Food inspectors to boost oversight at XL
E. coli test reviews will be faster after work resumes at plant
CALGARY – Federal food inspectors will intensify their oversight of E. coli testing at a troubled Alberta packer when it resumes slaughtering and processing cattle in the next few days.
Instead of the past practice of waiting a week or longer for XL Foods Ltd. to provide an analysis of tests done on lots of trim used for making ground beef, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency will now review those results every day.
“We will review on a daily basis then the sampling procedures of the company,” Dr. Paul Mayers, CFIA’s associate vice-president, said Tuesday.
“All products will be held until all E. coli tests have been assessed.”
Mayers said the agency will also conduct internal review of its handling of what has become the country’s largest beef recall, and will make it public.
Most of the tainted beef from the Brooks facility that has been recalled was slaughtered on Aug. 23 and processed on four days that followed.
The CFIA has said a subsequent review of problems at the plant found that on some of those days the proportion of positive test results spiked at more than five per cent — a level that industry norms and voluntary U.S. guidelines dictate every kilogram of meat produced should have been considered tainted.
The company was providing “run sheets” to CFIA within 36 hours that showed the number of positive test results on any production day.
But agency inspectors were depending instead on a trend analysis done every seven days — and that was sometimes provided late — to spot a spike in positive tests that would prompt an alarm.
Harpreet Kochhar, CFIA’s executive director for Western Canada, has said inspectors weren’t checking those daily results and were trusting that the company was following its policy of “bracketing,” or removing, contaminated lots before and after each contaminated one and that those measures were adequate.
“When we went back to the in-depth review, we found that the bracketing was not done properly, and that led us to believe that food may be unsafe,” Kochhar said.
That review didn’t begin until Sept. 12, after U.S. officials had intercepted shipments of tainted beef trim at the border a second time and stopped further imports. Then came word that five people in Alberta had fallen ill after eating contaminated steak from the XL plant.
Given that the company was supposed to be supplying weekly reports on its test results, it’s still unclear why CFIA didn’t spot a red flag sooner, as the analysis of the Aug. 23 slaughter ought to have been on inspectors’ desks before the month ended. Kochhar has said he didn’t know when exactly that week’s report was received or why there appears to have been a delay.
CFIA’s investigation identified a clogged carcass washer on the kill floor, and company sources have said malfunctioning equipment may have been the reason so much of the meat produced Aug. 23 turned out to be contaminated.
By the time the first public health alert was issued Sept. 16, the company test results from that problem day at the XL Foods plant had been available to federal inspectors for three weeks.