Salads To Get New Dressing - Radiation

(CBS/ AP)  Consumers worried about salad safety may soon be able to buy fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce zapped with just enough radiation to kill E. coli and a few other germs.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday will issue a new regulation allowing spinach and lettuce sellers to take that extra step, a long-awaited move amid increasing outbreaks from raw produce.

It doesn't excuse dirty produce, warned Dr. Laura Tarantino, FDA's chief of food additive safety. Farms and processors still must follow standard rules to keep the greens as clean as possible and consumers, too, should wash the leaves before eating.

"What this does is give producers and processors one more tool in the toolbox to make these commodities safer and protect public health," Tarantino said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, each year more than 300,000 people are hospitalized and 5,000 die from food-borne illnesses, reports CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy.

Irradiated meat has been around for years, particularly ground beef that is a favorite hiding spot for E. coli. Spices also can be irradiated.

But the Grocery Manufacturers Association had petitioned the FDA to allow a list of fresh produce and other foods to be irradiated as well - starting with leafy greens that have sparked numerous recent outbreaks, including E. coli in spinach that in 2006 killed three people and sickened nearly 200.

The industry group wouldn't name salad suppliers ready to start irradiating. But it expects niche marketing to trickle out first - bags of spinach and lettuce targeted to high-risk populations such as people with weak immune systems "who right now may be afraid to eat uncooked produce," said GMA's chief science officer Robert Brackett.

"It's one big step forward in improving the safety of fresh produce," he added.

The food is bombarded with high-frequency radiation - about 15 million times that of a single chest x-ray, reports Tracy.

"It kills the bacteria, makes it so they are not able to reproduce and … make you sick," microbiologist Brendan Niemira told CBS News.

A leading food safety expert said irradiation indeed can kill certain bacteria safely - but it doesn't kill viruses that also increasingly contaminate produce, and it isn't as effective as tightening steps to prevent contamination starting at the farm.

"It's a high-tech solution to problems that should be solved earlier in the food chain," Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest told CBS News.

She questioned why the FDA hasn't addressed her agency's 2006 call to require growers to document such things as how they use manure and ensure the safety of irrigation water. Irrigation is one suspect in this summer's nationwide salmonella outbreak attributed first to tomatoes and then to Mexican hot peppers.

"We are not opposed to the use of irradiation," DeWaal said. But, "it's expensive and it doesn't really address the problem at the source."

Won't zapping leafy greens with X-rays or other means of radiation leave them limp? Not with today's modern techniques and the right dose, the FDA decided.

The FDA determined that irradiation can kill E. coli, salmonella and listeria, as well as lengthen the greens' shelf life, without compromising the safety, texture or nutrient value of raw spinach lettuce.

E. coli actually is fairly sensitive to radiation, while salmonella and listeria require more energy. While irradiation doesn't sterilize, the FDA ruled that food companies could use a dose proven to dramatically reduce levels of those germs, a dose somewhat lower than meat requires.

But consumers shouldn't consider irradiation a panacea, either. While E. coli and salmonella tend to affect more people and make bigger headlines, consumer advocate DeWaal has found that norovirus contamination is a leading cause of produce outbreaks.

The irradiation rule goes into effect Friday. The FDA still is considering industry's petition to allow irradiation of additional produce. The grocery manufacturers group will push for other greens, such as Romaine lettuce, to be next, so that producers could irradiate bags of salad mixes.

While irradiated foods initially caused some consumer concern, FDA's Tarantino stressed that the food itself harbors no radiation.

"There is no residue, there's nothing left and certainly no radioactivity left," she said.

[republic1776]

legacyABQ,
Your right, I did not buying tomatoes.
I knew that it would hurt the American Farmers.
Turned out the FDA was wrong.
More people die from gunshots in one weekend than ecoli. I don''t believe that 5000 people dies each year in America from bad food, alone.
I think the FDA is doctoring stats.

[republic1776]

Let''s stop bringing food sources across our border.
No need to zap American grown food.
We don''t have waste products in our water supplies like Mexico.

[legacyabq]

This brings up an interesting debate.. Someone said to remove the *(&* from the food. Not that simple.. E. Coli "gets around" as it were, it''s not possible to absolutely eliminate bacteria, they occur naturally in soil and irrigation since we have cows everywhere. Farms are big, dirty, wet fields. Millions and millions of little muddy plants 8 inches high (like spinach) which needs moist soil. Guess what? That''s life. There''s no problem to be solved, on the whole. We live, we die. Compared to the number of plants we harvest and eat, VERY VERY VERY few people get sick. Why must we always harp on every tiny little item in the news, and find a "solution". Many of these "problems" are just life happening! We should learn not to over-react! that''s what this is. OVER-REACTION. Grow some balls people.

[hypnotoad72]

I''ve to wonder; all the news articles over the last year -- is it just me and it probably is, but doesn''t it seem like the number of problems is disproportionate to previous years?

Not that I''m complaining about irradiation - possibly questionable, but at some point any new concept is questionable. We can be wimps and do nothing, or take a chance - we''ve eaten food that some illegal worker took a dump on anyway, and that''s technically fertilizer so just wash the food and be done with it. Insane wackies can shove irradiated carrots up their noses for all I care.

[relee42]

This will make salads into the perfect petri dish for cultivating bacteria such as e-coli since the T4 bacteriofage and other good virus and bacteria that kill the e-coli will be zapped. This is the welcome mat to disease. The reason they are doing this is to prolong shelf life of "fresh" veggies. Yum! and that cardboard taste of second life food ... , not your mommas cookin''.

[downsteamjim]

Much of America learned physics from Godzilla and Cher.

[displeased]

If these people had their way, the only fertilizer would be sh*t, pests would destroy two-thirds of the food supply before it could be harvested (more after harvest), children would not be vaccinated against debilitating and life-threatening diseases; heck, the Black Death would probably still be an every-day concern.
Posted by rf35

You''re another one obviously not educated with organic procedures. Your posts sounds more like assumptions to meet some strange agenda. If you want to consume irradiated food, that''s your business. As long as they label it and don''t force it on the ones that choose not to consume.

[displeased]

Are you radiactive when you get your teeth or chest x rayed?
Posted by hk94

We don''t get x-rayed everyday.

[displeased]

More vitamins and nutrients are lost when you cook the spinach then would ever be lost in this process.
Posted by hk94

That''s why I eat it raw.

[rf35]

I love how the food news brings the loons out of the woodwork. If these people had their way, the only fertilizer would be sh*t, pests would destroy two-thirds of the food supply before it could be harvested (more after harvest), children would not be vaccinated against debilitating and life-threatening diseases; heck, the Black Death would probably still be an every-day concern.