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FOOD IRRADIATION UPDATE
January 15, 2005
“People’s perception of the disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) is
coloured by the fact that it’s not a very nice disease,” adding that
salmonella, botulism and E. coli are much more effective killers.” Stephen
Moore, chairman of bovine genomics, University of Alberta’s department of
agriculture
“We’ve resolved our differences. Both…

We as Americans have grown up believing that our food supply is the safest in the world. But the CDC estimates that over 300,000 people are hospitalized and over 5,000 die, just from eating food contaminated with a pathogen. In recent years, E. coli outbreaks have been linked to not just ground beef, but also…

This winter, scores of Americans, most of them small children or senior citizens, have already or will become deathly ill after eating ground beef boldly labeled “USDA approved.”

The now infamous ConAgra case started with a few sick kids in Colorado and quickly spread coast-to-coast, eventually triggering the recall of nearly 19 million pounds of ground beef tainted with E. coli O157:H7 in July. Now Emmpak Foods recalls 400,000 pounds of tainted ground beef. However, Emmpack Foods is no stranger to E. coli. It recalled 471,000 pounds of ground beef just last May. I guess lightening can strike twice?

What we will learn about the Emmpack Foods recall is that it comes weeks late, after most of that meat has been consumed and 40 Wisconsin residents are sickened. Because these people trusted our government’s food inspections, dozens are ill and some suffered kidney failure and spent days or weeks hooked up to kidney dialysis machines. For some, the long-term prognosis is grim, with the risk of further kidney failure, dialysis, transplants or worse.Continue Reading Put me out of business, please

We as Americans have grown up being told that our food supply is the safest in the world. However, the CDC estimates that each year over 76 million of us become ill, 300,000 are hospitalized and over 5,000 die, just from eating food contaminated with a food borne pathogen.

In recent years, E. coli outbreaks have been linked to not just ground beef, but also to sprouts, lettuce, apple juice and steaks. Salmonella outbreaks have been traced to foods such as tomatoes, orange juice and cantaloupe. In the last months the largest Hepatitis-A outbreak in United States history has been linked to green onions. Last year, school children in a Chicago suburb were fed chicken fingers contaminated with ammonia. And now, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or “Mad Cow” disease has been discovered at a slaughterhouse in Washington State.

While the incubation period for most food borne pathogens is a matter of days, and human symptoms of hepatitis-A infection frequently do not show up for over a month, symptoms of “Mad Cow,” or the human variant known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, may not appear for decades. Because we should not have to worry about the meat we eat today, and the impact that it could have on us days or decades from now, we need stronger and more aggressive regulation and enforcement by the Government, specifically the USDA. This arm of the government must do everything it can to protect the consuming public from tainted product and to protect the US meat industry from economic suicide.Continue Reading What to do about the “Mad Cow”

I had a nice chat with Mike Keefe-Feldman of the Missoula Independent about John Munsell, the owner of Montana Quality Foods meat packing plant, who is suing the USDA. As the Independent puts it, it’s a lawsuit which “if successful, could bring about the most significant changes to America’s meat-inspection system since the Federal Meat…

A piece of legislation called the California Safe Schools Lunch Act (AB 1988) was recently passed by the State Assembly and now awaits action by the State Senate. Unfortunately, its positive-sounding title might not satisfy the State’s own truth-in-labeling laws. The Bill’s passage and the passage of similar laws around the country could put school children at greater risk, not less, from the dangers of foodborne illness.

As originally drafted, the Bill restricted the State’s Department of Education from ordering irradiated ground beef from the USDA’s National School Lunch Program, an option that school districts have available for the first time in 2004. In its present form, it makes this additional food safety measure more difficult and expensive, at a time local school districts are financially strained. In some cities, like San Francisco, Berkeley and Washington, DC, local school boards have succumbed to pressure from irradiation opponents and voted outright bans on serving irradiated foods in cafeterias.

The problem is this: an estimated 73,000 people, many children, get E. coli infection every year and 61 die from it. The GAO found that between 1990 and 1999, 195 outbreaks of foodborne illnesses occurred in our schools, sickening thousands of children. I currently represent children who were made ill with E. coli O157:H7 infections after eating contaminated lettuce served at Eastern Washington University, a school in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and schools in San Diego and Orange Counties. In the past, I represented children made ill after eating contaminated ground beef in Washington state and Georgia. The list goes on, and E. coli is not the only pathogen making our children sick.Continue Reading Irradiating Foods – One More Step to Preventing Illness in Our Schools

Does America really have the safest food supply in the world? The Center for Disease Control estimates that each year over 76 million of us become ill, 300,000 are hospitalized and over 5,000 die, just from eating food contaminated with a food borne pathogen.

As I said in a recent op-ed What to do about…