USDA inspectors overwhelmed by growing workload

Vacancies go unfilled, and inspectors find their duties doubling and tripling.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — As alarm bells sounded for the second-largest hamburger recall in history, the nation’s top food safety officials were in Miami setting the “course for the next 100 years of food safety.”

The fact that so many U.S. Department of Agriculture executives were in Florida studying the future when New Jersey-based Topps Meats Co. was scrambling, very much in the present, to recall 21.7 million pounds of hamburger patties — a full year’s production run — has rankled some USDA inspectors and food safety advocates, who see it as a symbol of the department’s attitude toward food safety enforcement.

Several USDA inspectors said in interviews that their workloads are doubling or tripling as they take on the duties of inspectors who have left the department, not to be replaced. The force has been reduced dramatically in recent years as vacancies are left unfilled.

“We’ve been short the whole time I’ve been in,” said one veteran inspector who asked to not be identified. “We don’t have enough inspectors, but we have too much management. The inspectors are short all the time and getting spread thinner and thinner.”

The crisis began last month when three consumers in New York and Florida fell ill from E. coli poisoning. Soon at least 32 people were sick. The Topps recall, though, began a full 18 days after the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) first confirmed E. coli bacteria in a Topps hamburger.

FSIS — which regulates meat, poultry and egg production — says it had 7,200 inspectors in 1992 and 7,450 today. But Stan Painter, an inspector and a union representative for the American Federal of Government Employees, which represents the inspectors, said the actual number is closer to 6,500.

The difference, he said, are unfilled vacancies that FSIS permanently carries.

FSIS did not respond to written questions submitted by the Chicago Tribune for this article. In an Oct. 4 teleconference with reporters, Raymond said, “We are looking into the FSIS inspection activities in this plant in order to ensure that our inspection work force has the tools, the training, the data and the oversight to ensure public health protection.”

Under the federal Meat Inspection Act, USDA inspectors are required to examine animals that are “prepared at any slaughtering, meat-canning, salting, packing, rendering, or similar establishment,” and intended for use as food. Inspectors put a USDA stamp on products that pass inspection.

About 6,000 food production facilities are visited by USDA inspectors, but some are so large they require several inspectors. From April to June of this year, inspectors examined 34 million “livestock carcasses” and condemned 54,546 of them, according to FSIS records. For poultry the numbers jump to an astounding 2.3 billion carcasses inspected and 11 million condemnd animals.

At Topps, a single USDA inspector was assigned to the Elizabeth, N.J., plant, which produced more ground beef patties than any other U.S. meat processor.