By Katherine Reed
Columbia Missourian/Missouri School of Journalism
Contaminated foods sicken and kill Americans every year. Though the stories receive wide coverage in the U.S. media, the danger hasn’t lessened. That’s because of weaknesses in the regulation and inspection of foods, panelists said during a discussion about the safety of the food supply.
Speaking at Health Journalism 2010, Michael P. Doyle, a microbiologist who directs the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, said there are two major – and increasing – threats to the U.S. food supply: imports and animal manure.
Eight-five percent of the seafood and fish Americans eat comes from outside the U.S. and is produced via aquaculture. Two-thirds of that fish is grown in animal- or human-manure fertilized ponds, Doyle said.
Manure is as serious a problem domestically. Five tons of animal manure – most of it from cattle – is produced annually nationwide for every human being in the United States.
“It is being used as a fertilizer, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Doyle said. But manure is finding its way into irrigation and processing water, and that contamination results in illness, he said.
It also continues to find it way into hamburger, said panelist Nancy Donley, whose only child, Adam, age 6, died after he ate an E. Coli (O157:H7) contaminated hamburger from Jack in the Box in 1993. He was one of four children who died; scores of people were hospitalized in the outbreak, and hundreds were sickened.
Donley, who is the board president of STOP (Safe Tables are Our Priority), said the organization sees a glimmer of hope in the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (Senate Bill 510), which would (among other things):
- Empower the Secretary of Health and Human Services to suspend the registration of a food facility
- Require food facilities to evaluate their risks and implement safety controls
- Allocate inspectors based on the risk posed by the production of a food
- Give the FDA mandatory recall authority
“The FDA says it has been severely handicapped by not being able to trace the origin of foods,” Donley said. “This bill also requires pilot projects to come up with more effective ways to track and trace foods.”
Tracking was the cornerstone of Michael Moss’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story in The New York Times last year about the origins of a hamburger that sickened and ultimately paralyzed a 22-year-old dance instructor. Moss found a troubling lack of accountability and transparency about where the meat came from that went into the burger.
Moss told the AHCJ audience that documents were the key to his prize-winning report. The one that makes his heart “still skip a beat” showed which slaughterhouses killed the cattle that went into the grinder to make hamburger at Cargill.
He encouraged fellow journalists to pay attention to the work of personal injury attorneys like Bill Marler who have used FOIA to obtain documents from the USDA and are pursuing legal remedies for their clients injured by food.
