BEEF RECALL REACHES ONTARIO
Stores scramble to pull meat off shelves in wake of E. coli outbreak at Alberta plant,
All of Canada’s major supermarket chains and dozens of other stores, have pulled selected beef cuts off their shelves in the wake of an expanded E. coli warning about Alberta’s XL Foods.
“It’s quite broad in its impact,” said Dave Wilkes of the Retail Council of Canada, speaking for all the major food retailers.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) broadened the recall to include a range of steaks, roasts and other beef cuts sold in Ontario stores and others across Canada.
The agency said Canadians should not “consume, sell or serve” the products, which may be contaminated with the bacterium E. coli.
Richard Arsenault, who heads the CFIA’s meat program, said the recall doesn’t signal huge problems with food safety.
“This is a good system that will improve as opposed to a broken system like some people are saying,” he said.
But a union official and a food safety expert at Guelph University said the incident signals the need for a better culture of safety.
The CFIA posted a long new list of retailers and products now affected by the warning.
It includes many Ontario retailers, including Zehrs, Loblaws, ValuMart and The Kitchen Table.
Wilkes said all retailers are being affected.
“This is a national recall, it is quite broad-based,” said Wilkes. “Loblaws has had products affected and recalled, as have others including Metro, Sobeys, Wal-Mart, Costco.”
The products being pulled, he said, are only those produced by the XL plant on certain days that have been identified by the company and the CFIA.
XL’s plant in Brooks, Alta., has been closed because of the E. coli outbreak.
That closure creates a huge ripple effect across the meat industry, as the Brooks facility kills and butchers 35 to 40 per cent of Canada’s beef, according to industry estimates. It employs about 2,500, many of them foreign workers on temporary permits.
The first recall from the XL plant dealt mainly with ground beef. The latest recall is extended to cuts that haven’t been ground.
The strain of the bacterium found in the tests, E. coli O157:H7 is potentially deadly. Health officials say it can cause bloody diarrhea, dehydration and, in the most severe cases, kidney failure.
Previously, four cases of illness had been attributed to the XL plant; a fifth was reported Tuesday.
Arsenault said dirt is washed off animals as they move into the plant.
Once they’re killed, the hide is stripped off, and any visible dirt is cut off the carcass, not rinsed.
Once the carcass has been cut into pieces, inspectors take meat samples for bacterial testing.
That was working reasonably well, he said.
But on Sept. 12, when a truck was checked at an export point, two samples turned up positive.
“This was not normal,” he said, and the inspectors started more intensive testing.
“It was one of those high event days when one of the animals had more E. coli 157 H7 either on them or in them, and the E. coli was so high that even when it was perfectly clean it still got through to the other end.”
You can’t tell which animals have abnormally high bacteria levels by looking at them, he said.
The CFIA announced the first recall before any illnesses had been reported, Arsenault noted.
When inspection teams started going through test results at the plant, they noted some trends of test results that hadn’t rung alarm bells individually, but pointed to a trend that was worrying.
That triggered recalls of products from several other days, he said.
Initially, the recall only affected ground meat, but it was extended to other cuts after a piece of unground meat in Alberta turned up with the bacteria.
The source of that contamination still isn’t certain, he said.
Lawyer Richard Mallett said a potential class-action lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Edmonton against XL Foods. He said the lead plaintiff is Edmonton real estate agent Matthew Harrison, who said he became ill in September after eating a steak
“Somebody needs to be held accountable for it, for the E. coli.” MATTHEW HARRISON EDMONTON MAN WHO SAID HE BECAME ILL FROM EATING STEAK.
purchased from Costco, which came from XL Foods. “Somebody needs to be held accountable for it, for the E. coli,” Harrison told the Star from Edmonton. Mallett said he’s not sure how many plaintiffs will be involved but at least eight other people have shown interest. Meanwhile, a union official and a food safety expert at the University of Guelph both questioned the culture of food safety at the plant. Tom Hesse of the United Food and Commercial Workers, who bargained the latest contract at the plant, said the big issue at the plant is the speed at which carcasses move through the plant. Live animals are stunned, then killed and suspended from a chain that moves them through the plant is a “dis-assembly line,” he said. But Hesse said there’s been a battle with the company over the speed at which the line moves, with the company opting for faster speeds. “I think the culture is of profit and production first,” Hesse said. “Food safety falls through the cracks in that culture.” Many of the staff in the plant are foreign workers on temporary work permits, he said, and they’re not in a strong position to question procedures or safety practices on the shop floor. XL Foods wasn’t talking to reporters on Tuesday. Keith Warriner, director of the food quality assurance program at Guelph University, said the number of illnesses reported is small. But he sees similarities to the outbreak of listeriosis at Maple Leaf Foods, in which the company had excellent procedures on its books. ”You’ve got the written plans in place . . . everything documented, everything monitored, but just not being enforced on the shop floor.” There was also a lack of “trend analysis,” or looking at patterns in test results as a group, rather than just looking at individual samples, he said. The answer isn’t necessarily more testing or inspectors, Warriner said. “It’s more to do with the culture of the company,” he said. That means management has to make sure written standards and procedures really are being followed. With files from Carys Mills