WEB POSTED 3-6-2000

One man's meat is every man's poison

Recent news reports of widespread sickness, and even death, from food poisoning seem to go unseen and unheard by the majority of consumers who are at risk. Most prominent is the study of the filing of what the CHICAGO TRIBUNE refers to as "the first wave of lawsuits ... against Sara Lee Corp. in connection with an outbreak of food poisoning that killed 15 people and sickened hundreds of others in 1998."

As if that were not bad enough, five suits have been filed in Cook County Circuit Court alone against Sara Lee and its Bil Mar Foods plant in Zeeland, Michigan, for the outbreak of Listeria. This is the plant that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked to the unusual outbreak of the virulent form of food poisoning. Lending credence to their assignment of blame was the fact that when Sara Lee recalled 15 million pounds of hot dogs and other meats, four months after the first Listeria cases were reported, new cases of the disease dropped off sharply.

The front cover of the National Weekly Edition of THE WASHINGTON POST, dated January 24, 2000, features the word "OUTBREAK" in huge red letters, along with the question, in smaller, black letters, "Why Didn�t the Government Warn Us?" The words are skillfully wrapped around a color picture of a package of weiners with a skull-and-crossbones, a sign of death, painted on it. The headline on the article itself is "PACKAGED POISON". And asks the question, in the subhead, "Why did regulators act so slowly in a deadly case of food contamination?" The writer points out that conditions got so bad that the U.S. Department of Agriculture "took the rare step of shutting down the plant for several days in 1997".

The writer points out that, "The company took weekly swab samples from environmental surfaces such as slicers, conveyors and packing equipment that came in contact with food. During the following six weeks, 11 of 12 samples tested positive for bacteria, compared with only 3 of 12 in the preceding time period." Then, when the readings remained high for two more months, they stopped testing altogether. By the end of 1998, USDA inspectors had written up Bil Mar for at least 45 "Noncompliance Records." According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the food poisoning outbreak which originated at this plant had swept across 22 states, killing at least 21 people and seriously sickening at least 100 others from Tucson to Baltimore.

A new CDC study estimates that food-borne diseases in America cause 76 million illnesses annually, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and about 5,000 deaths. The writer, Peter Perl, sums it up pretty well: "A politically powerful industry, a compliant Congress and a timid federal bureaucracy have fashioned a system that still has glaring problems."