Food is safer despite latest egg outbreak
Salmonella contaminated eggs have sickened 1,470 people in 17 states, including Georgia, over the past four months. It’s a story that seems familiar.
In 2009, grocery foods laced with salmonella-infected peanut butter sent hundreds of people across 43 states to hospitals.
In 2008, it was a 41-state e. coli outbreak from contaminated tomatoes. In 2007 contaminated hot dog chili produced at Augusta’s Castleberry’s Food Co. plant, pot pies and peanut butter caused three separate multistate outbreaks. In 2006, it was e. coli tainted spinach.
In the wake of the 2010 egg-salmonella crisis, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday repeated calls for passage of a bill that would, among other things, give the agency new powers to inspect and enforce disease-prevention plans at food-production facilities.
Statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, though, show our food is safer than ever. Food-borne-disease outbreaks fell by 8 percent in 2007, the most recent year reported, and the number of outbreak-related illnesses was 15 percent lower when compared to the preceding five years.
The problem, said Robert Tauxe, the deputy director of the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Bacterial and Mycotic Diseases, is not larger amounts of unsafe food or more sick people.
Instead, the way food-borne disease outbreaks happen has changed. So regulators are seeking new tools to prevent them.
“When I started here 27 years ago, outbreaks were localized events,” Tauxe said. “You’d see 30 people who got sick at a wedding reception or catered event or 50 people who got ill from a local restaurant or church supper.”
Historically, the county health department would enforce the needed safety rules through restaurant and retail inspections. That’s still happening, but now large outbreaks covering many states are also happening. In these cases contamination is occurring higher up in the food-production chain.
“It used to be the eggs we were eating in Georgia were mostly from Georgia. But now food is not so local. We produce eggs, meat and poultry on giant farms and ranches, and they get shipped out over the whole country,” Tauxe said. “When it’s done well, you have a lot of safe food. But when there’s a problem, it’s a much bigger problem.”
Besides being bigger, these outbreaks are also tougher to detect. When a local emergency room gets 50 patients with salmonella infections, it’s obvious they’re related, said Tauxe. But when 50 people across several states get sick, it’s harder to make the connection.
In the 1990s the CDC created a nationwide database for health agencies to upload the DNA fingerprints of food-borne infections. The system, called PulseNet, enables CDC scientists to more quickly identify a multistate outbreak, allowing it to be contained sooner.
It’s how the egg-salmonella outbreak was discovered, but the system still does nothing to prevent the outbreaks from occurring in the first place.
Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food, said at a press briefing Monday that new regulations would reduce that risk.
A new egg-safety rule that requires egg producers to follow specific safety standards and allows the FDA to inspect for compliance took effect in July, he said. Over the next 15 months, the FDA will inspect all egg-production facilities that have 50,000 laying hens, which accounts for 80 percent of egg production.
“It’s also important that legislation pending in Congress be passed that will strengthen our ability to enforce FDA requirements,” Taylor said.
The legislation would give the FDA better access to company records and authority to recall products, he said. Companies now conduct recalls voluntarily.
Tauxe said consumers and food retailers should also become more active players in food safety.
“It’s important that consumers handle food safely and purchase safe foods, such as pasteurized products,” he said.
“It’s also important that food companies make sure their processes are safe. Most food we eat goes through grocery and restaurant chains — these chains need to be sure they are buying safe food and handling it safely.”
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