Chicken Surprise at Stores

  • Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores to test for their study. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

A Consumer Reports study finds
most of the chickens bought at
the grocery store are contaminated
with bacteria that can cause you
to get sick. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

A Consumer Reports study finds
most of the chickens bought at
the grocery store are contaminated
with bacteria that can cause you
to get sick. Lester Graham reports:

Consumer Reports bought whole chickens from 100 different stores.

Dr. Urvashi Rangan says they tested them for two different strains of bacteria.

“Salmonella and campylobacter infections can give people serious diarhea, abdominal cramping for sometimes days, even weeks at a time.”

Two-thirds of the chickens they tested were tainted.

Rangan says the U.S. government’s guidelines are pretty loose for the chicken processors.

“Each company is basically allowed to script their own hygeine plan. And, clearly, there aren’t enough standards or standardidization among them that has allowed them to achieve a decent rate of cleanliness.”

The chickens that were cleanest were organic air-chilled chickens. The Consumer Report’s study is available online and will be published in the January issue of the magazine.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

FDA and Food Safety: Failing Grade

  • Another scare came a few years ago, when spinach was found to be tainted with E. Coli (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

In the wake of this year’s tainted peanut butter scare, Congress is getting ready to approve changes to the Food and Drug Administration. Lawmakers want to give the American public more confidence in the safety of the food supply system. But some people doubt they will be able to
make real change. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

In the wake of this year’s tainted peanut butter scare,
Congress is getting ready to approve changes to the Food
and Drug Administration. Lawmakers want to give the
American public more confidence in the safety of the food
supply system. But some people doubt they will be able to
make real change. Julie Grant reports:

Gwen Rosenberg is a mom. She has four boys to feed. So
she’d like to be able to trust that the food supply is safe.

But when Rosenberg heard that 8 people died after eating
peanut products earlier this year, and hundreds more got
sick, it confirmed her beliefs: that the Food and Drug
Administration isn’t making sure food is safe.

“There shouldn’t be stories that come out that reveal that the
peanut plant hasn’t been inspected for years. Or when it
was inspected, there was rat feces. They’re not doing their
job.”

Rosenberg wants the FDA to crack down on food
manufacturers. She says they need inspect more – and shut
down facilities when they find dangerous conditions. She
was appalled when she realized the FDA has no authority to
recall tainted foods.

“The fact that they don’t have recall authority essentially
neuters the FDA. I mean, how are we supposed to take
anything they say or do seriously if they end result is, ‘well,
we can’t force you to do this?’ Well, thanks for the
community service message not to eat the tainted peanut
butter, but you’re not actually making me any safer.”

In the case of the Peanut Corporation of America, a test
found salmonella in its products. It retested. When the test
came out negative, it went ahead and shipped out the
products.

And the FDA had no recall authority. Congressman Bart
Stupak says that’s just wrong. He’s co-sponsoring a food
safety bill that would give the FDA some authority in cases
like this.

“What the FDA can do, shut ‘er down. Prove to me that you
cleaned it up. Prove to me, where did you destroy this
product. Give me the facts. They can’t give you the facts,
shut ‘er down right now. Let’s not wait ten days.”

But leaders in the FDA don’t think recall authority would
have made much difference in the tainted peanut product
case.

David Acheson is Associate Commissioner for foods at the
FDA. Once people started getting sick, he says most
companies using the Peanut Corporation of America’s
products voluntarily recalled their cookies and crackers.

“There’s no suggestion that having mandatory recall is a
panacea to solving food safety problems. It’s one more tool
that would be used from time to time when the situation
warrants it, but it’s not the answer to modernizing food
safety.”

Acheson says the real problem is that the FDA is so busy
reacting to public health threats – to putting out fires – that it
can’t get ahead of the problems and fix the food safety
system.

He says the food system needs preventive controls.

There are a lot of points in the food supply chain where
hazards can creep in: when the food is being grown,
processed, distributed, or sold in a store. Acheson says the
food industry needs to identify control points for each food –
where they are most at risk at becoming unsafe.

“Is it a wild animal in a field, is it the water supply for the
spinach, is it the temperature in my freezer in a retail store.
And all these things in between where things can go wrong
and food can either become contaminated or if there is a low
level of contamination then bacteria can grow.”

