[NYTr] E. Coli Spreading: Playing Pattie Cake with Public Health

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 8, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/rosenberg1082007.html


Playing Pattie Cake with Public Health:

E. Coli Spreading Slaughterhouses Allowed to Stay Open

By MARTHA ROSENBERG

E. coli contamination in meat is the ultimate example of "crap in; crap
out." Not only can Escherichia coli 0157:H7 make you violently sick or
kill you, it is a grim reminder of where the beef you ate came from and
the fact that the cow didn't die voluntarily.

That's why big meat and the government agencies that protect it want to
keep the focus on beef packagers like Topps Foods and Cargill Inc. If
the E. coli problem can be blamed on packaging workers who didn't wash
their hand or held over day-old meat or didn't wear a hairnet, then no
one's going to ask about the other s word--slaughterhouse.

Lucky for big meat state and federal officials have long anticipated
the need to protect businesses--if not people--when outbreaks of
potentially lethal pathogens occur in meat. That's why the identities
of restaurants and grocery stores in California who served beef from a
mad cow in 2003 were kept secret as well as the identities of Texas and
Alabama ranches who produced mad cows soon after.

So even as 67-year-old Elizabeth, N.J based Topps Meat Company shuts
down after having to recall 21.7 million pounds of ground beef products
it won't snitch on its slaughterhouse like the beaten woman who won't
answer, "who did this to you?"

Nor has Wayzata, MN based Cargill Inc. which had to recall 840,000
pounds of Cargill Meat Solutions ground beef products from Wal-Mart
Stores Inc owned Sam's Club named its slaughterhouse supplier or
suppliers.

Of course federal inspectors like Dr. Lester Friedlander who trained
vets for the USDA until 1995 have long warned about hygienic anarchy in
the slaughterhouses.

"My plant in Pennsylvania processed 1,800 cows a day, 220 per hour,"
says Friedlander and the meat regularly contained, "[h]ormones,
antibiotics, hair, feces, cancers, tumors."

Stopping the slaughterhouse assembly line costs about $5,000 a minute,
says Friedlander so pressure is intense on veterinarians "to look the
other way" and "tacitly demanded" by their employer, the federal
government.

Profit watching causes other health risks in the slaughterhouse too
Friedlander says; it costs more money to make "two incisions in the
cow" so inspectors just make one, which cuts the spinal cord, spreading
disease.

But rather than fix the inspection system, after four people died from
Jack in the Box beef in 1993 and 25 million pounds of contaminated
ground beef from Hudson Foods were recalled in 1997, the government
gave more control to the slaughterhouses under the Hazard Analysis and
Critical Control Point (HACCP) system.

Dubbed "Have a Cup and Coffee and Pray" by critics who say it lets the
fox guard the chicken coop, HACCP is an honor system in which
slaughterhouses police themselves, federal inspectors simply auditing
compliance with their self created inspection systems. ("And how did
you do in September?" they're probably asking about now.)

In 2000, 62 percent of slaughterhouse workers interviewed for a study
by the Government Accountability Project and Public Citizen said they
had allowed feces, vomit and other contamination through the line that
they would have stopped before HACCP; 20 percent said they had been
told not document violations.

It's obvious that Topps and Cargill didn't grow their own E. coli--it's
a "systemic problem" says Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser,
"starting in the feedlots, spreading in the slaughterhouses, and
winding up in the ground beef at plants that make frozen patties.
Putting Topps out of business isn't going to solve that fundamental
problem,"--but who did?

The Grand Island, NE Swift plant that recently departing (timing!)
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns stripped of its right to ship to
Japan in February 2006?

The Florida cattle plant where a USDA inspector told Slaughterhouse
author Gail Eisnitz cattle were skinned while fully alive and his
superiors did nothing when alerted?

Or the notorious Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) plant in Wallula, WA where
second legger Ramon Moreno whose job was to cut hocks off carcasses at
a rate of 309 an hour told the Washington Post the fully alive animals,
"blink. They make noises. The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking
around" as he cut?

Recently bought by Tyson Foods charged with smuggling 2,000 illegal
Guatemalan workers across the Mexico border to work in its
slaughterhouses in 2001?

(Slaughterhouse work is so aversive, inmates released from prisons to
work in the Smithfield Foods' Tar Heel plants preferred prison and
quit, wrote the New York Times.)

Big food doesn't want you to know. Having you-know-what in the meat is
bad enough--but showing kicking cows hanging upside down on the kill
floor, cows who clearly don't want to die can really kill your appetite.

[Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist on the Evanston Roundtable. She
can be reached at mrosenberg at evmark.org ]