ISIS commentary on CDC food illness statistics - click here
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/health/18FOOD.html
New York Times
March 18, 2001
Contaminated Food Makes Millions Ill Despite Advances
By GREG WINTER
Tapeworm and botulism have been all but eradicated in this
country, and new
technologies from freeze-drying to irradiation have been
developed to make
food safer. But because of changing eating habits and more
choices of foods,
Americans may be more likely to get sick from what they eat today
than they
were half a century ago.
The frequency of serious gastrointestinal illness, a common gauge
of food
poisoning, is 34 percent above what it was in 1948, according to
the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention. Not all scientists agree with
that
conclusion — some say that food poisoning is as common as in
the immediate
postwar years, but not necessarily more so — yet there is no
doubt about the
scale of the problem.
Every year, the agency says, 5,000 deaths, 325,000
hospitalizations and 76
million illnesses are caused by food poisoning.
One of those sickened was Taylor Lake Holt, a cheerful 7-year-old
boy from
Anchorage. Taylor, a cancer patient who had just ended a yearlong
ordeal
with chemotherapy in 1999, celebrated with a smoothie made with
unpasteurized Sun Orchard orange juice. Within a day, he had to
be rushed
back to the hospital, where it took him four more days to
recover.
The juice, it turned out, contained salmonella. The company later
explained
that it had met rising demand by bringing from Mexico a tanker
truck of
unpasteurized orange juice, chilled with contaminated ice. The
company and
regulators agree that this probably caused an outbreak that
infected more
than 400 people. One elderly man died.
Why, in an age of technologies that protect food, is food
poisoning at least
as common as it was a half- century ago?
For one thing, people are eating more fresh fruits and vegetables
without
cooking them, increasing the chance of infection through bacteria
or
viruses. For another, people are eating more precooked foods,
like seafood
salads and deli meats, which are more dangerous than traditional
sit-down
meals served right off the stove or out of the oven.
What is more, the variety of foods available has expanded
considerably
faster than the government's ability to inspect them. In the last
decade,
grocery stores have doubled the number of items they stock, from
every
corner of the world, some carrying new organisms that scientists
still
cannot identify, much less treat.
In fact, the amount of contaminated food that reaches store
shelves only to
be recalled for posing health risks has reached its highest level
in more
than a decade.
"We do have a real problem," said Joe Levitt, food
safety director for the
Food and Drug Administration.
Amid the proliferation of foods, the F.D.A.'s resources to
scrutinize them
have scarcely changed, often making consumers the first to test a
product's
safety. A healthy person can withstand most infections, but older
people
have weaker immune systems and the population is aging, leading
many
scientists to worry that more Americans are becoming more
susceptible to
food-borne illness.
"We are the canaries in the coal mines," said Dickson
Despommier, a
professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia
University.
"The moment someone gets sick, we say, `Don't eat that
food.' It's a miracle
that the system doesn't break down more."
Unappealing though they may be, many contaminated products
recalled last
year, from batches of moldy Gatorade to ammonia-tainted ice
cream, do not
pose serious threats to health, manufacturers say. When outbreaks
do occur,
the food industry adds, better surveillance has quickened the
ability to
track down the cause, helping to make the nation's food supply,
already the
safest in the world, more trustworthy than ever.
And the industry says it has made much progress in making food
safer. In
fact, the illnesses caused by contaminated juice came in spite of
stringent
new F.D.A. rules for the juice industry in the wake of earlier
outbreaks.
And Sun Orchard, an Arizona company, had already increased safety
by
steam-cleaning oranges and bathing them in chlorine to kill
bacteria.
Although much of the fear surrounding food safety focuses on meat
and
poultry, especially beef, the General Accounting Office estimates
that 85
percent of food poisoning comes from the fruits, vegetables,
seafood and
cheeses that are regulated by the F.D.A. and claim a larger share
of the
American diet each year. And poisoning from such foods can be
every bit as
deadly as that from meat and poultry.
Still, the F.D.A. has less than a tenth of the inspectors of the
Department
of Agriculture, which regulates the meat and poultry industry. So
while
U.S.D.A. inspectors examine meat before it gets to grocery
freezers, the
F.D.A. must increasingly rely on the companies it regulates to
keep their
factories clean and their products safe.
