U.S.

Irradiated Beef Now Approved

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

February 21, 2000 / 6:07 PM EST / CBS

The first irradiated meat should be available in supermarkets within a few weeks. It remains to be seen whether wary shoppers will buy it. CBS News Consumer Correspondent Herb Weisbaum reports.

The government has given processors the go-ahead to irradiate any uncooked beef, lamb or pork. Consumers can expect to see ground beef irradiated first because it is the most likely meat product to make you sick if it is contaminated with harmful bacteria.

Irradiation is something new in the ongoing fight against food poisoning. In this process, meat is zapped with energy beams to kill dangerous bacteria, like E.coli 0157.H7.

Q&A On Irradiation

Answers to common consumer questions.

Before Seattle's Jack in the Box incident of 1993, few consumers had heard of E.coli 0157.H7, the bacteria that made Brianne Kiner and hundreds of others sick.

Kiner is lucky to be alive. An under-cooked hamburger nearly killed her. "She was on dialysis for 118 days. No kidney function," recalls her mother, Susan Kiner.

Since then, much has been done to clean up the country's meat supply. And yet, the only way to absolutely kill any E.coli that might be present in raw meat is to treat it with a process called irradiation.

The process is already used on some poultry and produce. A plant in Florida uses gamma rays, from radioactive cobalt, to zap harmful bacteria.

Despite government approval, many U.S. shoppers are reluctant to buy irradiated products, because up until now the process always involved nuclear materials.

But a new type of irradiation is about to come into use. The industry likes to call it "e-beam" or electronic pasteurization, because it does the job with electricity.

"There are no nuclear materials involved, only commercial electricity," says Gene Ray, president of the Titan Corporation, which built the electronic e-beam plant in Sioux City, Iowa.

Titan calls its process"Sure Beam." The meat is bombarded with a stream of high-energy electrons. It only takes a fraction of a second to destroy the dangerous bacteria, so fast it doesn't even change the temperature of the meat.

E-beam technology was developed nearly 10 years ago. Scientists at Iowa State and the University of Missouri have shown it to be highly effective.

"Electronic pasteurization is as effective as milk pasteurization, when we heat milk to kill bacteria," says Dennis Olson, of Iowa State University.

University of Missouri Professor Nan Unklesbay says: "We have worked a lot with ecoli 0157.h7 and we have 100 percent destruction."

The meat industry would like the feds to start a public education program to teach consumers that this process is safe. But first, irradiated meat will begin to show up in a few stors within the next few weeks.