E. coli O157 comes back with a
vengeance, and other nasty toxins in meat
Posted 6:11 PM on 29 Jun 2009
by Tom Philpott
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and
livestock industries.
————————————————-
(This is the first Meat Wagon column in months. No, the meat industry
hasn’t suddenly become socially and ecologically responsible. I’ve just been
distracted by other topics.)
Where’s the tainted beef?
If you regularly eat fast-food burgers or unlabeled supermarket beef, you’ve
almost certainly consumed a JBS product in the past month. That’s because
Brazil-based JBS is the globe’s largest beef producer—and the third-largest
U.S. beef packer. And what a month it’s been for this emerging beef
behemoth.
Here in the U.S., JBS has dramatically expanded a “voluntary” recall of
beef “that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H,” the USDA
reports. (Hat tip,
Obama Foodorama.) USDA rates the recall Type 1, meaning the product
presents a “high” health risk. The recall originally involved 41,000 pounds;
now the company is trying to call in 421,000 pounds. Ouch.
(It’s Meat Wagon tradition to convert such abstract-seeming figures into
what we like to call Quarter Pounder Equivalents. According to our
proprietary computer models, JBS has officially released enough suspect beef
for McDonald’s to crank out approximately 1.7 million Quarter Pounders.)
Meanwhile, down in Brazil, JBS is being investigated by the Brazilian
government for “bribing of public officials, racketeering, corruption, fraud
and collusion,” Reuters
reports. Not long ago, Greenpece
called
out the company for knowingly buying cows raised on illegally cleared
rain-forest land. Charming company, huh?
As for the U.S. recall, those 421,000 pound were “distributed nationally
and internationally,” the USDA reports, without adding which states and
nations received it. Let’s all bow our heads for a moment and ponder what it
means that a single beef-processing plant could produce nearly half a
million pounds of beef in a day—and send it out to points unknown across the
globe. Like a butterfly’s wings, a little bullshit in a massive
slaughterhouse can have tremendous global impact (pun, um… intended!).
And get this: the dodgy beef got processed way back on April 21—meaning
it has been circulating in the food system for three months.
Already, 18 people in “multiple [but unspecified] states” are known to have
been infected, the USDA reports. Obama Foodorama
reports that the CDC reckons that for every confirmed E. coli case in an
outbreak like this one, 35-50 people more actually comes down with it:
“That’s between 630 and 900 people already ill.”
And the number of infected will almost surely grow. Very little of the
suspect beef will likely ever actually come back; most of it will be
consumed by unwitting consumers. As Obama Foodoramaputs it:
Recalls are VOLUNTARY. There is no requirement legally that the
products be tracked down by the processor and yanked from store shelves,
out of restaurant freezers, out of community and church group food
lockers. There’s no requirement that grocers or chefs not use contaminated
products.
Now, in the above-linked press release, the USDA calls JBS a “Colorado
firm.” That’s wrong. The plant where the outbreak originated is located in
Colorado, but, as noted above. JBS is a globe-spanning beef producer based
in Brazil, and identified by Reuters as the “world’s biggest beef
processor.”
After a
buying spree last year—partially blocked by the U.S. Justice Department
on
antitrust concerns —JBS is one of the the three largest U.S. beef
packers, along with Tyson and Cargil. Together, the three giants slaughter
nearly four in five beef cows raised in the U.S., giving them tremendous
power over their farmer suppliers.
In a
recent report, Food and Water Watch teases out the devastating effect of
this intense consolidation on small- and medium-scale farmers—who raise
precisely the kind of pasture-raised, relatively sustainable meat consumers
are increasingly demanding. The FWW report is worth reading in its entirety;
for our food-safety purposes, let’s look at a discussion of how the USDA
tests slaughterhouses for E. coli contamination. According to FWW:
• The agency creates incentives for plants to use interventions (e.g.
chemical sprays or hot water rinses).
• The agency avoids collecting data or performing tests that would show if
these technologies are not being used effectively at the largest beef
slaughter plants.
• The agency avoids enforcement of regulations at these large plants when
it learns of unsafe production practices and contamination coming from
these plants.
In other words, the USDA’s inspection program is much more geared to
protecting the profitability of the meat giants than it is to protecting the
public health.
Gigantic meat companies probably couldn’t exist without a toothless
food-safety regime. Take the current recall. JBS has already sold that
421,000 pounds of beef. It will reimburse any meat that actually comes back,
but the rest of it is gone—profit booked. Imagine if a government inspector
had shown up on April 21, the day the suspect meat was processed, and taken
a swab. The company would have had to stop operations—and likely have had to
destroy the day’s output. Imagine the losses.
Got PBDEs?
PBDEs—short for polybrominated diphenyl ethers—are intensely nasty, and
shockingly ubiquitous. They’re a flame retardant that manufacturers put in
mattresses, rugs, electronic gadgets, and even clothes. According to the
Environmental Working Group,
they’re associated with a host of human maladies, including” thyroid hormone
disruption, permanent learning and memory impairment, behavioral changes,
hearing deficits, delayed puberty onset, decreased sperm count, fetal
malformations and, possibly, cancer.”
And, they appear to be even more harmful for young children and fetuses
than adults. Animal research shows that “exposure to brominated fire
retardants in-utero or during infancy leads to more significant harm than
exposure during adulthood, and at much lower levels,” EWG reports.
So, what does this have to do with industrial meat? Well…. meat eaters
have show significantly higher concentrations of PBDEs in their bodies than
do vegetarians, according to a
study
(PDF) just published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Health
Perspectives by three Boston University public-health scholars.
They conclude: “Intake of contaminated poultry and red meat contribute
significantly to PBDE body burdens in the United States.” How our meat
becomes contaminated, the authors don’t speculate. Might it be because of
the vast scale of our meat production—and its intensley industrial nature?
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