Safe Enough To Eat?

By: Wyatt Andrews
Topics: Field Notes

(CBS/iStockphoto)

We begin our Evening News series on food safety tonight with a look at just how broken the food safety system is in America.

I have never seen official Washington so unanimous. Everybody knows the system doesn't work. Everybody, including the key members of Congress, knows that the fault lies with Congress. Everybody wants Congress to strengthen the system. How to do this exactly, what what agency, with which new regulations and with what funding are open questions. Needing to act is not an open question.

The problem is simple to define. Taxpayers spend most of their food safety dollars on the USDA, which has the primary job of inspecting animal carcasses inside slaughterhouses. Fine. Except that most Americans are getting sick today from e coli on produce; spinach and lettuce. And produce is regulated by -- the FDA. When the FDA tried to trace the source of the huge e. coli outbreak in spinach last September, it took weeks to find the farm, and the source was never precisely defined. The e. coli came from manure, either from cows or pigs, but they don't know how. Irrigation water? Soil? Splashing from rain?

It's tempting to blame the FDA, but given the agency's meager resources, it's lack of research dollars and the fact it does not have the legal right to proactively inspect farms, you can see why the problem is legislative.

Not to be graphic about this, but in the spinach outbreak four people died and almost 200 got sick because we are allowing animal poop to get on salad greens. Dozens of the people who got sick were very sick. They were on dialysis because of kidney failure, or plasma pherisis because of toxic blood.

You will hear a proposal in our story from Senator Dick Durbin to upgrade the Federal food effort by making one single food agency. I'm not sure this is realistic, and honestly, neither is Durbin. But Congress at a minimum does need to update the system, and put a much higher priority on research to make farm produce safe. Public confidence in fresh vegetables is on the line.

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by boston1954 February 14, 2007 8:50 PM EST: In the month and a half before the big spinach scare, my husband and I ate spinach about 5 times. I guess we were very lucky.; Reply to this comment


by jimlindad February 14, 2007 5:58 PM EST: Hello Katie, My family has been DEVASTATED by E COLI 0157H7. Im glad to see more awareness. In 1987, my son then 6 yrs old contracted the deadly e coli bacteria, I had never ecen heard of it. It developed into HUS or Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, He suffered Kidney failure, requiring peritoneal dialysis, and to top it off he suffered a MASSIVE STROKE ! My baby boy would never be the same. Our family of five has never been the same. My son JImmy has permanaent paralysis of his left side, he has no use of his left arm at all. He is able to walk with the help of a brace on his left leg. He has had seizures DAILY for 20 yrs from the stroke and is being worked up for Brian Resection Surgery to help him have a normal life. All because of a bacteria. The infectious disease in RI tried to pin point the source. No one in my sons class was sick, no one in our family, no in the state of RI . The most likely culprit I was told was Food.
I belong to SAFE Safe Tables our Priority. I try and educate my friends about food safety, our country does a very poor job of it !!; Reply to this comment


by jamesellis2 February 14, 2007 6:31 AM EST: My vocation is wastewater treatment and agriculture.
In Salinas the fields are mostly irrigated with reclaimed water. Water the comes from the sewage plant and is then filtered and chlorinated. The standards for treatment however do not account for slamonell, e .coli, and lysteria. And chlorine does not kill everything. Pigs and rain have been named as the culprit for e. coli sickeness. Why? Because the e. coli is probably comming from the reclaimed water plant itself, but, Salinas needs that water, and if the real cause were found out, the plant would be shut down, but Salinas could obviously not afford to have that happen; fodder for real investigative research and reporting.
James
Santa Barbara; Reply to this comment