The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being stymied in its investigation of illnesses related to a huge beef recall because it cannot gain access to information about specific strains of deadly bacteria that could be making people sick.
As a result, trying to gauge the effect on public health from the nation’s second-largest meat recall is proving more difficult than expected.
At issue are almost 19 million pounds of fresh and frozen ground beef voluntarily recalled by ConAgra Beef Co. on July 19 out of concern that the beef produced at the company’s plant in Greeley, Colo., could be contaminated with deadly E. coli 0157 bacteria.
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ConAgra has not provided samples of the bacteria that contaminated its beef. The material is private property, and the CDC has no legal right to it. Because of this, public health officials, including CDC researchers, cannot know exactly what bacterial strains they are dealing with, look for matches with bacteria from people who have become ill and map the full scope of the outbreak.
Food safety activists have long argued that meat companies’ private testing programs for pathogens aren’t overseen closely enough by federal regulators and don’t allow for sufficient public accountability. But even activists never anticipated this latest wrinkle: That information that could allow public health authorities to track a major food-borne illness outbreak could remain unavailable.
In a related development, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and two other Democrats in Congress voiced concern Friday about delays between the discovery of E. coli 0157 contamination and the launch of the July 19 ConAgra recall, covering meat dated from April 12 to July 11.
“It is a red flag for our nation’s food safety system that more than three months passed between production of possibly contaminated meat and its eventual recall,” they wrote in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman.
Virulent in small amounts
Transmitted primarily by fecal material from cattle, E. coli 0157 is one of the most dangerous food-borne pathogens. A small amount can make people extremely ill, leading to violent intestinal problems, kidney failure and even death.
No amount of the bacteria is safe in meat, according to the Agriculture Department, which is responsible for ensuring the safety of beef products in the United States.
The CDC has linked an earlier and much smaller recall of ConAgra beef processed May 31 in Greeley to 28 people who have become seriously ill in seven states, including seven people who had to be hospitalized.
Among them was Thomas Kruc, 8, of Castle Rock, Colo., who started hallucinating after eating hamburger meat cooked in a spaghetti sauce. He was in intensive care for almost a week, most of the time on dialysis after his kidneys gave out; he is recovering.
But the CDC is having a hard time determining whether the 18.6 million additional pounds of ground beef recalled by ConAgra last week is associated with other cases of E. coli 0157 poisoning because it doesn’t have samples of bacteria that contaminated the meat or test results that confirmed the presence of the bacterium.
Those tests were taken by ConAgra as part of its private program at the Greeley slaughterhouse, and they are private property, said Paul Mead, chief of the CDC’s outbreak response and surveillance unit.
He said Friday that the agency was “actively pursuing the issue” of getting samples with federal food safety officials.
“Public health is too important to be left in private companies’ hands,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America and a former high-level USDA official. “These tests have to become public information.”
Why samples are needed
If samples were available, the CDC could create a DNA profile of the E. coli and post it on an electronic system that allows laboratories across the U.S. to compare results. Laboratories could then compare DNA samples from people made sick by E. coli 0157 to DNA samples of E. coli 0157 from contaminated beef to see if they match.
As things stand, the CDC will pursue a more traditional and time-consuming investigation, Mead said.
Several strains of the bacteria may be involved. ConAgra spokesman Jim Herlihy confirmed this week that the meat company’s testing had found at least 28 lots of beef contaminated with E. coli 0157 on 28 separate days between April 12 and July 11.
Because ConAgra couldn’t assure federal officials that contamination had been fully contained, all of the meat produced on those days, an estimated 18.6 million pounds, was recalled last week.
Questions about the ConAgra beef recall–including what was known about E. coli 0157 contamination at the Greeley plant and when and how quickly action was taken on these findings–moved to the forefront Friday as the lawmakers released their letter.
“The long delay between contamination and recall is striking,” the four Congress members wrote, noting that even after the USDA received a positive E. coli 0157 test result on ConAgra meat on June 19, it took 11 more days until the beef was recalled June 30.
Another 15 days passed before USDA sent an in-depth investigative team to the ConAgra plant in Greeley, the lawmakers wrote.
“Eventually, meat products produced as late as July 11 were recalled. This means that even as USDA was investigating E. coli 0157:H7 contamination from a May 31 sample, contamination may have been ongoing,” they said.
USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service “acted with deliberate speed in response to the ConAgra situation,” recalling beef 10 days before the first cases of illness were reported, spokesman Steven Cohen said. ConAgra initiated a recall one day after learning of the positive E. coli 0157 test, Herlihy said.
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Still, it took the USDA more than six weeks after the first positive test for E. coli at a Denver meat-grinding facility to trace the disease back to ConAgra’s Greeley plant and issue a recall, Cohen confirmed.
Faster tests available
Peter Slade, a food scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s National Center for Food Safety and Technology, said there are tests for E. coli that yield reliable results within a day or two.
Cohen said the USDA has looked at a number of faster test methods, but those tests sometimes yield negative results even when disease is present. The Food Safety and Inspection Service “constantly reviews its procedures to see if they need to be tightened.”