Angeles District Director Alonza Cruse said the FDA has made major improvements over the past decade, including better communication and collaboration with other agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection and a new computer system that is helping pinpoint which of the millions of shipments each year should be inspected.

That system, called PREDICT, or Predictive Risk-based Evaluation for Dynamic Import Compliance Targeting, is now used at 70 percent of U.S. import operations at land, sea and air ports. It analyzes information such as a manufacturer’s history with the agency, lab test results and even current weather patterns to direct investigators toward the riskiest commodities and shipments.

But while PREDICT is a powerful tool, the safety of food imports still lies largely in the hands of investigators like Denise Williams and scientists like Steve Angold.

Until someone invents a robot that can distinguish safe food from unsafe food, Cruse said, it’s “a person who has to ultimately decide, yea or nay.”

There are “tools that hopefully help us to say yea or nay faster,” she said. “But it all comes down to a person.”

Salmonella outbreak traced to cantaloupes in Guatemala

Guatemala — 2012-01-23T20:20:51-05:00

GUATEMALA CITY – When an Albany, Ore., church group gathered for a dinner in February 2011, three people ate salmonella-tainted cantaloupe and fell ill.

They were the first confirmed victims of an outbreak involving a rare strain of salmonella that eventually reached 10 states – from California and Nevada to Pennsylvania and Maryland – and was linked to 20 illnesses this spring, News21 reports.

Federal and state officials traced the outbreak to a farm in Guatemala 2,800 miles away that grows cantaloupe for Del Monte Fresh Produce N.A. Inc. Despite the company’s reluctance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urged a recall of nearly 60,000 cantaloupes imported into the U.S. from the farm in Asunción Mita, located about four hours from here.

Del Monte Fresh Produce is now challenging the decisions and conclusions of the FDA, the Oregon Public Health department and its senior epidemiologist, raising questions about how foodborne illness outbreaks are investigated and the steps authorities take to stop them from spreading.

In court actions against the FDA and Oregon, Del Monte Fresh Produce contends its cantaloupes never tested positive for salmonella and, as a result, federal and state investigators did not have proof of the contamination. The company said the FDA did not exhaust other possibilities of contamination, including when the product was in the hands of retailers or during transit.

In the world of epidemiology, the science of tracing and identifying diseases in a population, it’s rare for scientists to test the exact food suspected of carrying pathogens, said Dr. Kirk Smith, epidemiology supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Health. By the time symptoms occur and a foodborne illness is reported and confirmed, the product in question has likely been consumed or has exceeded its shelf-life and been thrown away.

Instead, scientists, like detectives, interview victims, collect data, analyze patterns and match food “fingerprints” to determine the likely source of an outbreak.

“The majority of outbreaks, we don’t have the food to test,” Smith said. “Laboratory confirmation of the food should never be a requisite to implicating a food item as the vehicle of an outbreak. Epidemiology is actually a much faster and more powerful tool than is laboratory confirmation.”

David Acheson, former FDA associate commissioner of foods, said Del Monte Fresh Produce’s challenge underscores how important it is for the agency “to do everything in its power to make sure it’s right” when putting pressure on a company to recall a product.

“It would be unfortunate if the impact of this was that the power of epidemiology to protect public health is diluted,” he said. "In a way, epidemiology is on trial."

News21, a national university student reporting project, has traced the cantaloupe outbreak since March, reviewing nearly a thousand pages of documents, including government reports and emails between investigators and the company, and conducting dozens of interviews. Reporters also visited the farm in Guatemala, nestled amid winding dirt roads in a fertile valley near the El Salvador border where the problem allegedly began.

Anatomy of the Outbreak

When people started getting sick in Oregon from the rare strain of salmonella known as Salmonella Panama, epidemiologists there began comparing the strain to reported cases in other states. When the case matches were confirmed, multiple state health departments began coordinating with investigators from the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track down the origin of the outbreak.

Through a series of patient interviews and questionnaires, epidemiologists identified a common theme: Victims reported purchasing and eating food from Costco, a national warehouse store.

Using Costco customer purchase receipts and shipping records, investigators quickly zeroed in on cantaloupe grown at the Productos Agricolas de Oriente, S.A.’s Asunción Mita farm and distributed through Del Monte Fresh Produce N.A. Inc. Both are indirect subsidiaries of the global food giant Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc.

Under pressure from the FDA, Del Monte Fresh Produce issued a limited, voluntary recall of the cantaloupe on March 22. The recall included 4,992 crates of cantaloupes that were shipped to Costco retailers in seven states.

The cantaloupe was “grown in and shipped from Del Monte Fresh’s farm in Asuncion Mita” and has the “potential to be contaminated with (salmonella),” according to the recall issued by the company.

“The language in the release was suggested and approved by the FDA,” Del Monte Fresh Produce said in an email statement to News21.

