We analyzed genomic sequencing data to show that even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ended its outbreak investigation, a dangerous and drug-resistant strain of salmonella was still running rampant through the chicken industry and sickening tens of thousands of people. The unchecked spread of this strain is emblematic of America’s baffling and largely toothless food safety system, which is ill-equipped to protect consumers or rebuff industry influence.
The reporters discovered a system that prohibits meat safety inspectors from regulating contamination on farms, that makes cheese pizza the purview of one agency and pepperoni pizza the responsibility of another and that can’t ban raw poultry tainted with even the most dangerous strains of salmonella – unless it’s in pet food. As a result of these and other flaws, the U.S. has failed to reduce the rate of salmonella food poisoning over the past 25 years, even as several European countries have seen dramatic declines.
ProPublica was able to piece together the truth about the infantis outbreak with a combination of scientific expertise and relentless mining of public records. Data reporter Irena Hwang used computational tools for analyzing genomic sequencing data she’d developed as part of her doctoral research to tie together infantis cases and build an evolutionary history of the strain. Still, the genetic data lacked information about where and when the samples had been taken. Reporters Bernice Yeung and Michael Grabell and researcher Mollie Simon filed more than 100 public records requests for data that linked the genetic information Hwang had analyzed to the foods that food-poisoning victims ate and the processing plants their poultry came from.
ProPublica didn’t stop at documenting the food-safety system’s past problems with salmonella. It also gave consumers a tool to make themselves more informed and safer going forward. Over several months, news apps developers Andrea Suozzo and Ash Ngu assembled federal inspection data to build an interactive database that allows users to look up the salmonella records of the plants that produced their chicken or turkey.
The food-safety system’s flaws have deep roots. Yeung and Grabell documented how efforts to fix them have failed time and time again over nearly 70 years. But the series also demonstrated that the salmonella problem isn’t unsolvable. One installment revealed how the turkey industry worked with researchers to eradicate a drug-resistant strain that had run rampant through its flocks, charting a starkly different course than the chicken industry took with infantis.