NEWS ANALYSIS : Meat Inspection: ‘No Longer Adequate’

Much remains unknown about the events that preceded the hundreds of illnesses linked to contaminated hamburger in the past month, but what’s been learned in the past four weeks may be even more unsettling for consumers than the still-lingering mysteries.

Federal officials now concede that the origin of the E. coli 0157:H7 contamination--whether sick cows, unsanitary slaughter plants or human error--may never be known despite the efforts of numerous government health agencies now tracking the problem.

More disturbing, however, is that the largest reported E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak to date has underscored how ill-equipped the federal meat inspection program is to handle the threat from harmful bacteria in the food supply.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the nation’s $500 million meat and poultry inspection program, tries to ensure safety and wholesomeness by looking for visual defects on carcasses, which is basically the same technique that has been in use for more than 50 years. But bacteria cannot be detected by sight, scent or touch.

Laboratory analysis is the only way to detect E. coli. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy estimates that it would cost $58 billion just to analyze 20% of the nation’s beef supply for E. coli. Further, it takes about six days to get laboratory results, which is too long to hold fresh meat prior to its release into retail channels.

“From everything I’ve heard, seen and read, it is clear to me that improvements must be made in the way we inspect meat and poultry in the future,” Espy says. “A visual inspection program is no longer sufficient to meet the food safety needs of today’s consumers.”

Yet, despite a long list of proposals announced by Espy last week, the public can expect little change in the condition of raw meat or poultry: The department does not even have the budget to fill its 550 meat inspector vacancies.

When USDA officials testified before a Senate Agriculture Subcommittee hearing last week, one official after another said the department’s meat inspection program is “no longer adequate” to control harmful bacteria and cannot prevent similar outbreaks in the future.

Many in Congress and in the consumer advocacy community agree that it is irresponsible to shift all responsibility for food safety to consumers.

“I know thorough cooking is an answer, but it is not the complete answer because errors are made,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). “Children will continue to eat in restaurants. Children do not bring meat thermometers with them to restaurants. Parents make mistakes also, but the death penalty is too strong a penalty for a cooking error.”

In some ways more frightening still, one U.S. Food and Drug Administration official testified that the government’s revised cooking instructions for ground beef may not be enough to destroy this particularly powerful bacteria, especially if the organism is present in high numbers.

“The FDA has recommended raising the cooking temperature to 155 degrees to compensate for . . . higher levels of pathogens,” said Douglas L. Archer, deputy director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “Even this higher temperature is insufficient to kill high numbers of E. coli 0157:H7 . . . . The emphasis should not be on changing cooking temperature times; the emphasis must be placed on improving raw ingredients.”

And, in probably the system’s most serious failing, federal inspectors would be helpless to keep contaminated raw meat off the market even if high levels of harmful bacteria were to be discovered during any round of testing.

“We (the USDA) do not have the (regulatory) authority to detain or condemn raw meat product that is contaminated with bacteria,” said H. Russell Cross, administrator of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the agency responsible for meat and poultry inspection.

An analogy heard frequently during the current controversy is that the USDA already knows that as much as 60% of the nation’s raw poultry tests positive for Salmonella. Yet sales of raw chicken go on uninterrupted. Salmonella causes an estimated 2 million or more cases of food poisoning each year in this country; E. coli 0157:H7 is responsible for between 6,000 and 20,000 illnesses.

Meanwhile, USDA officials working to discover the origin of the E. coli 0157:H7-tainted beef are not having much success. Last week, the USDA released a list of 13 companies thought to be possible sources of the raw meat that was ground into the problematic shipment. Yet only one of the 13 acknowledged it could be a possible source; some on the USDA list do not even sell raw meat products. A USDA representative was at a loss to explain why the list was inaccurate and said the department is working on a new one.

The origin of the tainted beef is important because health officials believe that reforms need to be instituted at the farm level to reduce the presence of harmful bacteria in meat. Destroying harmful bacteria in food is much more difficult than preventing it from entering the system in the first place. Government officials, industry analysts and consumer advocates agree that E. coli 0157:H7 most likely originates in mature dairy cattle that are sent to slaughter.

“Dairy cattle constitute a major reservoir for the transmission of E. coli 0157:H7 to humans,” said Paul Blake, chief of the enteric diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “However, we do not fully understand the ecology of the organism on dairy farms, its prevalence and geographic distribution, and why it is present on some dairy farms and not others.”

There is no way for a consumer to discern whether beef is from a dairy cow or from a steer raised on a feed lot. In fact, as the food system becomes more globalized it is not uncommon for a single beef patty to contain meat from three or four different countries. In the current epidemic, officials are at odds over whether some of the implicated beef originated in Canada, Australia or in the northern United States.

Carol Tucker Foreman, a representative of the Washington-based Safe Food Coalition, told last week’s Senate hearing: “We are spending a half billion dollars a year for a rickety, ineffectual, old system, bad science and poor leadership. The public deserves better.”

Foreman said the USDA has been too cozy with the industry it regulates to make the tough decisions necessary to improve the meat supply.

“We haven’t found ways to determine that meat is contaminated, not because it is too difficult,” she said, “but because the people who run the system and the people who are regulated by it are too comfortable with the status quo.”