Tainted steak sickens four
Beef may be tied to troubled XL Foods plant in Brooks
The country’s food inspection agency says steaks contaminated with a potentially fatal bacteria that made four Edmonton people ill may have come from an Alberta plant that recently shipped other tainted meat onward to wholesalers and grocery chains.
Tim O’Connor, spokesman for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said late Wednesday the offending strip loins sold at a Costco Wholesale store in that city’s northeast came from either the XL Foods facility in Brooks or another unidentified plant.
“We can’t say definitively that those steaks eaten by those people came from XL or where along the chain of supply they were contaminated,” O’Connor said. “There is no smoking gun.”
But with Alberta’s health authority announcing that lab results showed a genetic match between the strain of E. coli 0157 found in the patients’ stools and one of the uneaten steaks, CFIA was forced to issue a health alert warning the public not to consume any Kirkland brand strip loins purchased at the outlet between Sept. 4 and Sept. 7.
While any bacteria on the exterior of a steak is normally killed during cooking, Dr. Gerry Predy, AHS’s senior medical officer of health, said a tenderizing process done at the Costco outlet by a machine with needles may have allowed the bacteria to get inside the cuts of meat. If the internal temperature of the steaks never reached the required level of 71 C (160 F), then the bacteria would remain potentially lethal.
At the authority’s request, the retailer has since stopped using the tenderizing process at its stores.
AHS officials said they have shared an imprint of the E. coli 157 strain from the Edmonton case with CFIA, but O’Connor was unable to confirm whether it is a match for the bacteria that his federal inspectors first learned on Sept. 4 was in beef trimmings shipped from the XL plant.
This is the eighth time the beleaguered agency has had to reissue and expand its initial alert on Sept. 16 to include additional products that may or do contain contaminated meat from cattle slaughtered and processed at XL’s plant in Brooks.
Another warning issued late Tuesday includes ground beef, meat loaf and numerous sausage products packed between Sept. 18 and Sept. 21 and sold at Co-op stores across the Prairies.
Three people from Calgary and one from central Alberta have also fallen ill, although AHS is still investigating the food source of those cases.
Some of those patients fell ill as late as Sept. 19, something that an AHS spokesman said commonly happens within three to four days after consuming contaminated product.
The company said its thoughts were with those who had become sick.
“Even though there has been no definitive link of illness between our products and people who have become ill,” said the statement, “we are very concerned for their well-being and working in their best interests.”
The initial health alert from CFIA and XL’s first voluntary recall were issued on Sept. 16, nearly two weeks after both learned of positive results from the test of contaminated product that American authorities had intercepted at the international border.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service revealed Wednesday that most of the affected product that has now been recalled came from cattle that were slaughtered August 23 and then further processed into trim for ground beef on four days that followed.
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz has said that all of the trim processed on the same day as the lot with the first positive test was caught before it got to store shelves.
But neither Riz nor CFIA officials replied Wednesday to questions about why all of the other product from cattle slaughtered on the same day was also not quarantined pending further testing.
Canadian inspectors only began an in-depth review of the facility on Sept. 13, when U.S. officials informed them they were banning XL product from their country after two more shipments their inspectors had stopped at the border also turned out to be contaminated.
Richard Arsenault, CFIA’s director of meat programs, said earlier this week that review found some deficiencies on the killing floor.
But Arsenault said the larger problem was that the plant’s laboratory failed to increase the intensity of testing when there was a sudden spike in positive test results for the bacteria in trimmings destined for use in ground beef. As a result, he said some lots that tested negative and were shipped out for further processing may have been tainted.
But a Food Safety and Inspection Service release issued Wednesday indicates American authorities are now of the opinion that much of the meat slaughtered during the recall period could be contaminated and poses a health risk if it is further processed in “non-intact” product.
The release noted that beef short ribs, produced on the same production dates, were being trimmed in order for that material to be used for ground beef.
“Whole muscle cuts were being used to produce ground beef,” the release said. “Product from these cuts are also considered to be adulterated unless they receive a full lethality treatment capable of eliminating E. coli 0157.”
Doug O’Halloran, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers local that represents employees at XL, said it’s clear in hindsight that neither CFIA nor the company acted swiftly or thoroughly enough to prevent potentially contaminated product from reaching restaurants and barbecues.
“Our members have little control beyond telling management when there is a potential problem on the line, but somewhere higher up the ball got dropped,” O’Halloran said.
“This is a tough lesson for the company and the government, but I’m pretty sure some things will change as a result.”
He said the plant, which normally exports about half its production south of the border, has only been operating at about half its normal capacity of 4,000 head-a-day since the Americans imposed the ban.