FOOD SAFETY -- A GAME OF CHICKEN

FOOD SAFETY -- A GAME OF CHICKEN
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: At a Pennsylvania poultry plant, food inspectors found more than 40 serious sanitation violations in the first 10 months of this year. Yet never once did they halt the production line.
It took a listeria outbreak that killed seven people, sickened 46 others and caused three miscarriages to finally shut down the Wampler Foods plant in the Philadelphia area. A record 27.4 million pounds of poultry and chicken were recalled.
Most of the tainted poultry ended up in the Northeast, though some was pulled from store shelves in Illinois. It was just the latest in a string of meat recalls that have affected Missouri and Illinois consumers. So far this year, three Missouri meat processors and four companies in Illinois have recalled contaminated products.
Tainted meat
About 5,000 Americans die every year from eating tainted meat. Two of the nation's three largest meat recalls have occurred since July. Now, after years of prodding from consumer groups, the official in charge of federal meat inspections has finally acknowledged that the system "is broken, and it needs to be repaired." But the administration of President Bush put stricter inspection rules on hold when he assumed office, and has yet to offer specific fixes.
The federal food safety process now relies heavily on industry to find contamination. No longer do U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors perform "poke and sniff" tests at processing plants, a method abandoned because it often failed to find microscopic pathogens. Since 1998, the USDA has relied instead on meat plant operators, under USDA supervision, to find and fix sanitation problems, and to halt production if tainted meat is discovered.
But too often they do neither, say consumer groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Meat inspectors who work for the company know that down time on a production line costs their employers money; the inherent conflict of interest is obvious. In addition, in most cases, federal inspectors' power to recall meat is limited until tainted meat makes its way to market. That makes consumers the canaries in the coal mine of food safety. That's got to change.
Food safety is a public health issue that should be handled by a health agency, not one like USDA that is also responsible for promoting agriculture. Now may be a good time to fold all aspects of food inspection -- currently the responsibility of more than a dozen agencies -- into a single entity. That would streamline government, eliminate duplication and increase accountability.
Tougher regulations
Already, members of Congress have begun calling for tougher regulations. Whether their fervor will survive when the spotlight fades -- and industry lobbyists press their case -- remains to be seen. By now, however, one thing is clear: Industry self-policing has not resulted in safer meat.