Here is the original excerpt from COX News.
USDA: Meat citations ignored
By Elliot Jaspin and Scott
Montgomery, Cox News Service
Washington -- The U.S. Department of Agriculture has permitted hundreds of meat and poultry plants to operate virtually uninterrupted even while federal inspectors file tens of thousands of citations against them for unsanitary conditions and food contamination,USDA records show.
Cox Newspapers analyzed an Agriculture Department computerized atabase of meat and poultry inspection records for 1996 and found 138,593
instances in which inspectors said food being prepared in packing plants was "certain" to sicken consumers -- the most serious deficiency. The database was obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act.
That year, Georgia had 8,173 such citations, the third-highest rate in the nation after Arkansas (15,269) and North Carolina (8,998), according to USDA records.
Experts don't know how much contaminated meat and poultry makes its way to America's dinner tables from these plants, but officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have long argued that food-borne illness is a far bigger problem than public reports would suggest, and that food-processing plants play a major role. USDA officials can close or curtail operations at a plant, but they rarely do.
Still, a CDC doctor was surprised by the extent of the problem indicated by the Agriculture Department database.
"Heavens!" said Dr. Paul Mead, an epidemiologist at the CDC in Atlanta, when told by reporters that some plants have been allowed to operate after being cited 1,000 or more times for the most serious of unsanitary conditions.
Mead said the "burning question" is why, in a plant with that many violations,"has the [federal] inspector not been pulled from that plant? And I have no idea."
Thomas J. Billy, head of the Agriculture Department's Food Safety Inspection Service, said the high number of violations shows that his inspectors did their job in catching contaminated food before it left the plant.
While most of the nation's approximately 6,000 processing plants had only a handful of violations, 299 were cited weekly.
The database showed a poultry plant in Waldron, Ark., operated by Tyson Foods Inc., amassed 1,753 "critical" violations in 1996, the most of any plant in the nation. On some days it averaged a critical violation every two hours.
A "critical" violation is defined by the Agriculture Department as a plant condition that is "certain" to cause contamination of food, which is "certain" to reach consumers, and is "certain to have a detrimental effect upon the consumer."
But the plant never missed a day of production in 1996 because of federal sanctions.
By comparison, the ground beef plant in Nebraska that made headlines last August for its 25 million pound meat recall and for being shut down by an Agriculture Department "swat team" of inspectors, had 90 critical violations during 1996.
It was difficult to get Tyson's response to the findings late last week because its chief spokesman, Archibald L. Schaffer III, a company vice president, said he was "distracted" by his indictment Thursday by the special prosecutor investigating illegal corporate gifts from Tyson to former Agriculture Secretary
Mike Espy. The company already has pleaded guilty to some charges.
On Friday, Schaffer released a statement blaming the high number of violations at the Waldron plant on the "subjectivity" of federal inspectors.
While the computer database notes categories of violations, it does not include inspectors' specific descriptions of the unsanitary conditions being reported.
A Cox Newspapers reporter who visited the Waldron plant recently was refused access to the inspection reports kept in an Agriculture Department office at the plant.
Although the documents are public record, both Schaffer and the government inspector in charge at the plant said journalists could see the records only after filing a Freedom of Information Act request in Washington. Those requests can
take months to process.
Last Wednesday, six days after the reporter visited the plant, Agriculture Department officials closed the Waldron operation for repeatedly violating sanitation regulations. A department spokeswoman said they had amassed 4,100 violations in 1997. It could not be determined how many of those were critical.
The Arkansas plant's track record on critical violations was not unique. Nationwide, seven plants topped 1,000 critical violations in 1996, the last year for which there are complete records.
The Agriculture Department told Congress it shut down six plants in 1996, but spokeswoman Jacque Knight would not identify them, and in December referred a request for those details to the Freedom of Information Act office. A month later, that office has not supplied the names of the six plants.
The Clinton administration said late last month that it was planning to ask congress for significantly more money in the next federal budget to increase the number of food inspectors.
The administration says it is responding to the public's alarm over the safety of the nation's food supply. The CDC estimates that contaminated foods make more than 30 million Americans sick every year -- and cause over 9,000 deaths.
Agriculture Department records show President Clinton's concerns hit close to home. Arkansas, where Clinton was governor, led the nation with 15,269 critical violations in 1996, even though there are far fewer processing plants there than in states such as California and New York.
While the Cox computer analysis was limited to 1996, more recent inspection records obtained by Cox show that alarming safety problems persist.
On Feb. 4, 1997 a plant inspector in the Midwest found approximately half the carcasses being processed peppered with "feces, bile, hair."
On March 17, 1997 inspectors at another plant noted Kosher slaughtered beef was "completely covered with blood" and there was "commingling of blood (of) several animals" heightening the danger of cross-contamination.
On May 28, 1997 a plant was discovered preparing scores of carcasses for sale that had dropped on the plant floor.
"It's horrendous, it's horrendous," said Felicia Nestor, the food safety expert at the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit organization that has supported whistle-blowers among federal food inspectors. "The part I feel worst about is that the vast majority of people would never guess that that's the
situation."
Nestor scoffed at inspection chief Billy's explanation that the high volume of critical violations at some plants shows the Agriculture Department has been doing its job. She said inspectors are not catching all the instances of food contamination.
"It's totally ludicrous to think that they are," she said.
Billy also said the inspection records dramatize the need for the new inspection program that is coming into place Jan. 26. The old method of assigning inspectors to catch problems is being replaced with a program where companies will monitor their own operations and inspectors will double-check the work.
But the new system has drawn criticism from both consumer groups and federal inspectors, who say it gives meat packing companies too much authority to police their own operations.
Under the system being phased out, government inspectors visually inspect meat and poultry as it is being processed, and write up citations known as Process Deficiency Reports, or PDRs, when meat and poultry packing laws are violated.
Plant managers must respond to such deficiency reports by either appealing them or explaining the steps being taken to ensure cited problems will be corrected.
Under the new program, PDRs will be eliminated. Plants have been asked to identify points in their production processes where contamination is most likely to occur and then design programs to control it. Plants also will be required to test for bacteria and halt production if bacterial levels exceed specified limits.
But the day-to-day monitoring of these so-called "critical control points" will be done not by federal inspectors, but by plant employees.
Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of the food safety program at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, was surprised by the findings in the database and said they "don't bode well" for the new system.
"If the plants aren't cleaning up these basic problems," she said, "why should we expect them to act any faster if the messenger is a plant employee rather than a government inspector who theoretically has the power to shut them down?"
Regards
Sri. |
