Listeria’s lessons
Safety experts meeting in Houston say the 2015 outbreak was ‘revolutionary’ for the Food and Drug Administration
AS Blue Bell continues to rebound from a deadly listeria contamination crisis that slashed its market share, food safety experts on Wednesday highlighted the 2015 outbreak’s
significance in shaping the food industry’s understanding of the bacteria. The incident took the spotlight at a session on listeria control at the 16th annual Global Food Safety Conference, held this week in Houston by the Global Food Safety Initiative. More than 1,000 participants from 60 countries gathered to learn about developing technology, trends and regulations. The efforts are geared toward minimizing product recalls and foodborne illnesses.
“The ice cream outbreak was revolutionary” for the Food and Drug Administration, said Mickey Parish, senior adviser for microbiology at the agency’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “It was the first time we had naturally contaminated food that we could test and have large (amounts) of it.”
The widespread contamination problem, which ultimately forced a monthslong total recall of Blue Bell products, called into question whether low levels of listeria monocytogenes, a pathogenic strain of the bacteria, could cause illness in chil-
dren, elderly individuals and others with weaker immune systems.
The FDA is now evaluating whether any quantity of the bacteria could be safe to eat for all consumers, Parish said.
Blue Bell’s listeria crisis came to light in February 2015, when the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control discovered the pathogen in samples of ice cream made in the company’s flagship plant in Brenham. The Texas Department of State Health Services then verified the presence of the bacteria in certain flavors produced at that facility.
A multistate investigation, conducted during the following months, ultimately linked tainted Blue Bell ice cream to 10 listeriosis cases in four states. Three patients in Kansas who had been hospitalized with other conditions died after contracting the illness.
Further inspections revealed sweeping sanitation problems at production facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama. Blue Bell shut down all three for months as it worked to strengthen testing procedures and devise safety agreements with the state health departments involved in regulating its operations.
Parish said Blue Bell provided the FDA with more than 2,000 product samples after the outbreak, almost all of which contained some quantity of listeria. The agency, which once proposed a standard of tolerance for listeria organisms in certain foods, is now questioning what level would adequately protect all consumers.
“The FDA remains uncertain,” Parish said.
The agency has revised its suggested prevention measures and it released a draft of new guidelines in January. Awareness raised
The Blue Bell incident also alerted regulators that ice cream could potentially harbor the deadly strain of listeria, said Rob Tauxe, director of foodborne, waterborne and environmental diseases for the Centers for Disease Control. Before this, he said, ice cream had not been associated with listeria.
The multistate investigation, which relied heavily on a certain sort of bacterial “fingerprinting” to link the 10 listeriosis cases to Blue Bell, raised awareness within the industry that the production of such frozen products requires greater oversight.
“We leapfrogged to find that ice cream was a problem,” Tauxe said.
Food safety has taken on greater importance to consumers in recent years as information about contamination becomes more readily available, said Robert Gravani, emeritus professor of food science at Cornell University. In 2016 alone, the FDA logged 2,771 recalls. New regulations
Gravani said the industry will have to double down on its efforts to leverage technology, data and better worker training programs to reduce risk of contamination. The industry is already moving to implement new regulations under the recently enacted Food Safety Modernization Act, which holds food producers to higher standards of safety.
“We’ve had a lot of recalls in the past several years,” he said. “There are major concerns about this that we can take care of.”