Since the March recall, eight additional illnesses have been confirmed from the tainted cantaloupe, according to a June 23 update from the CDC. But because state health department reporting practices vary and victims can test positive for salmonella months after being infected, it is unclear when the victims consumed the cantaloupe – thus leaving it an open question whether the limited recall left contaminated cantaloupe on U.S. store shelves.

On July 15, several months after the outbreak, the FDA issued an import alert, effectively banning future melon imports from Asunción Mita. An import alert is an FDA action that prohibits imported goods from entering U.S. commerce and mandates that they be detained at U.S. ports of entry without physical examination.

Unusual Litigation

In an Aug. 22 complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Del Monte Fresh Produce contested the recall and alert, saying the FDA has no evidence that the cantaloupe from Asunción Mita was the source of the salmonella outbreak. The company said the government actions were based on “erroneous speculation, unsupported by scientific evidence."

In another unusual move, Del Monte Fresh Produce filed notice to sue the Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division as well as its senior epidemiologist, Dr. William E. Keene, for “misleading allegations regarding Del Monte Fresh’s imported cantaloupe."

In court documents, Del Monte Fresh Produce said the FDA demanded that it either go along with the recall “or suffer the consequences of an FDA consumer advisory questioning the wholesomeness of Del Monte cantaloupes.”

The suit says that with the winter cantaloupe season approaching, the company will face “irreparable harm” if the alert is not immediately lifted.

Del Monte Fresh Produce, the largest importer of cantaloupe to the U.S., gets a little more than 50 percent of its cantaloupe from Productos Agricolas de Oriente, with 27 percent of that from the farm in Asunción Mita, according to the August court filings.

Food safety experts and state health department epidemiologists say the lawsuits could have a dramatic chilling effect on how future public health advisories are issued.

“The lawsuit against the epidemiologist in Oregon is very troubling to me because they seem to be singling out an individual official,” said Tony Corbo, a senior lobbyist on food-related legislation for Food & Water Watch, a food safety advocacy group. “This lawsuit could have a chilling effect on public health agencies recommending that recalls be taken based on epidemiological information.”

Tim Jones, an epidemiologist for the Tennessee Department of Health, said if public health officials like him are constantly worried about lawsuits “it would have a terrible effect – slowing them down and hesitating to do things.”

In its statement to News21, Del Monte Fresh Produce said that’s not the intent of the litigation. “Although Dr. Keene is mentioned in our filings, our intent was not to single out any particular state official,” Del Monte Fresh Produce said. “Rather, we reluctantly took these actions to draw attention to weaknesses in the current system that appear to have influenced this recall.”

Whatever the source of the outbreak, the cantaloupe recall has drawn attention to the high-risk fruit, involved in multiple U.S. outbreaks or recalls in the last 20 years, and to a government regulatory system strained by soaring food imports.

Imports Growing

The Del Monte Fresh Produce recall is one of 31 U.S. outbreaks and recalls from contaminated cantaloupe that have killed three and sickened more than 1,200 people since 1990, according to a News21 analysis of data from the FDA and the CDC.

Nearly a third of the melons exported around the world end up in the U.S., and in recent years nearly half of those have come from Guatemala, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Service.

Overall, imports account for 15 percent of the U.S. food supply, including nearly two-thirds of all fresh fruits and vegetables. The FDA, which is responsible for the safety of 80 percent of the nation's food supply, cannot effectively regulate all this imported food, former FDA associate commissioner Acheson said. The FDA "simply does not have the resources,” he said. “It doesn't have the people, and it certainly doesn't have the dollars to even begin to (regulate) this well."

The FDA “pays no attention to whether a product leaves its country of origin or its exporting country with the right certification,” Acheson said, adding that the agency physically inspects less than 1 percent of food imports.

Banned Cantaloupe

The farm at Asunción Mita is located in a modest, mostly rural area dotted with small homes, chicken coops and fields of corn and mango trees. A water-soaked road leads to a gated entrance.

When two News21 reporters visited in June, Del Monte Fresh Produce executives would not permit them access to the facility and declined to let employees be interviewed. Two guards, handguns strapped to their hips, stood behind the chain link fence, checking anyone who sought entry.

For the time being, at least, Del Monte Fresh Produce will not be able to import any cantaloupes from the farm here. Any of its melons exported to the U.S. will be detained at U.S. ports of entry because prior shipments appeared to be harvested and packaged under “insanitary conditions,” according to the FDA alert.

For the alert to be lifted, the company must provide evidence that its imports are negative for salmonella and other pathogens.

One week before Del Monte Fresh Produce filed suit against the FDA, the company attempted to provide that evidence. In an 84-page document emailed to the FDA were the results of a third-party audit conducted at the Asunción Mita facility, previous FDA inspection records of another Productos Agricolas de Oriente farm in 2010, and a history of FDA and independent testing of fruit from the Asunción Mita facility that tested negative for salmonella.

