Nebraska Beef recall expands to 5.3 million pounds

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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star

The beef recall road got a bit rockier for Omaha’s Nebraska Beef operation Friday.

The company has decided to expand its efforts to recover beef trimmings that may be contaminated with a deadly form of bacteria to 5.3 million pounds.

That’s a ten-fold increase from the 532,000 pounds originally targeted Tuesday by Nebraska Beef after health departments in Ohio and Michigan reported about 50 people becoming ill after eating potentially tainted beef.

The expanded recall accounts for all beef trimmings processed in Omaha between May 16 and June 26 and sent on to other companies for use in ground beef.

The latest action came as the federal Food Safety Inspection Service announced Friday that “production practices employed by Nebraska Beef, Ltd. are insufficient to effectively control E.coli 0157:H7 in their beef products that are intended for grinding.”

William Lamson, an Omaha attorney and corporate counsel for Nebraska Beef, was unavailable to comment on the latest developments.

Marla Augustine of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services said there are still no known cases of food-related illnesses in the state that may be linked to the recall.

Lamson said Tuesday that there was almost no chance any of the meat originally targeted for recall had been distributed to Nebraska retailers. But by Wednesday, the scope of precautionary steps had grown to include Baker’s stores in Omaha and other Kroger Co. properties in Nebraska.

Meanwhile, Seattle, Wash., attorney Bill Marler said Friday he has filed suit against Nebraska Beef and Kroger on behalf of about a dozen clients from the Ohio-Michigan victim list.

Advised of Friday’s announcement from the Food Safety Inspection Service, Marler suggested its language may give some new and more serious dimensions to the recall investigation.

He said that may be the case even though the pounds of meat involved made this recall “a medium one” in size.

For the sake of comparison, the Hudson Foods recall in Columbus in 1997 exceeded 25 million pounds.

Still, said Marler, “I’d be very worried if I was Nebraska Beef.”

Marler also represents members of a Minnesota church in a legal battle in which Nebraska Beef sued the church last year. Nebraska Beef alleged that the 17 illnesses and one death that followed a 2006 church potluck resulted from negligence in preparing meatballs from ground beef purchased at a local store.

Cooking beef to proper internal temperature kills the bacteria, according to food-safety experts.

Marler said that case is scheduled for trial in July 2009.

In 2003, Nebraska Beef went to court to thwart a U.S. Department of Agriculture effort to shut down the plant in response to violations of food safety rules.

Earlier this week, Dennis Burson, a meat safety specialist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, noted that the incidence of positive test results for the bacteria known as 0157:H7 stood at 0.23 of one percent in 2007.

After the Hudson Food episode, federal safety regulators stopped a practice commonly referred to as “remix,” in which ground beef left over from the previous day’s production could be mixed in with beef from the current day’s production.

Burson said the final safety steps are up to consumers. “If things are cooked properly, there’s no concern.”

Reach Art Hovey at 473-7223 or at ahovey@journalstar.com.