October 5, 2007

 

USDA to change policy after latest beef recall

 

 

The USDA is treating the recent 21.7 million-pound ground beef recall as a learning experience and officials said Thursday (October 4) they are looking into how they can improve federal policy as a result.

 

"This is kind of a wake-up call," USDA Food Safety Undersecretary Richard Raymond told reporters.

 

The first thing to change, he said, will be strict USDA policy that forbids calling on a company to issue a recall if the box that contained the suspect product has been opened.

 

The possibility that product was contaminated in the home or cooking area rather than at a production plant is why the USDA needs to see contamination from a sealed package before a recall is initiated, USDA officials said.

 

But sometimes, as was the case recently when a man in Florida was sickened from E. coli bacteria in a frozen hamburger patty made by the Topps Meat Company, the USDA should be able to call on the producer to initiate a recall.

 

"That's a policy that we will be changing here," Raymond said. "We need to change our policy of saying that if it's not an intact box, we will not link it (to an E. coli contamination)."

 

However, in a later conference Raymond acknowledged the department could have moved forward as soon as Sept. 14. The department in the future will seek a recall if officials have strong evidence of contamination, regardless of whether the tested meat had been opened in the home.

 

"There's always a possibility of contamination in the home rather than the place of manufacture, but it's unlikely," he added.

 

It was Topps that, on Sept. 29, agreed to expand its recall of frozen ground beef patties to include 21.7 million pounds of product. Originally, the company had recalled 331,582 pounds on Sept. 25. Privately held Topps, is believed to be the leading U.S. maker of frozen hamburger patties.

 

The first event leading up to the recall happened on Aug. 31 when a consumer in Florida reported an illness after eating one of the hamburgers, USDA officials said. A USDA operative went to the Florida home and retrieved the suspect product for testing, which came up positive for the deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacteria. The consumer tested positive for the genetic match of the same variation of bacteria found in the hamburger. Tests were done on product in a sealed package, but those came back negative.

 

At that point, USDA and Topps did nothing further and would not have called for a recall at all if two other people had not become ill from the same kind of frozen beef patties - also produced by Topps - in New York.

 

Each of the E. coli occurrences in the three separate cases had different genetic "fingerprints;" they were all in hamburgers produced on different dates and only one case was backed up by a positive test from a sealed package. But by then, Raymond said, there was enough overwhelming evidence of a problem to call for recalls of product linked to production in all three cases even though only one was backed up by tests on a sealed case of hamburger patties.

 

A total of 29 sick people in eight states are now believed to be linked to E. coli O157:H7 contamination from Topps products, but only the first three cases have been confirmed.

 

Beyond policy on when to initiate a recall, USDA officials said Thursday they believe there are too many beef producing plants that do not have in place effective safety protocols and perhaps the USDA has not done a good enough job explaining to companies what they should be doing.

 

Daniel Engeljohn, deputy assistant administrator of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that, overall, US beef processors have been doing a good job at reducing E. coli contamination for the past few years, but recently the USDA has begun to notice more "non-uniform applications of its policies."

 

The USDA also promised to speed up warnings about contaminated meat in the future, as they sought to quell criticism of an 18-day delay in seeking the recall.

 

Department officials acknowledged that they knew as early as Sept. 7 that frozen hamburger patties could be contaminated after preliminary tests indicated the E. coli bacteria strain O157:H7.

 

They said it was impossible to seek a recall without conducting a more sophisticated test to confirm the original results, but said they would reevaluate what USDA can do better to warn the public sooner.

 

The department's response comes after news reports disclosed an Agriculture Department email showing the department knew on Sept. 7 about possible contamination but waited 18 days before concluding Topps Meat Co. should issue a recall.

 

USDA acknowledged the department could have moved forward as soon as Sept. 14. The department in the future will seek a recall if officials have strong evidence of contamination, regardless of whether the tested meat had been opened in the home.

 

The first illness began July 5, and the last began on Sept. 11, the Centre for Dsease Control said

 

The CDC reported these states and number of cases: Connecticut, 2; Florida, 1; Indiana, 1; Maine, 1; New Jersey, 6; New York, 9; Ohio, 1; and Pennsylvania, 8.

 

The recall represents all Topps hamburger products with either a "sell by date" or a "best if used by date" between Sept. 25 this year and Sept. 25, 2008.