GOVERNMENT & POLICY
FOOD SAFETY SYSTEM Contaminated SPINACH prompts calls for major overhaul BETTE HILEMAN, C&EN WASHINGTON
THE RECENT CONTAMINATION of spin
ach with Escherichia coliy which resulted in three deaths, led the Food & Drug Adminis tration to advise consumers on Sept. 14 not to buy any of the fresh vegetable. It was not until Oct. 2 that Americans were given a green light to eat fresh spinach again. In the process, the bagged fresh greens industry suffered direct losses estimated to be as high as $150 million. The spinach incident spurred renewed calls for a single, independent food safety agency that would regulate animal and plant production in an integrated way. Currently, the Department of Agriculture regulates meat, poultry, and processed eggs, and FDA is responsible for nearly all other foods, including fresh produce andfish."For prac tical purposes, no agency oversees what happens on farms except for those that pro duce eggs," says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University. The spinach tragedy has also given rise to a number of other suggestions for im proving the safety of fresh produce, includ ing irradiating it with electron beams to kill E. coli and labeling cartons or packages with special identifiers that tell where the produce was grown and processed so any bacterial outbreak can be traced immedi ately to the source. There is a great disparity between the food safety resources at USDA and FDA. USDAhas about 7,000 people inspect ing 6,000 processing plants daily, but on average, FDA's 800 inspectors can visit a particular processing plant only once every five years. Because of the huge difference in re sources for inspection and research, some members of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, and various public interest groups have periodically called for the creation of a single, independent food safety agency. Such an entity would com bine the food safety functions of FDA and USDA and allocate resources according to risk. However, officials at both agencies have said repeatedly that the current sys tem would not be improved by establishing a single administration. Now, the severity of the disease out
break from spinach, along with 35 other recent food contamination incidents, has led to heightened interest among lawmak ers to reform the food safety system, says Rep. RosaL. DeLauro (D-Conn.). "In the past several months, this country has seen a staggering number of recalls involving bagged spinach, lettuce, bottled carrot juice, egg salad, ground beef products, and most recently, turkey," she says. "It is disappointing that Bush Administration officials refuse to acknowledge the problem. The system is broken, and Congress needs to act to protect public health." In 2005, DeLauro and Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced bills that would create a single food safety administration. The legislation failed to attract much support. Next year, they plan to introduce similar bills. "Legislation creating a sin gle food safety agency will have a much better chance of passage in the next Con gress, in part because the leader ship has now shifted to the people who have been working on this issue for many years," says Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The spinach outbreak provided the same kind of wake-up call for the produce industry as the 1993 Jack in the Box out break provided the beef industry," DeWaal says. Hundreds of people were sickened and four children died from eating under cooked Jack in the Box hamburgers con taminated with E. coli 0157^7. This year, between Aug. 30 and Sept. 9, individuals from 26 states began falling ill from symptoms of poisoning by the same deadly bacteria, E. coli 0157^7. Eventually, the Centers for Disease Control & Preven tion (CDC) determined that 95% of the
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patients had consumed fresh bagged spin ach. Their symptoms generally included nausea, severe abdominal cramps, and bloody diarrhea. In all, 204 people were sickened, including 102 who were hospital ized. Thirty-one of the patients developed kidney failure, and two elderly women and one two-year-old child died. FDA and CDC analyzed the DNA of the E. coli that had sickened the patients and that of the spinach they had eaten. The agen cies concluded that all of the contaminated spinach had been pro cessed by
Natural Selection Foods ofSan Juan Bautista, Calif. They also found that the vector for the contamination was most SACKED Fresh likely feral pigs that wan spinach was dered across a free-range banned from cattle ranch, picked up E. supermarkets coli from excrement, and for more than carried it into neighbor two weeks because ing spinach fields. of E. coli According to William contamination. D. Marler, a lawyer at Marler Clark, in Seattle, the strain of E.coli 0157^7 that caused the outbreak was extremely virulent, on the basis of the unusually high proportion of those who became seriously ill after developing symp toms. Marler, who represents 97 victims, is suing Natural Selection Foods, the farm where the spinach was grown, and the adjoining ranch that the pigs visited before roaming onto spinach fields. Before 1995, food-related E. coli infec-
