Great article, thank you ts.
Here's an interesting one from today's New York Times, on the theme of "our contaminated world":
March 18, 2001
Contaminated Food Makes Millions Ill Despite
Advances
By GREG WINTER
Tapeworm and botulism have been all
but eradicated in this country, and new
technologies from freeze-drying to irradiation
have been developed to make food safer. But
because of changing eating habits and more
choices of foods, Americans may be more
likely to get sick from what they eat today
than they were half a century ago.
The frequency of serious gastrointestinal
illness, a common gauge of food poisoning, is
34 percent above what it was in 1948,
according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. Not all scientists agree with
that conclusion — some say that food
poisoning is as common as in the immediate
postwar years, but not necessarily more so
— yet there is no doubt about the scale of the
problem.
Every year, the agency says, 5,000 deaths,
325,000 hospitalizations and 76 million
illnesses are caused by food poisoning.
One of those sickened was Taylor Lake Holt, a cheerful 7-year-old boy from
Anchorage. Taylor, a cancer patient who had just ended a yearlong ordeal with
chemotherapy in 1999, celebrated with a smoothie made with unpasteurized Sun
Orchard orange juice. Within a day, he had to be rushed back to the hospital, where
it took him four more days to recover.
The juice, it turned out, contained salmonella. The company later explained that it
had met rising demand by bringing from Mexico a tanker truck of unpasteurized
orange juice, chilled with contaminated ice. The company and regulators agree that
this probably caused an outbreak that infected more than 400 people. One elderly
man died.
Why, in an age of technologies that protect food, is food poisoning at least as
common as it was a half- century ago?
For one thing, people are eating more fresh fruits and vegetables without cooking
them, increasing the chance of infection through bacteria or viruses. For another,
people are eating more precooked foods, like seafood salads and deli meats, which
are more dangerous than traditional sit-down meals served right off the stove or out
of the oven.
What is more, the variety of foods available has expanded considerably faster than
the government's ability to inspect them. In the last decade, grocery stores have
doubled the number of items they stock, from every corner of the world, some
carrying new organisms that scientists still cannot identify, much less treat.
In fact, the amount of contaminated food that reaches store shelves only to be
recalled for posing health risks has reached its highest level in more than a decade.
"We do have a real problem," said Joe Levitt, food safety director for the Food and
Drug Administration.
Amid the proliferation of foods, the F.D.A.'s resources to scrutinize them have
scarcely changed, often making consumers the first to test a product's safety. A
healthy person can withstand most infections, but older people have weaker immune
systems and the population is aging, leading many scientists to worry that more
Americans are becoming more susceptible to food-borne illness.
"We are the canaries in the coal mines," said Dickson Despommier, a professor at
the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. "The moment
someone gets sick, we say, `Don't eat that food.' It's a miracle that the system
doesn't break down more."
Unappealing though they may be, many contaminated products recalled last year,
from batches of moldy Gatorade to ammonia-tainted ice cream, do not pose serious
threats to health, manufacturers say. When outbreaks do occur, the food industry
adds, better surveillance has quickened the ability to track down the cause, helping
to make the nation's food supply, already the safest in the world, more trustworthy
than ever.
And the industry says it has made much
progress in making food safer. In fact, the
illnesses caused by contaminated juice came
in spite of stringent new F.D.A. rules for the
juice industry in the wake of earlier
outbreaks. And Sun Orchard, an Arizona
company, had already increased safety by
steam-cleaning oranges and bathing them in
chlorine to kill bacteria.
Although much of the fear surrounding food safety focuses on meat and poultry,
especially beef, the General Accounting Office estimates that 85 percent of food
poisoning comes from the fruits, vegetables, seafood and cheeses that are regulated
by the F.D.A. and claim a larger share of the American diet each year. And
poisoning from such foods can be every bit as deadly as that from meat and poultry.
Still, the F.D.A. has less than a tenth of the inspectors of the Department of
Agriculture, which regulates the meat and poultry industry. So while U.S.D.A.
inspectors examine meat before it gets to grocery freezers, the F.D.A. must
increasingly rely on the companies it regulates to keep their factories clean and their
products safe.
