Health Law

Summer 2010 food safety report card

By Drew Falkenstein

It is constructive to look at what we've done recently, and take lessons from failures.  This summer--totally gone now in Seattle--was actually fairly encouraging, despite the best efforts of one bad egg who dominated food news.  Here are the grades for several major food industries (beef, produce, and raw milk), and a grade for Wright County Egg.

BEEF

Despite several recent missteps, the most notable grade on the food safety report card this summer was a B earned by the beef industry.  The mis-steps were, of course, Cargill's end-of-summer E. coli O26 recall and outbreak linked to ground beef  that sickened at least three people in Maine and New York.  The resulting recall totaled 8,500 pounds of meet. Valley Meat Company also recalled ground beef that was contaminated by E. coli O157:H7, sickening at least 7 people in California. 

Further eroding the very solid grade (would have been an A) that the beef industry would have received is American Meat Institute's disdainfully wooden adherence to its policy against mandatory testing for non-O157 strains of shiga-toxin producing E. coli.  Shame on the industry and its mouthpiece J. Patrick Boyle (also President and CEO of AMI) for their attempts to block this important public health measure (after all, Cargill's E. coli O26 outbreak is hard, recent proof that these bugs do cause outbreaks in meat).  Still with only a few thousand pounds of product recalled this summer, it was undoubtedly a good prime E. coli season for the beef industry. 

PRODUCE

A close second, earning another solid B has to be the leafy-greens and produce industries.  Only a few recalls marred an otherwise sterling summer for produce: 

•  sprouts recall due to salmonella contamination;
• mamey fruit pulp recall due to salmonella typhi contamination;
• Fresh Express salads' listeria recall;
• another sprouts recall due to listeria contamination;
• Fresh Express romaine lettuce recall due to E. coli O157:H7 contamination;
• Mexican peppers recall;
• Ready Pac salads recall due to E. coli O157:H7 contamination;
• spinach recall due to E. coli O157:H7 contamination.

Two points worthy of note as to why the produce industry's grade is a B rather than an A.  First, no A's to an industry with this many recalls, even though I do not know of many, if any, illnesses associated with the multiple recalls.  Further, this summer came on the heels of a spring that was not good for the produce industry, after Freshway's E. coli O145 outbreak in April linked to shredded lettuce, and the several other outbreaks and recalls that occurred in May. 

RAW MILK

My final major industry category is raw milk and related products.  As with the produce and beef industries, the year 2010 did not start well for the raw milk industry (11 outbreaks from January through June 2010).  And in contrast to the beef and produce industries, raw milk's (and related products) summer was not nearly as disease free.  For these reasons, raw milk earns a very average C (a D- overall for 2010; too many outbreaks and people sick). 

 Billy Goat Dairy, June 2010:  Billy Goat Dairy, a goat milk raw dairy in Longmont, Colorado (Boulder County) produced milk contaminated by E. coli O157:H7 and campylobacter.  The resulting outbreak sickened at least thirty people, causing multiple cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS. 

See Denver Post's important article on the Pierce family, whose two children were sickened and hospitalized with hemolytic uremic syndrome after consuming E. coli contaminated raw milk from Billy Goat Dairy. 

Other recalls or raw milk and related products (mostly Mexican cheeses made from raw milk):

• Queso Fresco recall due to listeria contamination
• Queso Cotija cheese due to staph aureus
• Queso Fresco and Hebra due to listeria contamination

EGGS

The widely held view right now is that our food safety system sucks.  This statement is true for many reasons, but right now, its true primarily because of one bad egg:  Wright County Egg.  This company earns an F, but only because that's the lowest grade on the scale.  In fact, it's difficult to say anything remotely positive about this company, given the findings that continue to stream in during the governmental investigation into Wright County Egg's outbreak.  For this reason, foodpoisonjournal.com is going to make an exception to the traditional grading scale and give Wright County Egg a Z.  The lowest of the low.

I'm actually a little tired of writing about Wright County Egg.  We plan to get our hands dirty, literally, in coming weeks by personally inspecting the farms where the contaminated eggs were produced.  Then its on to more litigation against the company on behalf of the dozens of people we represent who were sickened in the outbreak. 

See More about conditions at Wright County Egg

See also What we've got here is [a] failure to communicate

Full post as published by Food Poison Blog on September 11, 2010 (boomark / email).