"The system is broken, and Congress needs to act to protect public health." tions were mainly associated with meat processing. But in response largely to the Jack in the Box incident, USDA put in place a systematic testing requirement when it set up the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) system for meat process ing plants in 1996. As a consequence, meatrelated E. coli infections have declined. Since 1996, E. coli 0157^7 infections in humans have been linked mostly to fresh produce, much of it from central Califor nia. In all, 20 incidents involving leafy veg etables have occurred in the past decade. "INDUSTRY IS developing a plan to mini mize outbreaks in the future," says David Acheson, chief medical officer at FDA's Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutri tion. "Natural Selection Foods is planning to start testing raw produce." A new approach is needed, suggests
Dennis G. Maki, professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine. Infection from E. coli 0157:117 is "what we call a disease of progress," he says. The species was first isolated and characterized in 1982, he explains, and has caused an increasing amount of food- and waterborne disease over the past 15-20 years because of tremendous changes in how we produce food in the developed world. "For example," Maki says, "if you eat a hamburger anywhere, whether at home or in the richest hotel in New York City, that hamburger was probably commercially produced. The animal from which the ham burger was made may have been on the open range for much of its life, but it probably ended up eating grain on a huge feedlot for its last three or four months," he explains. "Grain feeding greatly increases the capac
ity of E. coli to survive in the colon in cattle." In many cases, 50,000 cattle live on one feedlot, producing huge amounts of ma nure, Maki says. The manure is often stored in pond-size lagoons that can leak during heavy rainstorms, contaminating wells, riv ers, and sometimes irrigation water used on spinach and lettuce, he explains. Eliminating E. coli outbreaks from leafy vegetables "is a formidable challenge," Maki says. In addition to quality control in pro cessing, "I think we ought to be irradiating many of our commercially produced foods," he says. "More than 4 million tons of lettuce, spinach, and sprouts are consumed in North America every year, and it is unclear how much the contamination risk is reduced by rewashing the produce at home." Alejandro Castillo, associate professor in the department of animal science at Texas A&M University, has been conduct ing research on spinach irradiation. After inoculating spinach with three strains of E. coli 0157:117, he irradiated it with electron beams from a linear accelerator. He found that an energy dose of 1.2 kilograys, a medi um dose for food, reduces all three strains
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GOVERNMENT & POLICY
to below the detection limit, 10 cells per gram. The appearance of the spinach leaves was unchanged by the irradiation, and shelf life maybe improved, he says. Irradiation maybe a viable alternative for decontami nation of spinach leaves, he explains, "but it should not substitute for good agricul ture practices and sanitary processing." Castillo believes spinach irradiation would be cheap because ground beef irradiation costs only a few cents per pound. But NYU's Nestle claims that irradiation is not a solution for pathogens. "If we use late-stage technologies like irradiation, all the efforts to try to prevent pathogens would disappear," she says. "It would instill a false sense of security." Instead, she ar gues, "there should be a single food agency that can oversee both the animal and plant side of food safety." To prevent something like the spinach incident, "someone needs to be looking at the big picture rather than looking at the situation in the usual frag mented way," she explains. Tracking capability is another key missing element, says William R. Pape, president of AglnfoLink Global. What is
needed on each carton CULPRIT Feral of newly picked produce P'g s probably is a "license plate" with a spir^ch^ 6 code that could be used contamination, to identify electronically i^^^H where the produce was grown, he says. That same code, along with processing plant data, could be duplicated on outgoing bags and cartons from the plant, he says. He es timates the labeling system would add only about 0.5% to the cost of produce. With this system, just a day or two would elapse be tween the time contamination is found on produce and the time the field where it was grown is identified, Pape says, in contrast to the weeks it took to identify the source of the contaminated spinach. "The produce industry is mostly talking about more test ing for contamination, but they also need to add a traceability component," he says. According to Michael R. Taylor, an epi demiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the primary missing element is resources. FDA does not have the resources to do inspections and set up testing systems, nor does it have a mandate
"to drive primary prevention at the point of production," he says. Another problem, he says, is no one—not the head of GDC, FDA, or USDA or California officials—is in charge of preventing the next outbreak of E. coli in spinach or lettuce. When it comes to food, Taylor says, "all play a role, but no one is in charge, and no one fairly can be held accountable." ■
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