Food safety advocates, farmers debate screening following latest lettuce E. coli outbreak
Food safety advocates, farmers debate screening after third lettuce E. coli outbreak this year
On Nov. 10, Joe Stratta of Texas ate a Caesar salad at a Beef O’Brady’s in Crestview, Fla. Four days later, he was stricken with a severe intestinal infection that hospitalized him for five days with acute kidney failure.
The culprit was a virulent strain of intestinal bacteria — E. coli O157:H7.
But it wasn’t until Nov. 20 that federal authorities, after noticing a pattern of similar illnesses and investigating, concluded the victims likely all were infected from tainted romaine lettuce and warned people not to eat it. The outbreak has now sickened 43 people in a dozen states and sent 16 to hospitals and has since been linked to romaine lettuce from six counties on California’s Central Coast.
While federal authorities continue trying to determine the source of the contamination, food-safety advocates, including Stratta’s lawyer, are suggesting Congress revive a program that screened produce in stores for pathogens but was eliminated in a 2012 budget cut after industry criticism.
“If it came back it would be such a good thing for food safety,” Jory Lange, a Houston lawyer representing Stratta who specializes in food safety cases, said of the USDA’s Microbiological Data Program. “It’s one of the cheapest, most effective interventions. It’s a way of finding problems before people get sick.”
The latest outbreak is the third involving lettuce-borne E. coli in the past year, and has certainly gotten the attention of an agriculture industry eager to find better ways of preventing contaminated produce from reaching consumers. But industry advocates aren’t convinced the scuttled program is the answer.
“There isn’t anyone anywhere who wants to make anyone ill,” said Hank Giclas, senior vice president of strategic planning, science and technology for Western Growers. The group represents family produce farmers in Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico. “I don’t think there’s anybody in the industry who believes that what we have is sufficient.”
But Giclas, who was among industry advocates who had criticized the program, said that “it seemed repetitive and redundant and costly at the time.”
“I don’t see a real reason to bring it back,” Giclas said.
The Microbiological Data Program was a national food-borne pathogen monitoring effort run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 2001 to 2012 with a $4.5 million annual budget. The program tested some 15,000 annual samples of produce in grocery stores, including lettuce, spinach, sprouts, tomatoes, cantaloupe and cilantro for a range of pathogens, including Salmonella, Listeria, Shigella and E. coli.
The benefit, advocates like Lange say, is that if the sampling detects a dangerous pathogen, “you can quickly do a recall before anybody even eats that lettuce.”
Without the program, advocates argue, that tainted produce can end up on thousands of dinner plates. And once people begin falling ill, the government must undertake a laborious and time-consuming process to determine a likely source of the infections and trace it back from retailers through distributors to growers, testing for genetic matches to the germs that struck the sick.
The process doesn’t even begin until several people develop the same illness. Local, state and federal public health officials share that information with the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees safety for most foods, or the USDA which regulates meats.