Once those control points are identified, Acheson says the
FDA needs to do more inspections – to make sure food is
being handlled safely from farms fields to grocery stores.

But that’s going to cost money.

So Congress is considering charging companies fees to pay
for those inspections.

Food manufacturers don’t like that idea. We contacted
several companies, but none of them, not even the Grocery
Manufacturers Association, would comment for this story.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Government Fails at Food Safety

  • The reported number of salmonella cases has not gone down since 1996 (Source: Gene.Arboit at Wikimedia Commons)

Government agencies admit they need to do a better job at keeping food safe. Kyle Norris has more:

Transcript

Government agencies admit they need to do a better job at keeping food safe. Kyle Norris has more:

When you discover people are getting sick from a food bourne illness like salmonella, you want to stop others from getting sick from it as fast as possible.

A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Food & Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture finds the government is not getting any faster.

The report found the number of reported salmonella cases each year is about 15 people in 100,000. That has not gone down since 1996.

Lola Russell is a spokeswoman for the CDC.

“We are planning to increase the capacity of state health departments so that outbreaks can be better detected and investigated.”

Russell says the CDC will work to get more “boots on the ground” to detect an outbreak. The report also indicated the FDA is looking at the best options to prevent food borne illnesses in the first place.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

The Peanut Butter Panic

  • There’s a chance that potentially-contaminated food is still sitting on store shelves, and maybe in your pantry (Source: Gene.Arboit at Wikimedia Commons)

Hundreds of products with peanuts or peanut-butter have been yanked from
store shelves. That’s because of an outbreak of salmonella poisoning. Kyle
Norris has the latest on the outbreak:

Transcript

Hundreds of products with peanuts or peanut-butter have been yanked from
store shelves. That’s because of an outbreak of salmonella poisoning. Kyle
Norris has the latest on the outbreak:

We know the products include cookies, crackers, snack bars, cakes, candies,
ice cream—even pet foods are affected. And there’s a chance that
potentially-contaminated food is still sitting on store shelves. And maybe in
your pantry.

Matthew Boulton is an associate professor of epidemiology. He’s at the
University of Michigan School of Public Health. He says the testing of the
Georgia facility that made these peanut-butter products shows there are
flaws in the food safety system.

“I think one of the big problems is this divide we have between the folks who do the
regulation and the folks responsible for human health. Sometimes you don’t have good
communication between those two groups and it’s really critical if you’re going to get a
handle on insuring a safe food supply.”

Boulton says this peanut-butter scare could go on for a few weeks. Or a few
months.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Tomato Ban Smashes Some Farmers

  • The tomato ban was really tough on some farmers (Photo by J. Beavers, courtesy of the USDA)

The Food and Drug Administration continues
to investigate the source of tainted tomatoes that
sickened more than 160 people. It’s narrowing down
the source of the salmonella bacteria, and has lifted
a ban on tomato sales in many states. Julie Grant
reports on how the ban has affected tomato growers:

Transcript

The Food and Drug Administration continues
to investigate the source of tainted tomatoes that
sickened more than 160 people. It’s narrowing down
the source of the salmonella bacteria, and has lifted
a ban on tomato sales in many states. Julie Grant
reports on how the ban has affected tomato growers:

It’s been a tough June for Florida tomato growers – who
grow 90% of the nation’s tomatoes. It’s not that they’ve
been working too hard – it’s that they haven’t been able to
work.

Lisa Lochridge is with the Florida Fruit and Vegetable
Association.

“Business pretty much ground to a halt for Florida tomato
growers. There were tomatoes out in the fields left, there
were tomatoes in the packing houses just sitting there, there
were tomatoes on trucks that were being turned away.”

Lockridge says Florida growers will have lost 500-million
dollars as a result of the ban. Now that the ban has been
lifted in Florida, she says growers are restarting business
and shipping tomatoes to the stores, cafeterias and
restaurants that want them.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

We Are What We Eat

The Food and Drug Administration has recently re-opened the issue of
labeling foods that have been irradiated. As The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Suzanne Elston points out, by focusing the debate on
labeling, were ignoring a much bigger issue: