Meat recall system has many gaps, data shows

[Guest guest]

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/7581646.htm

 

Meat recall system has many gaps, data shows

By Alison Young

Knight Ridder Newspapers

 

 

 

WASHINGTON - Four days after the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a

recall of meat that may have come from a Holstein infected with mad cow disease,

investigators and company officials were still working to locate much of it and

conceded some likely has been eaten already.

 

While federal regulators say eating the beef poses little health risk, the

situation is typical of a system that generally recovers less than a quarter of

tainted meat that is recalled, a Knight Ridder analysis of recall data found.

 

Besides Washington and Oregon, the meat from the infected cow is now believed to

have been distributed to some small retailers in California and Nevada, USDA

officials said Saturday. They were not ruling out that other states might have

gotten some of the meat.

 

" The recall system is so fraught with gaps, " said U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette,

D-Colo., who introduced a bill in November that would require the USDA to create

a system to trace meat products from their animal sources to consumers.

 

 

 

" The USDA does not have a way to really track meat through the whole system if

it comes from a contaminated cow, " DeGette said. " Unlike cans of peaches, which

have a lot number on them … when you have a cow that is contaminated, that lot

of meat then goes to a middleman, then goes to a processor then goes to the

grocery shelves, and there is no way to track the lots. "

 

 

 

USDA officials said that companies involved in the current recall of 10,400

pounds of ground beef and beef products were cooperating fully, but the

officials could provide no numbers Saturday of how much of the meat had been

located. They disputed concerns raised by DeGette, consumer advocates and a

recent report by the agency's Office of Inspector General about problems in the

nation's meat recall system.

 

" It's important for consumers not only to know that this product is of

infinitesimally low risk, but that there is a system in place that is very

effective in both informing consumers and controlling as quickly as possible a

situation where there may be a risk to consumers, " said USDA spokesman Steven

Cohen.

 

While USDA officials were taking extra efforts to locate the meat involved in

the mad cow recall, history has shown that the recall process generally recovers

a small fraction of suspect meat.

 

Between 1998 through 2000, nearly 109 million pounds of meat and meat products

were recalled in the United States for problems ranging from contamination with

dangerous bacteria to undercooking of processed meats. But just 24 percent of

that meat - 26 million pounds - was ever recovered, according to an analysis of

the most recent recall data available on the USDA's Web site. In 2000, the data

show, just 17 percent of recalled meat was recovered.

 

On Saturday federal investigators said they believe the infected cow was one of

74 dairy cattle that came into the United States from Canada around August 2001.

They said they hoped most of these other animals are still alive. Milk does not

transmit the neurological disease, they said.

 

Investigators in the United States and Canada were continuing to try to track

the " birth herd " of the infected cow, which was slaughtered in Washington state

on Dec. 9. Determining where the cow was born is important because officials

believe it likely contracted the disease by eating contaminated feed on its

birth farm and that other cows of this herd also could be infected.

 

Mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, is a chronic,

degenerative disease affecting the central nervous system of cattle. The human

form of the disease is thought to be contracted by eating meat from an infected

animal, specifically from the brain or spinal cord.

 

USDA officials said that meat from the Washington state cow is very unlikely to

spread the disease to humans because only parts of the central nervous system

are infected, and muscle meat is not.

 

 

 

Still, on Dec. 23, the USDA announced that Vern's Moses Lake Meats in Moses

Lake, Wash., was voluntarily recalling 10,410 pounds of beef because it may have

been exposed to tissues containing the agent that causes mad cow disease. The

meat covered by the recall is for all cattle slaughtered at that plant that day.

 

While a sample from the cow was being sent for testing for BSE, its meat moved

into the food supply.

 

On Dec. 11 its carcass was shipped to Midway Meats in Centralia, Wash., where

the meat was removed from the bones, said Kenneth Petersen and official with the

USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. On Dec. 12, Midway Meats shipped a

variety of boneless meat products to two processors, Interstate Meat

Distributors in Clackamas, Ore., and Willamette Valley Meat in Portland, Ore.

 

Interstate Meat ground all of the meat it received and turned it into various

kinds of beef patties that were sold in Washington state and Oregon, Petersen

said during a telephone news conference. He said about 25 percent of this meat

had not yet been sent into distribution at the time of the recall and was under

control.

 

Willamette Valley Meat received a variety of beef trimmings that are covered by

the recall, Petersen said. The firm sold this meat to about three dozen small

Asian and Mexican grocery stores in Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada,

he said, and investigators planned to visit these stores over the weekend.

 

It wasn't until Dec. 22 that the USDA received preliminary test results from its

national laboratory in Ames, Iowa, that indicated the Washington cow was

infected with BSE. USDA spokesman Dan Puzo said the recall wasn't launched until

Dec. 23 because the agency wanted to re-run the test to make sure it was

positive. A public notice of the recall wasn't posted on the agency's Web site

until 1:30 a.m. Christmas Eve.

 

While Puzo said that Vern's Moses Lake Meats began notifying recipients of the

meat on Dec. 23, another USDA official said during a news conference that much

of the process of notifying distributors and retailers didn't get under way

until Friday.

 

The USDA cannot release the names of the grocery stores that received the

recalled meat, because the information is considered proprietary business

information, Puzo said. Consumers who are concerned they may have purchased meat

covered by the recall should contact their grocery store and ask them, he said.

 

Puzo said all of the companies involved in the recall have been cooperating

fully and that notice has moved down through the system to retailers as quickly

as possible. He said there has been no problem with recordkeeping in identifying

the meat from the infected cow.

 

In a report last fall examining a 2002 recall by ConAgra Beef Co., the USDA's

Office of Inspector General raised concerns that some of the companies that

received recalled meat did not have recall plans and did not keep adequate

records to track the products in a timely manner. Of 18 million pounds recalled

by ConAgra, just 3 million were recovered, the report said.

 

 

 

 

 

Photos - Get your photo on the big screen in Times Square