According to the audit performed in April by a company hired by Del Monte Fresh Produce, the facility scored 97 out of 100 possible points, losing three points in the sanitary programs category. The inspection firm recommended covering an exposed sewage ditch, incorporating daily cleansing and sanitation of the dump tank – a basin of water in which fruit is cleaned before packing – and the use of squeegees instead of brooms to push water into drains.

The farm in Guatemala has not been a source of problems for Del Monte Fresh Produce in the past. However, the company has had its cantaloupes pulled from U.S. stores.

In fact, the March recall was the third associated with Del Monte Fresh Produce cantaloupe in three years. The other recalls involved melons shipped to California and Nevada in 2009, recalled by a California retailer that sold the cantaloupes, and a 2010 recall by Del Monte Fresh Produce of cantaloupes distributed in Michigan that were grown in and shipped from Arizona.

In the 2009 and 2010 instances, the Del Monte Fresh Produce-branded cantaloupes were randomly tested by state health agencies, who determined that they had the potential to be contaminated with salmonella.

Del Monte Fresh Produce said in an email statement that the company worked with state and federal agencies during the two previous cantaloupe incidents and that each case was resolved when the FDA determined no additional actions were necessary. No illnesses were reported in either case.

Pinpointing Blame

The emails News21 obtained through public records requests provide an inside look at discussions between state health officials and Del Monte Fresh Produce representatives leading up to the March recall.

Keene, Oregon’s lead epidemiologist, said he alerted Dr. Thomas Young, Del Monte Fresh Produce’s vice president of research and agricultural services, of the outbreak’s link to the company’s cantaloupe on March 15.

Two days later, Young sent an email response detailing Del Monte’s safety practices in Guatemala. “In summary, I cannot imagine how (salmonella) could be coming from our Mita operation, but I am available to assist you in your investigation,” he wrote.

Evidence of Del Monte’s cantaloupe as the source of contamination was “overwhelming,” Keene wrote on March 19. “I think we need to move ahead with the common understanding that your cantaloupes caused this outbreak,” he added, noting that he was speaking for Oregon and not the FDA or other regulatory agencies.

Keene included in the email an epidemiological analysis of cantaloupe consumption in the U.S. and how it relates to the share of Asunción Mita cantaloupe in the U.S. market. He used this analysis to explain the high probability that the contaminated cantaloupe originated from Asucnión Mita.

“In our world, these numbers are considered pretty good evidence, however circumstantial,” he wrote to Young in the same March 19 email.

Young argued that none of Del Monte Fresh Produce cantaloupes tested positive for Salmonella Panama. Keene responded that a positive test “is a pretty tough standard to meet,” given the fact that the implicated cantaloupe had already been consumed and whatever remained had likely been thrown away.

The emails between multiple state health departments and Costco also reveal that Costco customer receipts confirmed 11 out of the first 13 victims purchased Asunción Mita cantaloupe.

In court documents, Del Monte Fresh Produce contends that the contamination could have occurred when the cantaloupes were in the hands of retailers. The company also contends that the FDA never tested cantaloupe from the site and that its own tests showed the cantaloupe were safe.

FDA officials declined comment because the case is in litigation. But in its import alert, the agency said it is extremely unlikely that the salmonella outbreak could have been due to an isolated event in the field or in a packing house. The source of the contamination, according to the alert, was likely irrigation of fields with water contaminated with sewage, processing produce with Salmonella-contaminated water, poor hygienic practices on the part of workers, animals in close proximity to the cantaloupe or water sources, and/or unsanitary equipment at the Asunción Mita farm.

Out of the Loop

Guatemala's food safety director for the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr. Antonio Ferrate, said he and his agency have been left out of the FDA’s dealings with Del Monte Fresh Produce. The FDA, he said, rarely talks to Guatemalan officials.

In March, when the ministry was notified of the outbreak, the melons already had been harvested, so the government was unable to conduct tests to see if the fruit was safe, Ferrate said.

Herbert Pezzarossi, director of produce for the Guatemalan ministry, said Del Monte Fresh Produce conducted its own tests, but the ministry never received the results. “We asked for (test results),” he said. But the company argued “that this was a transnational issue that the U.S. was taking care of.”

In an interview with News21, Pezzarossi and Ferrate questioned whether the cantaloupe should have been shipped out of Guatemala at all. Pezzarossi called the shipments “irregular” and Ferrate called them “illegal,” saying the company did not have the proper licensing, including a sanitary operating license, to ship the cantaloupe.

Del Monte Fresh said in an email response to News21 that “any inference that Del Monte is importing any illegal shipments from Guatemala is completely false.”

Ferrate said his government does not intend to punish the company but will instead work with it to ensure that it meets export requirements in the future.

Cindy Martinez of Plaza Publica, an investigative online news site, assisted with reporting in Guatemala.

Tarryn Mento wrote this story while a Carnegie-Knight News21 fellow from Arizona State. Brandon Quester wrote this story while a Carnegie-Knight News21 fellow from Arizona State. News21 is part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. Use of content requires attribution under Creative Commons.