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Every major food safety scare - from E. coli in spinach and beef to salmonella in peppers and pot pies - has come with renewed calls for stronger laws and stricter oversight.
But outbreaks continue. The latest scare of salmonella in peanut butter exposes vulnerabilities in the food industry and an inadequate system to protect consumers - which comes as no surprise to health experts and food safety advocates.
"Absolutely it will continue to happen until big changes are made," said Sanford Miller, former director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and a senior fellow at the University of Maryland. "The food industry has just exploded over the last several decades, and unfortunately, the FDA has not been able to keep up with this."
Outbreaks of food-borne illnesses have become ingrained in a massively consolidated industry. Meat from a single farm or the ingredients from one manufacturer can travel across the country, with products susceptible to contamination at any point.
At the same time, federal officials hold little power to force recalls or oversee daily production in a plant. Add the slow process of identifying a nationwide outbreak, the arduous guess-and-check work to trace the origin of the contaminant and the long lapse in time from the first illness to the first recall.
Since the start of the peanut butter scare, lawmakers and advocates have pushed for reform, calling for legislation that would give the FDA recall authority, issue standards for routine inspections or set up a new federal department to oversee food safety. But many efforts to overhaul the food industry have stalled in Congress.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in April that, despite progress before 2004, the number of cases of food poisoning has not declined over the past several years, straying significantly from goals set by the federal government. The rate of salmonella infections, nearly 15 cases per 100,000 people in 2007, is the furthest from reaching the national target of fewer than seven cases per 100,000 next year.
Millions of illnesses
While increased surveillance has improved the government’s ability to track illnesses, the reported statistics - about 40,000 salmonella sicknesses nationwide each year - still reflect only a fraction of the actual cases. The CDC estimates that food-borne pathogens cause 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths each year.
Although the first reported illness from salmonella contamination in peanut butter was believed to have started early last September, the CDC didn’t begin investigating until nearly three months later.
By the time the Peanut Corp. of America initiated its first voluntary peanut butter recall in January, about 400 people in 43 states had fallen ill.
FDA officials said the company had knowingly shipped contaminated peanuts from its Blakely, Ga., plant since 2007, even after private lab tests confirmed salmonella. Other products made in 2001 may have been exposed to insecticides, FDA inspectors found. The Peanut Corporation also is under criminal investigation and was suspended from doing business with the U.S. government. It has denied wrongdoing. A further problem is weak oversight that allows for lapses in prevention, food safety advocates say.
Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said the agency increased the surveillance of peanut butter producers following the 2007 salmonella outbreak in peanut butter manufactured by ConAgra Foods.
Holes in safety net
But the Peanut Corporation of America was not part of the heightened oversight because the FDA did not know the Georgia plant was producing peanut butter, Sundlof said. Federal inspectors did not visit the facility from 2001 until last year, when the FDA found metal shards in a shipment of peanuts.
The FDA then sent Georgia health officials to the facility, but inspectors didn’t look for salmonella and didn’t know the plant’s internal tests had shown contamination.
The holes in the safety net led legislators and food safety advocates to call for stricter oversight, while President Obama vowed to make changes in the FDA.
An additional complication is the science of food contamination.
"Food-borne diseases have kept puzzling the scientific community ... over the last 30 years," said Mahdi Saeed, who is conducting government-funded research at Michigan State University on how salmonella contaminated ConAgra peanut butter in 2007. "We don’t have the ways and means that allow us to put our finger in a short amount of time on the source, and take action to prevent the disease."
