Safety advocates, growers debate produce rules

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-09-24-produce-rules_x.htm

Safety advocates, growers debate produce rules

By John Ritter, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO - As illnesses mount from tainted California spinach,
so do calls for a crackdown on a loosely regulated, mostly self-policed
produce industry that has avoided mandatory controls.
Consumer advocates and lawmakers urge tougher rules for fields and
processing plants, while investigators chase the source of an elusive
E. coli bacteria strain that has sickened 173 people and killed a
Wisconsin woman.

Growers and packers in the $1.7-billion-a-year spinach and lettuce
market say they can solve a problem that since 1995 has led to 20 known
E. coli outbreaks in the USA. Nine were traced to California's Salinas
Valley, the nation's biggest producer of leafy greens.

Last week, industry leaders prepared to take a new package of voluntary
guidelines to Washington. Critics say it's time to hold fresh produce
- loose or bagged - to tough standards like those in the meat
industry, which suffered through and solved its own rash of E. coli
outbreaks in the early 1990s.

"Nobody's really checking, nobody's really auditing or monitoring that
in fact they're using their guidelines," says Caroline Smith DeWaal,
food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest,
an advocacy group in Washington. "So we urge that the guidelines be
made mandatory."

The produce industry will "take whatever steps necessary to ensure food
safety," says Tim Chelling, a spokesman for Western Growers, which
represents 3,000 farmers and shippers in California and Arizona.
Mandatory controls "would not be our preference."

Such rules aren't justified when the source of E. coli in leafy greens
remains a mystery, the industry argues: Why make growers and packers
follow procedures that haven't been shown to prevent contamination?

In none of the 20 outbreaks did investigators isolate a cause,
according to the federal Food and Drug Administration. The growers and
packers say they follow common sense "best practices" such as sanitary
harvesting, good worker hygiene and rigorous water-quality control in
irrigation and processing.

More regulations could sidetrack efforts to learn why lettuce and
spinach are susceptible to E. coli, Chelling says. "We're not doing any
kind of knee-jerk reaction to any proposals at this point."

FDA actions

The FDA, in a stern letter last November, rejected that rationale:
"Claims that 'we cannot take action until we know the cause' are
unacceptable," the letter said.

"We want the industry to do things better," says Jerry Gillespie,
director of the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at the
University of California-Davis. "But when it comes time to tell them
what 'better' is, it's very difficult, because we're not quite sure
what they're doing wrong."

The FDA's November letter wasn't its first warning. In 1998, the agency
issued "guidelines" to the growers and shippers. In February 2004, it
"encouraged" the industry to review its practices. Eight months later,
the FDA released a "produce safety action plan" to fight food-borne
illnesses. In November 2005, the FDA expressed "serious concern" and
"strongly encouraged" companies to again review operations. That
prompted California regulators to send their own "strongly urge"
letter.

In August, just before the current outbreak, by far the worst to hit
the leafy-green market, the FDA announced a "lettuce safety initiative"
- then added spinach as E. coli cases rose this month. Most spinach
is sold prepackaged.

"FDA is really coming in after the fact," DeWaal says. "They're very
much like a fire department rushing in to put out a fire. We think they
should do much more to prevent these outbreaks."

When E. coli was plaguing meat products - ground beef is still the
leading source of E. coli infections - the meatpacking industry
undertook a "farm-to-table" review of operations and a lot of "trial
and error" research, Gillespie says.

With two key changes - washing cows before slaughter to remove
pathogens and rigorous sanitation in hide removal - E. coli
"substantially subsided," he says.

Leafy greens present a different challenge. "This is a delicate
product. To be attractive and palatable to consumers, you can't just
high-power wash it," he says.

No smoking guns have been found as in meat processing. E. coli in
lettuce and spinach has been traced to fields - investigators
narrowed the search last week to nine farms in the Salinas Valley,
producer of more than half the nation's fresh spinach. The FDA cautions
that the trace-back may end there.

Investigators focus on the usual suspects: water supplies, irrigation,
leaky septic tanks, manure composting, worker sanitation and
inadequately chlorinated water used to rid spinach of bacteria.

In the water

The regional water board has found high concentrations of the virulent
E. coli strain in local streams and rivers, presumably from
manure-tainted runoff.

Farms growing dinner-table crops don't irrigate from rivers, but a
flooded river can spread contaminated water over fields. Inspectors
don't check to see whether fields are dry after floods or packers'
chlorinated washes are OK. They depend on companies to follow industry
guidelines. "FDA almost never visits farms unless there's an outbreak,"
DeWaal says.

State inspectors last visited facilities of Natural Selection Foods,
one of the companies that has recalled tainted spinach, six months ago
and found no violations, says Kevin Reilly, a deputy director in the
state health services department.

Until last month, only one of the 20 E. coli outbreaks linked to leafy
greens had involved spinach. In October 2003, 16 people in a San Mateo
retirement home got sick, and two died. State investigators traced the
spinach to five fields but found no "likely source."

Mandatory rules will "level the playing field, so clean operators
aren't penalized for having a safer product," says Martin Cole,
director of the National Center for Food Safety and Technology at
Michigan State University.

The Economic Research Service estimates food-borne illnesses cost the
U.S. economy $7 billion a year. Friday, Sen. *** Durbin, D-Ill.,
renewed his call for a single food-safety agency to replace a
"mismatched, piecemeal approach" that "could spell disaster."

Twelve federal agencies have roles in food safety.

Among the 173 people stricken by the current E. coli outbreak, 27
developed kidney failure.

"I've talked to families with kids who are probably going to have
neurological damage besides kidney problems, maybe have to have a
transplant," says Seattle lawyer Drew Falkenstein, who represents some
of them. "Huge stuff. It's going to cost a lot of money and be
devastating over their lifetimes."

****

I can't help but think that there is someone on one of those farms that
has a pretty good idea what caused the problem and is keeping his or
her mouth shut while every farmer in the valley watches their
livelihood go down the drain.

TC

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