There are solid indications that the beef industry, as a whole, is having more trouble with quality control.
ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Thursday, August 14, 2008 7:00 pm
For the second time this summer, Omaha meatpacker Nebraska Beef is recalling product from retail stores because of E. coli contamination.
Opinions seem to vary on whether this one company has had more than its share of problems with the potentially deadly bacteria recently. But there are more solid indications that the industry, as a whole, is having more trouble with that key area of quality control.
Meat scientist Tommy Wheeler of the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Center is among those monitoring worrisome events, including Thursday’s news that the most recent Nebraska Beef recall had been expanded to some 1.36 million pounds.
“The only comment I would have is that, up until last year, all the data was indicating we were making tremendous progress,” said Wheeler, leader of the meat safety and quality research unit at the U.S. Department of Agriculture facility.
“There were a lot fewer recalls, what recalls we had were a lot smaller in magnitude, and the number of positive tests that USDA was finding were decreasing dramatically,” he added. But more recently, “we’ve started back up in the other direction and it seems to be continuing this year.
“And,” said Wheeler, “I don’t think anybody has a good idea of why that’s happening.”
The second Nebraska Beef recall of the last few weeks started to take shape last week even as USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) was trying to put a lid on the first one, which eventually swelled to some 5.3 million pounds of ground beef.
This time the focus is on so-called primal and sub-primal cuts, rather than ground meat, and on at least two dozen confirmed cases of E. coli-related illness in 10 states. Nebraska is not on that list of states, according to state officials.
Adding to the intense outside interest in this most recent round of regulator scrutiny is the apparent connection to Texas-based Whole Foods Markets, which bills itself as a “natural foods” outlet and grinds its own beef as another level of precaution against E. coli contamination.
Laura Reiser, speaking on behalf of FSIS officials Thursday, said the agency is “still working on making that definite link” between Nebraska Beef and Whole Foods. But that part of the latest federal meat-safety investigation is meant to determine if beef later ground and distributed through Whole Foods came from contaminated cuts of meat provided by Nebraska Beef.
No matter how that turns out, Reiser conceded that the latest E. coli episode appears to be part of an unfortunate trend.
“In general, in 2007, we saw a rise in E. coli positives in ground-beef products,” she said. “Typically, we do see a slight rise in the summertime. But in 2007, it happened earlier than we were expecting. And it kind of alerted us that something different might be happening.”
Furthermore, “we did see an increase so far this year.”
An average of about .17 percent positive E. coli tests in 2004, 2005 and 2006 crept closer to a quarter of a percent in 2007 and toward half a percent so far in 2008.
That’s despite a range of relatively new meat-safety steps at meatpacking plants that typically include steam pasteurization and rinsing carcasses with lactic and acetic acid.
Reiser said the government is now stepping up its checks of the beef trimmings commonly used to make ground beef as another way to surround a problem.
An FSIS press release said media inquiries to Nebraska Beef should be directed to corporate counsel William Lamson. Lamson was unavailable for comment.
In his Internet version of events, Whole Foods’ Edmund LaMacchia referred to “confusion about which plants were approved to send products to Whole Foods Market” and described Nebraska Beef as “an unauthorized processing plant” in its meat supply line.
Patty Lovera, based in Washington, D.C., with Food and Water Watch, noted that Nebraska Beef’s problems with quality control go back much further than the first 2008 recall in July.
“In 2003, USDA tried to withdraw their inspection from the plant, because of the severity of problems they saw, which would have basically shut the plant down.”
Nebraska Beef went to court in Omaha, and a federal judge decided the proposed withdrawal of USDA inspectors would inflict too much financial damage.
“We thought USDA should have appealed that,” Lovera said, “and they really backed down . . . and now, five years later, we have this plant having major food-safety problems again.”
Considering what she described as “two major recalls in one summer, something is not right here.”
Harshavardhan Thippareddi, a food-safety specialist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, doesn’t see Nebraska Beef as a special problem in the realm of meatpackers and meat contamination.
“I don’t think Nebraska Beef has any less of a food-safety record than anybody else,” Thippareddi said.
From his vantage point, “they’re just as good as the others” and “if they lack on any USDA food safety measures, according to USDA regulation, they cannot operate.”
Reach Art Hovey at (402) 473-7223 or ahovey@journalstar.com.