HOW MANY more times will vegetable growers have to plow under their crops after a food poisoning incident, since consumers stop buying the suspect produce and federal officials have no quick way to trace contamination to its source?
Growers lost $250 million this spring and summer when an outbreak of salmonella was originally linked to certain tomatoes. Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that the bacteria were probably on jalapeno peppers, but the unsellable tomatoes had already been destroyed.
In 2006, spinach growers said an outbreak of E. coli poisoning cost them $350 million. The losses in such cases would be less if regulators required growers, processors, and retailers to maintain a traceback system with computerized records. Until now, the industry has fought off calls for traceability because of cost. But the spinach, tomato, and pepper cases demonstrate the high price of inaction. Representatives of all levels of the industry should sit down with government officials and devise a system that does the job without breaking the bank.
A big push for traceback came after passage of the 2002 bioterrorism law, which called for such a system. FDA officials devised ways to detect and respond to the threat of intentional contamination of the food supply by terrorists. But as the Associated Press reported last month, food industry officials in 2003 and 2004 met at least 10 times with White House officials to head off the record-keeping and traceback measures supported by government food safety experts. Tommy Thompson, who was then secretary of Health and Human Services, told the Associated Press that FDA officials were forced by the lobbying pressure to compromise. "If we had more [regulation], would it help the situation now? Yes."
Food poisoning takes a huge toll in the United States - about 5,000 deaths a year and 76 million illnesses, with 325,000 victims requiring hospitalization. Tougher safety standards and more systematic enforcement for both domestic and imported foodstuffs can cut down on the frequency of such outbreaks.
Inevitably, though, contaminated goods will reach the consumer. In such cases, it is inexcusable in this digital age that regulators cannot promptly trace a pathogen back to its source and immediately inform the public what is safe to eat and what is not, sparing the industry the need to destroy perfectly edible produce. By blocking such capability earlier in this decade, industry officials set themselves up for the recent produce fiascoes. They shouldn't make the same mistake again.
