American Meat Institute Has A Beef With USDA's New E.coli Policy
When the USDA announced that it wanted to protect American consumers by banning six more serotypes of E. coli, food safety advocates cheered. After all who wouldn’t be happy with an effort to keep dangerous pathogens out of the food supply?
A handful of groups, including the American Meat Institute and the governments of Australia and New Zealand, as it turns out.
In September, the USDA announced that the E. coli serogroups O26, O103, O45, O111, O121 and O145 would be prohibited from entering commerce beginning March 5, 2012. The Big Six, as they are sometimes called, have been identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as the serotypes responsible for the greatest numbers of non-O157 shiga-toxin producing E. coli (STEC) illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States.
"Consumers deserve a modernized food safety system that focuses on prevention and protects them and their families from emerging threats. As non-O157 STEC bacteria have emerged and evolved, so too must our regulatory policies to protect the public health and ensure the safety of our food supply," Agriculture Under Secretary Elisabeth Hagen stated.
The USDA invited public comment, and, on Thursday, got one from the American Meat Institute’s Executive Vice President James H. Hodges who says current testing is good enough.
“USDA is proposing a solution in search of a problem,” Hodges said in a statement.
The Food Safety Inspection Service’s Draft Risk Profile includes comments from scientific experts that highlight knowledge gaps about the BIg Six such as “We found no consensus in the scientific community about precisely which features, or virulence factors, make an STEC harmful to humans.” The new policy also lacks a cost estimate for implementation, Hodges stated. “Given the many questions surrounding both its potential effectiveness and its costs, implementation should be delayed until a more thorough analysis is conducted and more is known.”
What is already known is that each of the Big Six have caused severe, sometimes life-threatening illness in people all over the country such as the May 2010 E. coli O145 outbreak linked to Freshway Foods Romaine lettuce, that sickened people in Michigan, Ohio, New York and Tennessee, three of whom contracted hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which can cause kidney failure and death. What more needs to be known?
