Attorney Fred Pritzker Comments on FDA Report of Peanut Corporation of America Sanitation Violations
I just reviewed the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspection records for the Peanut Corporation of America Blakely, Georgia plant implicated in the national Salmonella outbreak. In ten separate observations, the FDA inspectors noted a series of shocking sanitation violations including:
- Shipping product after it tested positive for at two separate Salmonella subtypes
- Failure to clean and sanitize the peanut paste production line after Salmonella was isolated from the product produced on that line
- Failure to confirm the effectiveness of the heating process designed to kill pathogenic bacteria (including Salmonella) during the production process (the so-called “kill step)
- Failure to safety store finished product (product that had already been subject to the kill step was stored in close proximity to raw product) and failure to properly clean storage areas)
- Failure to properly construct and maintain the plant’s roof (resulting in huge gaps that allow rainwater to seep into the plant and onto production areas)
- Failure to use production equipment capable of being properly cleaned
- Failure to use a negative pressure ventilation system (negative room pressure would direct air flow away from the finished product areas) and failure to segregate raw and finished product
- Failure to have properly designated hand cleaning sinks
- Failure to properly clean utensils and food production equipment
- Failure to prevent insect and pest contamination
By any measure of safety and sanitation, these findings show a callous disregard for consumer health and disease prevention. Any one of these ten findings could account for the product contamination that has sickened over five hundred people and killed at least seven.
Worse, these violations are not isolated in time. They appear to have existed for months if not years. And that raises an equally disturbing issue: where were the inspectors before the outbreak occurred? Why weren’t test results reported to state officials? Why were these conditions ignored for such a long period of time?
The answer is simple, but shocking: there is no uniform system of inspection and testing that applies to plants like this one. There are also insufficient funds allocated for funding existing inspection and testing programs. This has to change. The United States Congress has to pass and the President has to sign legislation that prevents this gross violation of sanitation from ever happening again.