Now, with slightly more than 400 inspectors to ferret out
violations in
57,000 plants across the nation, the F.D.A. inspects food
manufacturers
about once every eight years. Some health officials, consumer
advocates and
epidemiologists doubt that without more of a presence the F.D.A.
can catch
contaminated food at the source and prevent it from getting into
the food
supply.
"The F.D.A. is simply going from crisis to crisis and
attempting to put out
the fires," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director
for the Center
for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group.
The critics have some evidence. Last year, recalls of
F.D.A.-regulated
products rose to 315 — the most since the mid-1980's and 36
percent above
the average since the agency began keeping track 15 years ago. In
every
instance, the food had already made its way to store shelves
before any
contamination was discovered, either by regulators or by
manufacturers, and
often remained there for months.
"Any reasonable person would worry about it," said
George Grob, deputy
inspector general for the Department of Health and Human
Services, which
oversees the F.D.A. "If the inspection process worked really
well, there
would be fewer recalls. That's why you do inspections: to prevent
any
contamination from occurring in the first place."
In contrast with its strict supervision of blood banks or
mammography
centers, the F.D.A. is not required to visit food plants
regularly. And as
the agency's workload has increased faster than its budget,
particularly in
the realm of approving new drugs, food safety inspections have
fallen to
about a third of what they were in the 1980's.
"The core mission of the agency, which has been to inspect
food and ensure
its safety, has eroded," said one senior Health and Human
Services official.
With imported foods, the F.D.A. is at a particular disadvantage.
In the last
four years alone, the number of foreign food items increased by
50 percent,
from 2.7 million items in 1997 to 4.1 million last year.
The responsibility of examining that avalanche falls to a cadre
of just 113
federal import inspectors, and the force has grown by only 3
workers since
1997. As a result, the F.D.A. inspects less than 1 percent of all
imported
foods, according to the General Accounting Office.
It is all but inevitable, health officials say, that at least
some of those
imports will be contaminated. Last April, a California bean
sprout grower,
Pacific Coast Sprout Farms, shipped in seeds from China and
Australia.
Germinated in warehouse- sized shelters, the sprouts caused a
salmonella
outbreak from Oregon to Massachusetts. At least 67 people fell
ill, 17 of
whom sought treatment in hospitals.
Not only were the imported seeds contaminated, health officials
say, but the
company grew them using only a tenth of the amount of cleansing
agent
recommended by the F.D.A. And although the company found evidence
of
contamination before sending the sprouts to market, it did not
order a
recall until after an outbreak had spread.
The C.D.C. now says that food is
responsible for twice the number of
illnesses in the United States as scientists thought just seven
years ago.
Many of the illnesses stem from improper handling of food, either
by kitchen
workers or consumers themselves, but some health officials say
this has
always been the case and, if anything, treatment of food has
improved over
the years.
At least 80 percent of food-related
illnesses are caused by viruses or other
pathogens that scientists cannot even identify. As for the
diseases
researchers do know, while a number of common ailments like
salmonella have
tapered off in recent years, other, more serious illnesses appear
to be on
the rise. Cases of E. coli infection, for example, have more than
doubled in
the last five years, to 4,341 in 2000 from 1,667 in 1995,
although some of
the increase may be a result of better reporting, scientists say.
The food industry agrees that better scrutiny is needed, because
not all
companies can afford to run tests in their factories. "Right
or wrong, the
vast majority of foods are not required to be tested for
pathogens," said C.
Thomas Leitzke, director of inspections for the Wisconsin health
department.
"The plants are not required to do it, and in most cases
don't."
Many health officials worry that as consolidation transforms the
food
industry from countless local farms to a handful of giant
corporations that
ship their products worldwide, the reach of contaminated food is
expanding,
magnifying problems when they do occur.
"Even if you doubled the number of inspectors, you still
only look at a
small percentage of the food," said Dr. Dennis Lang,
infectious disease
officer at the National Institutes of Health. "But the mere
promise that it
might be inspected makes people take notice. They'll make sure
their plant
is clean."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
ISIS commentary on CDC food illness statistics - click here