USDA Meat Inspection System Under Fire : Jack in the Box Case Brings a Renewed Call for Reforms

Until his two young daughters became seriously ill after eating contaminated hamburgers at a nearby Jack in the Box restaurant, Joseph Dolan of Kent, Wash., never doubted that any meat was fit to eat.

Meat is inspected by the government, he knew, stamped with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s seal of approval.

“You just assume everything is safe,” Dolan said.

But the alarming wave of illness that has touched the Dolan girls and hundreds of other Jack in the Box customers has shaken that assumption for countless Americans who have come to trust the USDA stamp.

With two children dead and dozens of other people hospitalized, the epidemic is riveting attention on a decades-old meat inspection program that critics say is set up to ensure quality more than safety.

Speaking before the Washington Senate last week, newly appointed U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy acknowledged flaws in a system that did not detect large amounts of bacteria-laden beef. He pledged to outline reforms before Congress today.

Espy is expected to announce a program to bolster the agency’s ability to find and prevent bacterial contamination--a step that critics of the USDA say is long overdue.

Meanwhile, in the finger-pointing that has followed the tragedy, several victims are suing Jack in the Box for not cooking hamburgers long enough to ensure that all bacteria were killed. And on Thursday, the company that owns Jack in the Box sued Vons Cos., which supplied ground meat to the restaurant chain.

A Vons spokeswoman said the lawsuit was expected, adding that the Arcadia-based company is confident that it was not responsible for the contamination. Health authorities, she noted, have said “proper cooking would have prevented this tragedy.”

The task of checking for meat contamination falls to 5,000 USDA inspectors who patrol the nation’s slaughterhouses. They are charged with examining animal carcasses for signs of disease or contamination, such as hair, wood chips or fecal matter, much as they have since the 1930s. The inspectors are not equipped to search for disease-causing bacteria, a process that requires expensive, time-consuming laboratory tests.

Elaine Dodge, a staff attorney with the Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based watchdog group that has long lobbied for reform at the USDA, said the lack of testing leaves meat supplies vulnerable to the sort of mass contamination that has now struck in Washington state, Iowa and Nevada.

“The entire system was an accident waiting to happen,” said Jean Hutter, associate director of government affairs for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents meat handlers in supermarkets and slaughterhouses. “And it did.”

Calls for reform of the nation’s meat inspection system are not new. Three times in the last eight years, the National Academy of Sciences has recommended tests for disease-causing bacteria. But the USDA’s food safety and inspection system has resisted.

Jim Greene, a spokesman for the USDA, said the agency has been hampered by a lack of funding and technology. Existing tests for some harmful bacteria take several days to produce results, he said, making them impractical for checking meat.

In any event, the USDA maintains that the nation’s meat supply is generally safe and that the threat from bacterial contamination is small. A random testing program for bacterial contamination, started last October, has not yet detected the harmful E. coli strain, although other studies have found that it may exist in up to 3.7% of all raw meat.

The agency believes the presence of other kinds of bacteria is also low.

Over the years, the USDA has maintained that the best defense against bacterial contamination is cooking meat until it is well done--a message that hasn’t reached the many thousands of Americans who prefer to eat beef when it is pink and juicy.

The advice also has failed to make an impression on some state governments, including California’s, which do not regulate cooking temperatures for ground beef and other foods. In Washington, by contrast, Jack in the Box is alleged to have undercooked its meat in violation of a new state law.

Critics of the USDA view the emphasis on proper cooking as an attempt to shift responsibility for meat safety to consumers--or to teen-age chefs working at the local fast-food restaurant.

“I don’t hold teen-agers on their first job responsible for this problem,” said Dodge of the Government Accountability Project. “The contamination shouldn’t be there in the first place.”

No one is yet certain how the Jack in the Box hamburgers became contaminated.

Investigators believe that fecal matter splattered on a carcass, probably at the slaughterhouse when the animal was disemboweled. That possibility has caused critics to call for reform of the traditional inspection process as well.

“Feces can’t come in contact with the carcass unless there’s a mistake at the slaughter facility,” said Dodge. Government inspectors are supposed to check fecal contamination, she said, and cut away any meat in contact with it.

Some USDA inspectors assigned to slaughterhouses said they are not surprised by the problems.

Steve Cockerman, an inspector based in Nebraska who testified before the National Academy of Sciences, said carcasses dangling from hooks whiz by on assembly lines so quickly that inspectors have no time to perform thorough checks.

At high-speed processing plants, he said, beef carcasses move through at a rate of 312 an hour, giving an inspector just six seconds to check a split carcass for fecal contamination. While inspectors have the authority to stop the assembly line, most are reluctant to do so very often, he said.

In addition, Cockerman and other inspectors complain that the agency is understaffed, with around 600 vacancies. Espy last week ordered a hiring freeze at the department, so those posts may continue to go unfilled.

USDA spokesman Greene said that the “vast majority” of inspectors are satisfied with the way the system works, adding that the estimate of 600 inspector vacancies seemed high.

One person who is not satisfied is Joseph Dolan, whose daughters are still recovering from the effects of the E. coli 0157:H7 strain of bacteria that lurked in their Jack in the Box hamburgers on Jan. 3.

Mary, 4, suffered a stroke during a two-week hospitalization and was forced to briefly undergo dialysis when her kidneys failed. Now at home, Mary is trying to recover memory lost as a result of the stroke, her father said.

Her sister, 2-year-old Aundrea-- who fell asleep and did not finish her hamburger--did not get as sick. But she is being watched for signs of permanent kidney damage.

“The whole inspection system is flawed from start to finish,” said Dolan, 30, an engineer with Boeing. “The problem is massive.”