Meat inspection meets the 21st century - Food Safety

Vegetarian Times, Jan, 1995 by Judy Krizmanic

New Plans by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service to make the federal meat inspection program more scientific have been greeted with both enthusiasm and skepticism. The Pathogen Reduction Act, introduced by Sen. Tom Daschle (D-.S.D.), calls for using laboratory tests to check for bacterial contamination of meat and for setting maximum allowable limits on bacteria that cause disease. The bill also would give the Food Safety and inspection Service (FSIS) authority to trace contaminated meat back to the slaughterhouse, to issue fines for safety violations and to recall contaminated products.

Current inspection practices date back to the Meat Inspection Act of 1907, which instructs inspectors to rely on sight, smell and touch to detect contaminated meat. A 1985 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that although meat inspectors could detect grossly visible contamination, they couldn't identify microbial pathogens that pose a major health risk. The need for better inspection became tragically evident in 1993, when the much publicized E. coli poisoning incident in Washington state killed three children and made hundreds of other people sick.

Following that outbreak, the USDA spent more than $500 million to hire some 200 new inspectors to continue sniffing and poking. Continued outbreaks of poisoning from F. coli, salmonella and other foodborne illnesses show that these efforts aren't working; the USDA estimates that 15 percent of meat and poultry carcasses are contaminated with disease-causing bacteria.

Some food safety advocates praise the proposed changes. Carol Tucker Foreman (see "Compromising Safe Food?" p. 18), coordinator of the Safe Food Coalition, calls the effort "an enormous breakthrough." Others are less enthused. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a Washington, D.C., group that promotes humane medical research and vegetarianism, calls the plan "a ruse." The group says that although new tests may help detect contamination, there is no guarantee that tainted meat will not come to market. "If they had a policy that said contaminated meat shouldn't be sold, they would be condemning a whole lot of meat," says PCRM director Neal Bernard, M.D. "And as long as I have been following these matters, anything that has a negative impact on the meat industry, the USDA is loathe to do." But Jacque Knight, FSIS news officer, says the regulations would not just grant authority to the agency but actually require it to remove tainted meat from the marketplace.

While the proposed legislation is pending, the FSIS has voluntarily begun using lab tests to check for E. coli contamination in 5,000 ground beef samples--equal in weight to .05 percent of annual U.S. ground beef consumption--from meat processing plants and supermarkets. Should the tests turn up harmful bacteria in a batch of supermarket ground beef, the agency says it will recall other meat from the same lot--a difficult task, however, because the ground beef in any supermarket hamburger patty may contain meat from a variety of sources.