Now, with slightly more than 400 inspectors to ferret out violations in 57,000 plants
across the nation, the F.D.A. inspects food manufacturers about once every eight
years. Some health officials, consumer advocates and epidemiologists doubt that
without more of a presence the F.D.A. can catch contaminated food at the source
and prevent it from getting into the food supply.
"The F.D.A. is simply going from crisis to crisis and attempting to put out the fires,"
said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the
Public Interest, a nonprofit group.
The critics have some evidence. Last year, recalls of F.D.A.-regulated products
rose to 315 — the most since the mid-1980's and 36 percent above the average
since the agency began keeping track 15 years ago. In every instance, the food had
already made its way to store shelves before any contamination was discovered,
either by regulators or by manufacturers, and often remained there for months.
"Any reasonable person would worry about it," said George Grob, deputy inspector
general for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the
F.D.A. "If the inspection process worked really well, there would be fewer recalls.
That's why you do inspections: to prevent any contamination from occurring in the
first place."
In contrast with its strict supervision of blood banks or mammography centers, the
F.D.A. is not required to visit food plants regularly. And as the agency's workload
has increased faster than its budget, particularly in the realm of approving new drugs,
food safety inspections have fallen to about a third of what they were in the 1980's.
"The core mission of the agency, which has been to inspect food and ensure its
safety, has eroded," said one senior Health and Human Services official.
With imported foods, the F.D.A. is at a particular disadvantage. In the last four
years alone, the number of foreign food items increased by 50 percent, from 2.7
million items in 1997 to 4.1 million last year.
The responsibility of examining that avalanche falls to a cadre of just 113 federal
import inspectors, and the force has grown by only 3 workers since 1997. As a
result, the F.D.A. inspects less than 1 percent of all imported foods, according to
the General Accounting Office.
t is all but inevitable, health officials say, that
at least some of those imports will be
contaminated. Last April, a California bean
sprout grower, Pacific Coast Sprout Farms,
shipped in seeds from China and Australia.
Germinated in warehouse- sized shelters, the
sprouts caused a salmonella outbreak from
Oregon to Massachusetts. At least 67 people
fell ill, 17 of whom sought treatment in hospitals.
Not only were the imported seeds contaminated, health officials say, but the
company grew them using only a tenth of the amount of cleansing agent
recommended by the F.D.A. And although the company found evidence of
contamination before sending the sprouts to market, it did not order a recall until
after an outbreak had spread.
The C.D.C. now says that food is responsible for twice the number of illnesses in
the United States as scientists thought just seven years ago. Many of the illnesses
stem from improper handling of food, either by kitchen workers or consumers
themselves, but some health officials say this has always been the case and, if
anything, treatment of food has improved over the years.
At least 80 percent of food-related illnesses are caused by viruses or other
pathogens that scientists cannot even identify. As for the diseases researchers do
know, while a number of common ailments like salmonella have tapered off in recent
years, other, more serious illnesses appear to be on the rise. Cases of E. coli
infection, for example, have more than doubled in the last five years, to 4,341 in
2000 from 1,667 in 1995, although some of the increase may be a result of better
reporting, scientists say.
The food industry agrees that better scrutiny is needed, because not all companies
can afford to run tests in their factories. "Right or wrong, the vast majority of foods
are not required to be tested for pathogens," said C. Thomas Leitzke, director of
inspections for the Wisconsin health department. "The plants are not required to do
it, and in most cases don't."
Many health officials worry that as consolidation transforms the food industry from
countless local farms to a handful of giant corporations that ship their products
worldwide, the reach of contaminated food is expanding, magnifying problems when
they do occur.
"Even if you doubled the number of inspectors, you still only look at a small
percentage of the food," said Dr. Dennis Lang, infectious disease officer at the
National Institutes of Health. "But the mere promise that it might be inspected makes
people take notice. They'll make sure their plant is clean." |
