September 15, 2010

Banned Brazilian beef still on sale in US

The USDA said it discovered that Chicago-based Samco Inc, a subsidiary of Brazil's JBS SA, the world's largest beef producer, has continued to import banned beef from a Brazilian production facility.

About 258,000 pounds of cooked beef are being recalled because they were made at a Brazilian plant that previously produced meat contaminated with high levels of the de-worming cattle drug Ivermectin, according to the USDA.

The department personnel should not have allowed the Brazilian beef to be distributed to US retailers and the USDA is looking into the error, a government official said.

The recall includes cans of Libby's Corned Beef shipped to retail stores in Florida and Pennsylvania, Kroger Corned Beef in Indiana, Brushy Creek Roast Beef in California, New Jersey, Missouri and Texas and Brushy Creek Shredded Beef in Missouri, New Jersey and Ohio.

Ivermectin was first found by USDA port inspectors in the Brazilian processed beef products in May. That discovery prompted wider testing and, in June, the USDA announced finding more of the drug in imported cans of Hormel Corned beef and other products that all came from the same Brazilian plant.

Brazil voluntarily halted all processed-beef exports to the US before the second recall.

"It was a systemic problem," said USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service Administrator Al Almanza, but stressing that there is no evidence the contamination was harmful to consumers.

JBS is the largest processed-beef exporter in the world and owns 58 production facilities in Brazil and 50 in the US.

The US imported about 28.5 million pounds of processed beef from Brazil in the four months this year before the country stopped shipping in May, according to the USDA.