Outbreaks Called Rare but ‘Inevitable’

The delivery of fruit cups possibly contaminated with hepatitis A to thousands of Los Angeles schoolchildren points to holes in an inspection system that cannot readily test for viruses in food and apparently takes vendors’ word on the source of their product, food and health experts said Wednesday.

Some experts went so far as to call periodic widespread outbreaks of disease “inevitable,” though still relatively rare, as mass production and mass marketing of food grows more common.

“There is no simple way to screen strawberries and other fruit that are not cooked,” said Lee Riley, a professor of infectious disease at UC Berkeley. Viruses such as hepatitis, unlike bacteria such as E. coli, are too small to detect easily.

Although the general record of safety for fruit in the American market is good, it will never be 100%, according to Dean Cliver, a professor of food safety at UC Davis. Strawberries come into contact with too many different hands and water sources at too many locations to absolutely avoid contamination all the time, said Cliver, who is an expert on food-borne viruses.

“If we want fresh fruit, some things like this are going to happen,” he said. “A certain amount of risk is involved.”

That does not mean there is nothing to be done. Sometimes testing for bacteria also serves as a good way to detect a virus, Riley said. In fact, E. coli can serve as a marker for hepatitis A contamination because it is transmitted in the same way, through feces.

And the food industry bears a responsibility to disinfect products as they are processed, Riley said. In the case of berries, the product should be washed with an appropriate disinfectant, chlorinated water or a detergent, or irradiated.

Oversight Lacking Abroad

Riley said that oversight of farms where fruit and vegetables are grown in the United States appears to be fairly rigorous--with some workers actually being screened for hepatitis A--but the process in other countries is outside inspectors’ control. There is not much they can do “other than to know where the product is coming from,” he said.

In this case, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials say, they did not. The fruit vendor, Andrew & Williamson Sales Co., apparently certified that the products were domestically grown, as is required for school lunch programs, even though the suspect strawberries were harvested on a Mexican farm.

“That is fraud,” said Mary Ann Keeffe, acting undersecretary for the USDA’s food, nutrition and consumer services.

Cliver said he hears of hepatitis A outbreaks linked to strawberries about once a decade. Because the edible portion of strawberries are close to the ground, they can be more easily contaminated than tree-borne fruits, he added.

And freezing does not kill the virus. “When we want to store hepatitis A, we freeze it,” he explained.

Federal officials at a Washington news conference Wednesday were at a loss to explain where a breakdown could have occurred.

“We think now that the contamination occurred in the fields [where the berries were grown] or in processing, but we don’t know,” said David Satcher, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Hastening to allay the growing concern, health and school lunch officials described the situation as highly unusual and defended the safety record of the National School Lunch Program that serves 25 million each day.

“This is really an extremely isolated situation. . . . Something definitely fell through the cracks,” said Gary Grayson, administrator of food distribution for California schools.

Grayson said he could recall no comparable contamination scare in California since at least the early 1980s. His assessment was echoed by others.

Barry Sackin, on the executive board of the American School Food Service Assn., said this was only the second instance of contamination of a USDA-provided product that he has heard of in his 17-year career. Typically, schools get about one-fifth of their supply from the USDA.

“We as operators take it on good faith that the products that are purchased by the government are going to be safe,” he said. “This is a very, very rare occurrence.”

Although not common, problems have arisen in the past in the government’s safeguarding process.

In 1995, some USDA-approved chicken nuggets were pulled from schools in Connecticut, Keeffe said. Bone fragments were detected in the chicken morsels after a student choked on a nugget and died.

In 1992, the USDA immediately pulled its supply of juices when it suspected that the drinks might be infected with the E. coli bacteria.

In the 1980s, packing plants that had been among the largest suppliers of ground beef to the federal school lunch program were found to have tainted meat. They were regularly bringing dead animals into their slaughterhouses and mixing rotten meat into their hamburgers.

Another USDA school lunch problem arose for the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1992, with burritos that contained foreign substances such as pebbles. In 1995, three former operators of a City of Commerce food supply company providing the burritos pleaded guilty to defrauding the lunch program by using substandard ingredients in the burritos, namely beans that investigators were told contained “rocks, field trash, broken glass and metal.”

Keeffe says there are no common threads in the incidents. “It is so haphazard when it happens,” she said.

USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, which purchases products for the agency, has inspectors on site during the processing of school lunch products.

USDA inspectors at the San Diego plant of Andrew & Williamson are trying to determine what went wrong. But records show that the inspection occurred by the book, Keeffe said.

Typically, a USDA inspector does a basic review of plant sanitation. Then, the product is inspected to make sure that it meets specifications related to quality, size and origin.

Only if the USDA inspector suspects a health or safety violation is a report made to the Food and Drug Administration, said Keeffe. She said she was not sure if the USDA process goes beyond an eyeball inspection.

During a May 23, 1996, inspection, the San Diego plant was deemed sanitary. The product was approved for commercial use that month and was later recertified for school lunch use in November and December.

A consumer group Wednesday used the possibly widespread contamination to bolster its position that food regulation needs tightening in this country.

“We’ve called on President Clinton to form a single federal food agency,” Caroline Smith DeWall of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Right now we invest billions of dollars of taxpayer money to ensure the safety of foods, and we think we would get a bigger bang for the buck with a single federal agency.”

Buying From Local Vendors

Most products schools buy come not from the USDA but through local vendors. “We go with someone’s track record,” said Shyrl Dougherty, director of nutrition services for the Montebello Unified School District. When time permits, usually every few years, she will inspect a vendor’s plant, just to see how they are preparing food.

“We tend to buy from the same folks,” Dougherty said. USDA foods, she added, have typically been very safe. Prior to this week’s strawberry scare, she can recall two other problems with tainted USDA foods to schools in 20 years.

Usually, Sackin said, problems arise when schools buy locally, not from the USDA. “This is what makes this [current case] frightening,” Sackin said.

But Sackin added that food that gets to schools passes through many hands. Even the extreme precautions taken in Japanese schools--where school food workers, Sackin said, must take a complete physical with a stool test every two months--did not prevent that country’s recent outbreak of E. coli poisoning that was traced to school lunches. “It’s almost an impossibility in the food business to absolutely assure a pure food chain,” Sackin said.

There are only a handful of distributors for each type of product--dairy, bread, vegetables--and food service directors are quite familiar with their records. “Schools are probably the safest places to eat. We take our responsibility of serving our children very serious,” Sackin said.

Nevertheless, he said, “Stuff happens.”

Times staff writers Larry Gordon and Martha Groves contributed to this story.