Outbreak Sparks Push for Strengthened Produce Inspection System

The recent coast-to-coast outbreak of a deadly E. coli strain in raw, bagged spinach, coupled with more recent concerns about possibly contaminated lettuce, may prompt a thoroughgoing overhaul in the U.S. produce inspection system.

One thing is for certain: Fruits and vegetables on the farm and in processing plants are not subjected to the exacting standards of meat and poultry.

“Meat and poultry plants cannot even process unless a U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector is on site to inspect that product before it leaves the plant,” says Dr. Jean Weese, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System food safety specialist and Auburn University professor of nutrition and food science.

Inspection standards are not nearly so stringent for produce, Weese says.

“If there is a complaint, they will go and check it out, but generally speaking, FDA does well if it can get around once a year to [food processing] plants,” Weese says.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is entrusted with fruit and vegetable inspection, while the USDA is responsible for meat and poultry.

One of the problems associated food inspection, particularly produce, stems from the sheer magnitude of the FDA’s task. Currently, the FDA is responsible for regulating 80 percent of the U.S. food supply, the USDA the other 20 percent, according to Des Moines Register reporter Phillip Brasher.

The proportion of FDA’s budget devoted to food inspection has declined in recent years. In the 1970s, roughly half of the agency’s budget was devoted to food processing, Brasher reports, while only about a quarter of today’s budget is invested in processing.

Globalization also figures prominently into this increasingly complicated picture. In the early 1970s, there were roughly 100,000 shipments of food imported into the United States. This year, an estimated 12 million shipments will pass through U.S. ports. FDA will inspect only about 1 percent of these.

Adding to that challenge is the sheer size of the homegrown U.S. produce industry --- a size that precludes the kind of close inspection associated with other sectors of the nation’s food sector.

Weese says on-farm conditions present an especially big challenge. While growers may sample regularly for traces of food pathogens, there is no certainty this sampling will provide an accurate picture of what is in the field, Weese says.

“You’ve got to look at this from the grower’s point of view,” she says. “They are randomly sampling for traces of E. coli and other pathogens on a field by field basis --- but the operative word here is random. With random sampling, you simply can’t be sure that what you don’t find in one field doesn’t exist in another.”

“They may test one field and turn up absolutely nothing, though they may have entirely missed the area where a rat defecated.”

Currently, farm practices are not governed by mandatory regulations but by a voluntary code of good practices that instructs growers to “maximize their efforts to minimize contamination,” the New York Times recently reported.

The manager of a California-based lab quoted by the New York Times criticized the current voluntary rules for failing to provide a clear definition of what constitutes a genuine risk from E. coli and other pathogens --- a problem Weese has discerned in the course of her own career.

“We do a general E. coli test, which has been the standard and that looks for fecal contamination,” she says. “But it’s only an indicator of fecal contamination.”

The test, for example, may turn up large numbers of E. coli, which may be the more benign forms that, at worst, cause nausea, or, possibly, the potentially deadly O157:H7 strain, she says. While the vast majority of these bacteria may be benign, the presence of only a small number of the potentially deadly bacteria --- as few as 10 --- could cause severe sickness, Weese says.

Several U.S. legislators, including Democratic Senators Paul Durbin of Illinois and Charles Schumer of New York, have called for legislation aimed at substantially reducing the risk of food-borne illnesses associated with produce.

Among several measures, Durbin’s Safe Food Act of 2005 would require food processors to code their products so that future outbreaks could be traced back to their original sources. As introduced, it also would require that food processors have procedures in place to prevent and reduce food contamination and mandate greater frequency of inspection of processing plants based on a risk assessment.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at October 9, 2006 04:33 PM | TrackBack